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Alarm, feet on cold floor, massage temples and try to ignore sleep deprivation, five strides to a twelve minute lukewarm shower, six minutes with a not quite clean towel, clothes that are clean but two years old, an ounce of knock-off cereal, a cup of instant coffee, grab back, lock the door, twice, walk slightly too fast for comfort to the station, dash down the stairway to see the train just leaving. Sigh internally, and walk towards the platform.
Dean stands just over the yellow line, knowing if Sam were here he’d bitch and pull him back. He checks his watch, 8:08am. A woman to his left talks loud into her cell, holding a foot-long and a Starbucks. A drunk man sings a Christmas song, apparently unaware it’s now January. Three separate iPods are playing loud enough for him to overhear. It all blends together into a green-grey cacophony, and hardly remembering his morning routine already, he floats half lost. His eyes lose focu-
Harsh red pain slashes through his skill. It’s hard to see through it. He doesn’t want to see. He drank way too much last night. He’s on his back, his bed suddenly far too hard, great lumps digging into his shoulders. Hot sticky air washes over him. He can taste metal, feel metal, hear metal.
People are yelling on a platform above him.
A man is shaking his shoulder. His lips are moving, but all Dean can hear is roaring. Blood. Air. His eyes are too blue and they’re hurting Dean’s head. He sleeps.
A voice batters him awake. He swings towards it hoping to end the attack, but a hand catches his. When he twists his head to look at the voice the station swirls into soup.
Cold, rough tiles beneath him. Beige fabric pressed against his head. The voice fades into focus above him. A short moment of high-definition reality. Hair so dark it makes skin look pale. A brow creased in concentration. Consternation. Fine cheekbones and pointed lips. And blue eyes pinning him to the floor.
Blue-eyes is still talking, but Dean can’t bring himself to hear anything other than blood roaring out of his head.
Everything fades again, and keeps fading until, as if he had no beginning, he’s prone with a torch in his eyes, and a curly haired paramedic asking him what day it is.
“Uh…” He has to find his memories again. “Monday, last time I checked.”
The paramedic flashes him a reassuring smile, straight from the can. “Ah, there you are. You got a name for me?”
“Dean.”
“I’m Peter.” That smile again.
Dean’s skin prickles. He bats the paramedic’s hand off his head, taking over holding the bundle of fabric, and sits up, exhaling sharply through the throb of pain in his temple. Unphased, Peter pulls the fabric, a coat Dean realises, off his head to examine the wound.
It doesn’t take him long to say, “Okay, that’s going to need stitches,” and start dressing the wound well enough to get him to the ER.
Dean glances around. People are staring, but not stopping to watch. No time to waste on being nosey here. Something lurks in his peripheral vision, flickering out of sight as he tries to look at it.
“Was I on the tracks?”
Peter nods, “Apparently. When we got here a guy in a shirt and tie was with you. He said you were pushed, but he pulled you up, gave us a pretty good report of your injuries, and caught the train.” Peter nods at the space that a train will soon fill again. “Barely got a name out of him, Cassiel or something. Is the coat yours or his?”
Dean blinks. “His.” The only evidence the other man ever existed.
Peter moves to dump it in the bright red waste bag at his feet, alongside a few blood soaked lumps of cotton wool. “Wait,” Dean chokes out reflexively. Peter looks back at him, confused. There’s a moment in which he holds the coat hovering over the bag and Dean fails to clarify anything, managing only a prolonged, “Uhhh…”
Peter shrugs, and hands the coat to Dean. “I’ve seen weirder things, dude.”
---
In the hour’s wait to get his head stitched up he makes two calls: One to his line manager, involving him explaining his absence, and her trying to say without saying that she expects him at his shift tomorrow. (And he will be. He knows sitting around doing nothing would make his head hurt even without a concussion). The second to Sam, which he immediately regrets because now he has a migraine-inducing girl of a brother to deal with on top of his migraine inducing head trauma.
Thankfully, having his head sewn up gets the long-haired limpet and the waiting room cacophony removed. When she’s cut the final thread, and started tidying up, she offers to throw away the coat for him. Dean knows he has no reason to keep the coat, but something in his mind catches, and tells him he needs to look after it. He shakes his head. She gives him a knowing smile, though Dean can’t fathom what she thinks she knows, then says, “Good luck getting the blood out,” and leaves to get a script for painkillers, and to let Sam know he can annoy Dean again.
Sam insists on picking up his pills, because Dean needs to rest, because Sam seems to think that being a lawyer makes him Dean’s doctor too. The nurse telling him to keep an eye on Dean for the next few hours hadn’t helped either.
Alone again, Dean somehow manages to sit in awkward silence with the coat. As if the man had meant to leave it, and in doing so had left part of himself with it, within it. Dean watches it out of the corner of his eye. It is empty, it is inanimate. He ignores the feeling that he’s being watched in return. He tells himself it’s the concussion.
When they leave, Dean sees Sam see him bring the coat. He says nothing, but Dean saw his eyebrow quirk, and he knows he isn’t going to escape without comment.
Sam insists on driving him home and only stops insisting when Dean threatens to fight him out of the car. Sam claims to give in only to stop you from hurting yourself and not the obvious reason (that, even injured, Dean would kick Sam’s ass). He ignores how Sam sits in the passenger seat, with his arm poised to grab the wheel, and only pretends to pass out once. Sam nearly gives him another head wound for that.
Self elected Nurse Winchester keeps Dean under house arrest for the whole day whilst he cleans up the flat. Apparently it’s disgusting. Apparently. Only a girl would think his bachelor pad is a tip. Nurse Winchester’s skills do not, however, extend to cooking, so by eight they’re sitting in front of the TV eating Chinese from cartons.
During an ad break Sam’s chopsticks pause halfway to his mouth. Dean feels a smirk appear on Sam’s lips and prepares to be grilled. Or ribbed. Probably both. “Did you get his number?”
“ Sammy .” He keeps his eyes on the television, hoping the threats of violence in his voice are strong enough to penetrate even a moose’s skull.
Of course not. Sam twists in his seat, his face covered in so much glee it could write a musical. “Just his coat then?”
“From what part of near death experience did you get prospective date? ”
“The part where the knight in shining armour had to save the damsel in distress.”
“I am not a damsel,” Dean barks through a mouth of egg fried rice.
“So he was your knight in shining armour.”
“Obviously he was wearing the coat.”
Sam doesn’t even need to reply. Just turns back to the show with triumph in his eyes, and digs back into his pad thai. God damn his smart alec of a brother.
“I have a head wound. I’m not thinking straight,” he mutters.
“Certainly not thinking straight. ”
Dean dumps his carton on the coffee table. “Right. Out. Out now.” He starts to shove Sam, now laughing off the sofa and towards the door. “You can eat your fucking dinner in the car.”
“You can’t make me leave. I’m on doctor’s orders to stop you from fainting again.” On ‘fainting’ he had mimed falling, with the back of his hand on his forehead like a southern belle.
“Out or you’ll be the one with the head wound.” He slams the door.
He’s alone with the tan trenchcoat again.
He’d hung it on the corner of a chair in his kitchenette as he dropped his keys on the counter, as if nothing was going on. Sam had given it another funny look. Now that it’s there he has no idea what to do with a bloodied coat. Wash it, probably.
In the stillness he notices the ache clinging through his shoulder. A reminder of why he was stood here, and not in two halves in a morgue.The ache shares a meaningful look with the coat. They remember the man. Dean massages his shoulder, trying to quiet its complaints.
He scratches the back of his neck and huffs a laugh. He’s standing alone in his kitchen at 11:12 p.m. with the coat of a stranger, covered in his blood, because he nearly died. And he has five stitches in his head, a whiney shoulder, and a mildly bruised brain, but now he has to go to bed, because he still has work tomorrow morning.
He falls asleep imagining a tan trench coat filled with a man. A chest rising with breath around a beating heart. Fine cheekbones. Pointed lips. And blue eyes.