The Road So Far

[November 2013 - 7 Months Pregnant - Bunker DIY Sauna - Bedside manner hits different when sweaty]

Dean didn’t sleep for three days. I know that because, as a spirit or whatever I was, I didn’t need to sleep. Dean definitely needed to, but he refused. He also refused to shave or eat anything. Kept telling Sam he wasn’t hungry and he would “just wait for Jody to get back.” Finally, on day four, Sam tricked him into the shower fully clothed so that he would have to finish and dry off. That led to Dean sitting on his bed to put socks on, which led to him lying down, “just for a minute”, which led to him snoring in under sixty seconds.

I sat, as much as a ghost can sit, with him while he slept. It was the least I could do considering his seventy-two hour vigil at my bedside. His jeans lay in a heap on the floor and I could see the slightest bulge where the ring box was hidden in the front pocket. There was a stack of books on the nightstand next to his bed, which was odd considering usually his preferred “reading” material was skin mags. I tilted my head to read the spines and smiled to myself. Parenting books. Dean was reading parenting books. Or, at least he’d stacked them next to his bed with the intention of reading them.

I went to get a closer look and found that one of the books was lying open on his bed, partially hidden under his body. There were highlighted lines and notes in the margin. I’d recognize that chicken-scratch anywhere, he was actually reading and annotating these books. Baby lore indeed. He was recreating John’s old journal, but with research about human infants instead of medieval spirits. Dean never mentioned any of this to me, Sam, or Jody. He was doing this by himself, in the privacy of his bedroom. He didn’t want anybody else to know.

There’s an old superstition, across multiple centuries and cultures, that saying the thing you want out loud will “jinx” it and then it won’t come true. I know this is what Dean’s doing with the books because I’m doing the same thing, with baby clothes. I haven’t been able to bring myself to look at baby clothes or toys or even diapers because I’m terrified that saying or showing I actually want this will break the spell. Something will happen and I’ll lose the baby or the pregnancy will kill me. Except, something is happening to me right now, even though I hadn’t told Dean or anybody else about the box of onesies under my bed.

Dean snored loudly and shifted in bed. I smiled and caressed his face, my hand going straight through him. He smiled in his sleep though, so I allowed myself the hope that on some level he felt my presence. I leaned down next to his face and blew a kiss.

“I love you,” I whispered.

He didn’t respond, with words or actions, he just snored on.

That’s ok, he doesn’t have to say it back, his three-day experiment in sleep deprivation at my bedside says it for him.

A few hours later, Dean awoke with a start. He hurriedly threw on his jeans and rushed out the door towards my room. Jody had arrived during his nap and was just hanging a clear IV bag from a nail in the wall when Dean burst into the room. She smiled at him.

“Sam said you finally got some sleep,” she said, probing the veins in my arm with two gloved fingers.

“I didn’t mean to, it just happened,” he pulled his chair right up behind Jody, his knees in the back of her calves, “How is she?”

Jody turned and stared him down. Dean understood and scooted the chair backwards.

“She’s not going to get better by you starving yourself, Dean. Put the mask on your own face before helping others.”

“Right.”

Jody found a vein and got the IV all hooked up. She looked at her work with a satisfied smile as she taped up the port so it wouldn’t get pulled by accident.

“That’s the best stick I’ve ever done, I’m sorry you’re not awake to appreciate it Kate.”

“‘Put the mask on your own face before helping others’”, Dean repeated to himself once Jody left the room, “That’s what you were talking about in the Impala, wasn’t it, Kate?”

He looked at my stomach and his hand, now free of concealer.

“You hid this from me. You were managing me again. After everything we’ve talked about, the minute things went sideways, I jumped right back into old habits. My dad always told me, ‘protect Sammy’, but the only way he knew how to protect us was with a gun and holy water. That's all I know too.”

He picked up my hand and pressed his lips to the back of it before holding my palm to his cheek.

“I’m going to try harder, I promise.”

After Jody’s reprimand, Dean got a little better about letting Sam take a shift sitting with me. I didn’t have a relief in the spirit world so I stuck by Dean’s side wherever he went (except the bathroom). Without any way of confirming he could feel my presence, I decided that even if there was an off-chance he could feel me, it was worth it.

The antibiotics weren’t having any effect and Dean’s stability was nearing its breaking point. He was taking shorter and shorter breaks from my bedside. When we came back into my room after his last break, he lost his shit when he saw what Sam was reading.

“Are you freaking kidding me Sam? The sparkly vampires? It’s not even real lore.”

Sam looked unapologetic.

“All lore was ‘new’ at some point, get this,” he flipped to a specific page in the last book of the series, “The main character gets pregnant with a human vampire hybrid. The baby is draining the life out of her—“

“This is not helping,” Dean said through gritted teeth.

“Ok, the TL;DR version is they gave the mom what a vampire baby would need and she got better.”

“So, the human drank blood?”

“Exactly.”

Dean shifted his weight and leaned his back against the cool stone wall.

“How does this help Kate? She’s not awake enough to drink anything.”

“She’s not pregnant with a vampire baby anyway, it’s a demon hybrid. What do demons need?”

“A steady supply of assholes to possess?”

Sam snapped the book closed.

“Think about where they come from.”

“Yeah, Hell, so what?”

“What do Hell and Kate’s fever have in common?”

Dean shrugged.

“Hellfire. Heat.”

Dean looked at Sam and I swear I could see the lightbulb go off above his head.

“You think the demon baby is the cause of Kate’s fever? It was too cold, so it–it cranked up her internal thermostat?”

Sam’s turn to shrug.

“The antibiotics didn’t work, any attempts we’ve made to cool her have spiked her temperature higher.”

“So, we fight fire with fire…”

Dean turned on his heel and practically ran down the hall, I had to run to keep up.

“Where are you going?” Sam called.

“Hardware store, I have an idea.”

The boys got to work when Dean got back. PVC piping, heavy plastic, tarps, and duct tape. They built a large frame out of the PVC and covered it with the plastic and tarps, holding everything together with duct tape.

With every rip of the tape or slice of a box cutter through the plastic, the boys’ vision became clear: a giant plastic box. They were building it in the infirmary, which sort of made sense given this was a Dean idea for me, but I couldn’t fathom what they were doing. It was getting hard to think clearly. My body hadn’t eaten in days, Dean had managed to get some drops of water into me using a washcloth but I would surely need actual water soon.

It wasn’t until Sam left and came back with two massive space heaters that everything clicked. They were building a hot box. The narrow camping cot that Dean set up inside was clearly meant for me, and there was a chair, small table, and an old desk lamp. Jody had found a humidifier somewhere and added that to the box, giving off a mist that made the whole thing seem like a sauna.

Dean wouldn’t let anybody else carry me to the infirmary. He gingerly lifted my body, one arm behind my back and one under my knees, and my head lolled against his shoulder.

“Don’t worry, Kate, I got you,” he whispered.

“I know,” I answered.

Once inside the makeshift sauna, I started to lose all track of time. My vision was getting hazy and I found I didn’t have the energy to follow Dean around anymore. It was much easier to exist in one place. Dean wasn’t in much better shape either. Every time my breathing changed or lagged he watched me like a hawk for ten minutes before going back to his stack of baby lore.

“I’m trying to hold on, Dean,” I cried, sinking to the floor, “But it’s getting hard.”

The last thing I saw before the blackness consumed me was Dean kneeling over me, wiping sweat from my forehead with a damp cloth. Then my vision flickered out like a dying candle.