Note: Hey Beauties! It's midterms and I'm exhausted...But I'm still feeling very motivated to write thanks to all your incredibly kind comments, votes, and reads! Writing has always been enjoyable and cathartic for me, but it's made even better by all your feedback. Thanks so much for all the responses to the last (and every) chapter!

This chapter is another request, this one from the incredibly kind (and funny) 1ipod2, who wanted to see Soulless Sam. What came to mind when I thought of this prompt was negligence and a little comedy. I kinda dove into the negligence side of things... and I set it early in season six, before it was actually known that Sam was out a soul.You'll see what I mean about all of this, though. Hope you like it!

The title is a line from the song Missing You by All Time Low (which I highly recommend if you haven't heard it because it's SO good).

In this chapter, Anna is twelve.

Grit Your Teeth, Pull Your Hair

She woke up late and was groggy. She felt like there was a film over her eyes, making it harder to interact with the world. Looking around her, she saw that the boys had already gone. There was a note on the table, so she crawled out of bed, shivering in the cold of their motel room. The thermostat was probably broken-- they usually were in these places-- and it was below freezing outside. She shivered and ran across the dirty and frigid motel room floor in her bare feet to get to the table.

The note said simply: Working the case. Eat breakfast and stay put.

Anna sighed and looked at the takeout container that had been on the table next to the note. She wasn't hungry. She hadn't really had much of an appetite since Sam's descent, and even before that there'd been times when she had to be coaxed into eating, namely during the time Dean spent in Hell and the subsequent unrestful months in which Sam conspired with Ruby and Dean with the angels. She set the note down and flipped the container open. French toast, a couple sausage links, and a small container of syrup. Normally, it would have been an enticing breakfast, but this morning, it only turned her stomach. She sighed, knowing she would have to eat or face an interrogation and subsequent lecture from her brother later. But she could put it off for a little while.

Skin coated in goosebumps, Anna hurried into the bathroom. There were four nearly threadbare towels there, and she turned the water nearly as hot as it would go, which was surprisingly hot for a rundown motel like this one, and got in the shower. She stayed there for nearly twenty minutes, relishing in the warmth before the hot water abruptly ran out. She wrapped herself hastily in a towel and practically ran to her duffel bag, throwing a long-sleeved shirt and sweatpants onto her bed to change into along with a pair of cotton socks.

Once she'd dressed in those clothes, she found that she was still shivering with cold, teeth chattering audibly. She hated the shaky feeling she had from the inside out, her skin prickling sensitively in the freezing room's air. And she was still exhausted despite having just woken up, her eyes feeling glazed over with fatigue. All this wasn't to mention the headache building behind her eyes.

Anna sat on her feet on the floor in front of Sam's duffel, digging through until she found a hoodie in the bottom of the bag. She'd rarely seen him wear his sweaters since his return from Hell. It was one of the many things that had changed about her brother. In fact, enough had changed in Sam that Anna sometimes still felt like she was mourning the loss of her big brother. As she slipped into a huge Stanford University hoodie and let the sleeves cover her hands and the hood swallow her head, Anna felt a little closer to the version of Sam that still seemed lost to them. She glanced at the breakfast on the table, but she felt nauseous at the thought of eating and decided to just go back to bed where she buried herself in blankets.

Sometimes, the motel rooms they stayed in had TVs or other means of entertainment, but this one was barren. So, Anna had coveted Sam's laptop and curled up with it in bed, cozy but still feeling chilled from the inside out.

Nearly two hours later, she jerked awake to a hand on the side of her face. The laptop in front of her sported a blank screen, having gone to sleep after the movie she'd put on ended. "Wh'appen?" she mumbled in sleepy urgency, fumbling to sit up. She was tangled in blankets and sweating up a storm, though, and it didn't really work.

"Just me, kiddo," came the reassurance from above her, and Anna didn't even bother trying to sit up once she'd heard Dean's voice. She just relaxed back into the bed and let her heavy eyelids slide shut. Her stomach felt unsettled as it had earlier and was beginning to hurt now too. All in all, sleeping just sounded better than being awake at the moment.

"Hey," she heard and opened her eyes again. Dean was frowning down at her, and after a second of studying her, their eyes locked on one another in a quiet, simple moment, he moved the laptop to the foot of the bed and sat down in its place beside her. "Was gonna ask what you're doin' in bed, but it's pretty obvious you've got a fever." He laid his palm on her forehead again. "How the hell did that happen?" he said more to himself than to her.

Anna gave a lazy shrug and blinked drowsily. Her eyes felt like there was a woodstove behind them, heat radiating through white and green as she looked up at her brother. "Woke up like this," she grumbled, then started shifting again, suddenly feeling stifled by the layers she'd wrapped herself in earlier. "It's hot," she huffed, and Dean pursed his lips, helping her pull the blankets to the foot of the bed.

"That's what happens when you animorph into a burrito, Anna."

"Animorph," Anna repeated, her sluggish brain not understanding. She wasn't sure if she would have even understood that if she hadn't had a fever though. "What is that?"

Dean squinted, but seemed to fall short of coming up with an answer. He shrugged disinterestedly. "I'm gonna get you some Tylenol, but you're gonna need food- And don't argue with me," he added sternly, predicting the protest Anna had been ready to voice. "We probably have crackers or something, but you have to eat."

Anna watched miserably as Dean moved away from the bed and toward the other side of the motel room. She pressed the palms of her hands against her eyes and rubbed at the itchy heat there. Swallowing against her stomach pain and nausea, she curled up tighter in bed. She hoped that the nausea and pain was a result of hunger and that eating would make it better, not worse. At the same time, she very much wanted to just go back to sleep.

The door to the room opened and clicked shut, and Anna raised her head to see where Dean was going, but instead she saw Sam walking in. He was wearing his FBI suit and loosening his tie as he moved through the room. "Uh... what are you doing?" he asked as Dean passed him holding a box of crackers and a cup of water.

"What's it look like?" Dean asked tersely, and it quickly became clear to Anna that he was pissed over something. And because he was being so good to her, she knew it was specifically something to do with Sam, which was nothing new. He'd been strangely cautious about their brother-- even in his elation over Sam's return-- because there were some clear differences in Sam's behavior these days compared to the way he'd been before. "Anna's sick."

"Oh," Sam said and turned awkwardly to watch as Dean set the food and water on the bedside table and then placed a pill in Anna's hand.

She curled her fingers around it and let him help her sit up, feet still tangled in the rest of the blankets on the bed. A few baby curls stuck to her forehead and cheeks with the sweat of her fever, but all she could focus on as Dean helped her sit against the headboard was the way Sam stood there, body language tensely locked and yet somehow clumsy. She forced herself to look away when a glass of water was pressed into her other hand.

"Take that, and then you can get some food down and go back to sleep, alright?" Anna nodded along to the calm instructions and swallowed the Tylenol down with a few gulps of water. Her nausea didn't really get any worse with the addition of the medication, so she saw that as a promising sign, though she still felt sick enough not to have any real desire to eat. Still, when Dean handed her a sleeve of Ritz crackers, she started working at pulling the plastic open, irritated by how difficult it was. As he stood up, Dean placed his hand on her head affectionately for a moment before turning away and walking toward the table. "What?" he asked, and Anna looked up to see him looking at Sam looking at her.

Maybe usually she would have repeated the question for herself, but she just felt exhausted, and the chills she'd experienced earlier that morning were making a return. So, instead, she got onto her knees to collect the covers from the foot of the bed and snugly cover her legs lower half with them.

"Nothin'," Sam answered, a surprisingly normal-- or at least casual-- reply. "I'm sorry you're sick, Ladybug," he added, sounding just enough like himself for it to be sweet rather than weird.

Anna smiled drowsily at him, cheeks pink, eyes bloodshot and drooping. She nibbled slowly on her first cracker, sinking a little lower so she was only half-sitting up.

Sam dropped his suit jacket over the back of one of the chairs at the table and retrieved his laptop from the foot of Anna's bed. "I'm gonna see what time the morgue closes. We should hit it this afternoon."

Dean sent him a strange look. "You... right now?"

Sam looked up from his computer screen with an expression of confusion. "Well... We could wait until after lunch if you're... hungry or something."

"Sam, I'm not leaving Anna here by herself when she's sick. Are you nuts?"

"Oh," Sam said in a moment of what seemed like genuine realization. "Right. Yeah. Of course. Well, I can go."

"You- you want to go to the morgue by yourself?"

Sam shrugged. "Well, unless you want to come with me."

"Sam, we can put the case on hold for one afternoon," Dean said with some bite to his voice. Anna squirmed a little in bed, blushing as she realized she'd somehow managed to start a disagreement between her brothers. And she hadn't even said a thing. "Nobody's died in almost a week now. We're not even sure if this is our kind of thing yet."

"And taking a look at the body could confirm one way or another if this is our kind of thing," Sam argued with a simple, level rationality that irked Anna almost as much as it seemed to irk Dean. "She's twelve years old, Dean. And if you want to stay here, that's fine. But I don't think she needs both of us holdin' her hand through a fever."

Anna glared at Sam, crossing her arms over her chest and pushing herself into a sitting position with her feet, crackers forgotten atop the covers. "Well, I'm not keeping you here, you douchebag." She slouched back down a little when Dean sent her a sharp look.

But he turned to Sam with a much sharper one. "You are being a douchebag, man."

"Alright, you know what, you're right. I'm sorry," he said. Anna got the feeling that, hard as he was trying to be sincere, he really didn't mean it. "She's a kid, and she's sick, so you stay here with her. But I'm going to the morgue."

"I can stay by myself," Anna announced, face still wound into a frown that almost managed to look more angry than miserable and fatigued.

Much as she knew Sam probably didn't care, she felt as though she was in some sort of necessary standoff with him, as if she had something to prove. Namely, that she wasn't being a baby, that she could be tough like he seemed to think she should be. It was strangely double-sided. In order to prove herself to him, she was going to give in to his insistence that she stay alone rather than telling him to screw off. But she was twelve, and all she could think about was that she didn't want somebody whose opinion she cared about to think she was weak or childish. Nevermind that Sam had been a little colder and harsher, a little strange, and just all around different since he came back. He was still her older brother.

"See what you started," Dean fixed Sam with an irritated look, gesturing back at their sister. "Fine. Go to the morgue. Grab lunch on the way back."

"Yeah, I will," Sam agreed, snatched his jacket off the chair back, and closed his laptop.

As soon as the door had closed behind him, Anna deflated. She stared tiredly at the sleeve of crackers resting atop her blankets and let it show on her face how offended she was that Sam had spoken about her like a wimp. She hadn't asked not to be left alone, so she didn't know why it bothered her so much. Except that... well, she didn't want to be alone, so Sam hadn't been entirely wrong in thinking that she wanted somebody there holding her hand through what was just a little fever. Not literally, of course. Literally, she just wanted Dean nearby. Maybe she'd thought they could sit and watch a movie or something because that was what they always did when she was sick, or even when he was. But maybe Sam was right and she needed to grow up. She was twelve years old, after all.

"Don't let him get to you, Rugrat. He's been a real jerk lately."

Anna knew that. She really did. But she still felt shitty, though half of that probably had to do with being sick and overly sensitive. She sighed and picked up the sleeve of crackers, but her stomach still hurt, so she just set them aside again.

Dean's own sigh greeted that, but he didn't push the subject. "You goin' back to sleep?" he asked, pulling a beer from the mini fridge on the other side of the room.

Anna shrugged and listened to the familiar sound of the cap popping off a bottle, a release of pressure and a gasp of air. She watched Dean grab the laptop off the table and kick off his boots. She smiled blearily because they didn't get time like this anymore. Seemed like they were always chasing one terror or another. But when Dean walked around in black socks, popped open beer bottles, and opened Netflix, it was a sure sign of an evening in. And if he was willing to sit and watch something with her and relax without looking at her like a childish wimp, Anna had to believe that it wasn't so dumb or pitiful to get a little clingy when you were twelve years old and sick. She'd always trusted Dean's opinion as much as Sam's... and Sam wasn't quite himself lately.

()()()

The midday dragged slowly into early evening before Sam returned. Anna woke to the sound of the doorknob jiggling to find herself tucked against Dean's side, under his arm, an episode of Bonanza still playing on Sam's laptop. Unconsciously, she cuddled a little closer and felt herself inch closer to dozing again, but the door swung open and she blinked her warm, heavy eyes open. She felt better than earlier fever-wise, but her stomach still hurt, and she felt like she could easily start puking.

"You awake?" Dean's voice rumbled. Anna tilted her head up to look at him, her tired brain slow to process what he'd asked her. "Hate to do this to you, kiddo, but I've had to piss for the last hour, so..." he said and eased himself away from her to stand up. Anna mourned the warmth, curling under her blankets and hoping to return to sleep. She'd barely started to doze again before Sam shook her awake. Anna groaned a little and tried to brush him off, but he was insistent. "You didn't eat this morning, and you can't kick a bug if you don't eat."

Anna frowned. The way he was talking reminded her of someone, but that someone wasn't Sam. She stared at Sam's eyes, dully hazel-brown in the dim lighting of the motel room, and squinted in her fatigue until she realized. Sam sounded like their father. Then she felt guilty for having taken so long to recognize a memory of her own father.

"I got soup," Sam said. "Chicken noodle, not tomato, because the acid would probably exacerbate your nausea."

As he turned away to retrieve the food from the table, Anna tried to quietly repeat the word he'd used. "Egg-sir-bait?" She frowned and shook her head, giving up. Sam used stupidly big words all the time. She wasn't surprised that her sick brain couldn't understand everything he was saying.

Sam handed her a styrofoam container filled with soup and pulled the lid off for her, handing her a spoon. Anna wondered why he wasn't making her get out of bed and sit at the table to avoid making a mess, but she didn't question it. She had no desire to leave the coziness of her bed. The scent hit her with a strange combination of hunger and painful nausea. It smelled good, but it smelled strong. "It's gonna make me throw up," she resisted, only not handing it back to him because he'd already gone back to the table, taking his laptop with him.

Dean walked out of the bathroom, drying his hands on his flannel shirt. "Oh, nice," he said when he saw Anna holding a container of soup.

"Well, if you're so excited, you can have it," she said and offered it out to him, barely managing not to spill any over the sides of the container.

Dean clearly wasn't impressed. "You're a class act, aren't you," he said dryly.

Anna pouted, but won no sympathy and knew that she wouldn't. "My stomach hurts," she complained outright. "Can't I just drink water or something?"

"You need to eat something substantial or you're just gonna get worse," Dean reminded her. "Bon appetit."

Anna glared at the soup, realizing that she wasn't going to get out of eating no matter how nauseous she felt or how much her stomach hurt. She started out slow, but found her appetite a few bites in and so began to eat a little faster. Nearly as quickly as her appetite had appeared, it began to wane, and she started to just stir the soup around without eating anymore before it was even halfway gone. Her stomach was twisting and cramping worse with the addition of food, and Anna knew, just knew that she was going to throw up. She abandoned the soup on the bedside table and hurried to the bathroom, getting there just in time to hit her knees in front of the toilet and start spewing what little she'd eaten.

Dean came in after a few seconds, crouching down beside her and holding her hair out of the way with one hand. "It's alright," he murmured, wincing at the sound, smell, and sight of her barfing. It didn't last long, though, and when she was done, he reached over her to flush the toilet and drop the lid, hoping the smell wouldn't travel. "You okay?" he asked gently, moving his hand from the back of her head and trying to get a clear view of her face. Anna knew she must be a sight when Dean cringed at the sight of her face and then reached up onto the counter for a hand towel which he wet and then used to wipe her face off from the nose down. "Your fever's comin' back already," he muttered seemingly to himself, sounding vaguely concerned but so much in control that Anna didn't get scared, just nervous. "You want to take a shower?" he offered.

Anna nodded, but instead of moving to get up, she just fell against him, miserable and hurting, with her face against his shoulder. "This sucks," she grumbled, slightly embarrassed at how childish she sounded.

"Yeah, I know," Dean soothed. He let her stay there for a minute before easing her back and giving her a kiss on the forehead. "I'll get you some pajamas, okay? Just take it easy for a minute." Anna knew she must look miserable when he hesitated before leaving, looking at her with some serious pity in his eyes. She didn't have the energy to buck up and try to look a little better for him, though, so she just wrapped both her arms around her aching stomach and curled up until she found a way that it hurt a little less.

()()()

The morning light warmed her face, and suddenly all of her was burning. She felt hollow in her pain, skin sensitive and covering in goosebumps the moment she threw off the blankets. Her body went from stifling hot to quivering with cold in about a second flat. Anna trudged to the bathroom shakily to take care of business, cringing at the terrible smell leftover from last night. She'd spent half the night stuck in the bathroom, throwing up three more times after the first round. For a while, Dean had been adamant about getting food into her, but he'd given up sometime around ten pm. It was almost worse, Anna had realized, throwing up bile or nothing at all, than it was throwing up half a bowl of soup or a handful of crackers. It hurt more just heaving and heaving as if her body were trying to turn itself inside out rather than empty itself.

For the moment, the nausea was bearable, but it was still there, always there. And her stomach hurt even worse than it had yesterday, feeling less like a cramp now and more like a deep, sharp pain. She crawled right back into bed when she'd finished in the bathroom, and she curled under her blankets, but she was so cold that she couldn't get herself to go back to sleep despite how achy and tired her body was. She realized with a start that Dean was sleeping in the next bed, but that the sofa was empty. At just five in the morning, Sam was already gone. Granted, if any of them should be awake so early, it would be the one who hadn't been up all night in the bathroom, but Anna was pretty sure, if her blurry memory served her, that Sam had still been awake at one or two when she and Dean finally both went to bed.

Sitting up with her blankets wrapped tightly around her shoulders, she looked around the room for any sign of Sam. He wasn't there, though, and she frowned in concern. Where could he have gone so early? Maybe for a jog? She stood up and shivered her way over to the door which she eased open and peeked outside. Sam wasn't anywhere nearby, so she closed the door and turned around to see Dean stirring.

"Sammy's gone," she said, feeling irrationally concerned about this development, enough so to wake Dean even though she knew how late he'd been up last night. Because of her.

In the next second, Dean was leaning up one elbow, one hand discreetly settled underneath his pillow. He saw that it was just Anna, though, and his demeanor changed, his hand coming out from under his pillow. "What's wrong?" he mumbled, squinting in the early morning light filtering through the windows.

"Sammy's gone," Anna said again.

"He's probably gettin' breakfast or something," Dean grumbled, half-asleep again already. "Go back t'sleep."

Anna pursed her lips, slowly coming to accept Dean's response. Sam probably was fine. She'd only thought otherwise even briefly because he'd been so different lately. Out of energy and out of worry, Anna sat down on the floor, the thought of walking back to bed a bit too much, and curled around her hurting stomach again. She didn't know what was going on with Sam, but she was too damn sick to care at the moment. She dozed off shortly thereafter.

The next time she woke, there was a hand on her forehead. She roused enough for a thermometer to be eased into her mouth, and she heard it beep, heard a murmur that it could be worse. She was in her bed, she realized, no longer on the floor. Tylenol and water were coaxed into her, and she woke with sudden urgency a few minutes later to run to the bathroom and throw them up. Then she crawled miserably back into bed where Dean looked sympathetically at her and threw the blankets back over her when she lay there without making a move to do it herself, too tired to put in the effort even though she was shivering with cold.

She woke again an hour or so later. The clock read 11am, and she felt a little more alert, though still nauseous and in a lot of pain, as she uncurled herself underneath the blankets and sat up. Her pain was clear on her face.

"Welcome to the land of the living."

"Sh't up," Anna grumbled, receiving a taken-aback look in return.

"Somebody's grumpy," Dean remarked. Sam raised one eyebrow behind him.

Anna realized quickly that they'd been waiting for her to wake up. It was the only reason they both would've come to the side of her bed immediately when she woke up. "What?" she asked dreadfully.

Dean sighed and let Sam explain, and Anna saw that he looked unhappy about this while Sam seemed unfazed as he spoke. "We got this hunt down pat. Nest of vamps took over a set of hunting cabins a few miles outside of town, and a lot of the victims that went missing a few weeks ago, the ones whose bodies were never found, we think they're being kept there, used as feed-bags. We have to go wipe 'em out, get those vics out of there."

Anna didn't need the long-winded explanation to understand the gist of what she was being told. They were leaving to save some people, which meant she was being left alone for a few hours at least. "Could've just left a note," she said and rolled over onto her side.

"That's what I s-" When Dean shot him a look, Sam cut himself off and his expression grew more sympathetic. "Uh- no, we wanted to tell you before we left so you... um... wouldn't think that we didn't care."

Dean rolled his eyes at the awkward manner of Sam's explanation. "Pretty much," he agreed, though. "There's a package of crackers and a bottle of water on the nightstand. You need to eat something while we're gone. Watch some more Bonanza, take a nap, suit yourself, but just stay put and rest, alright? We'll be back before you know it."

Trying not to dread the moment the door closed behind them and she was left all alone, Anna focused on this moment, stared into Dean's eyes, tried to think of something to say that would take that guilty look out of his eyes. She didn't get that far, though, before she leaned over the side of the bed to grab the trash can and puke her guts out.

It was only five or so minutes later that the boys left with another promise to be back soon.

Anna settled in, curled tightly around her stomach, which only hurt more and more every time she woke up. On the laptop in front of her, Little Joe and Hoss picked mesquite beans, caught wild geese for dinner, and basically got into their usual mess of trouble. But she still felt jealous. Those two would get home to a big, warm, cozy house before long, and Anna was trapped in this itchy, icky motel, her stomach alight with pain, for the unforeseeable future. Not to mention the inevitable breaking point Sam would reach sometime in the near future. She could feel it coming because they hit breaking points so often.

And with that thought, she reached one herself, and her tears melted into the blanket the way Little Joe's mesquite beans had hit the snowy surface of the ground and sunk into the surrounding white, their meager food blending into the subject of their doom.

Her cold hands slipped under her shirt and pressed hard against her stomach. It hurt worse than she'd ever felt it hurt before, and without somebody standing there, promising her that it was okay, Anna found such a sentiment difficult to believe. Still, she grasped onto it. And as Hoss tried to shake some sense into his little brother on screen, Anna hugged her arms tighter around her stomach and tried to do the same to herself, whispering, "It's fine. I'm fine. It's just a stomachache. It's fine. I'm fine."

When the boys came back as the sun was setting, Anna tried not to cry in relief. And when Dean told Sam to stay with her while he went out to get some supplies-- since Anna was clearly not getting better anytime soon-- she tried, once again, not to cry, but this time out of misery. Sam wasn't right. He wasn't right, and that thought ran almost hysterically through her mind as she tried not to cry at the sound of the door latching shut behind Dean. She was successful both times at not crying, but not by much.

Sam sat on the side of her bed for a moment after she ran to the bathroom, threw up, and then crawled miserably back under the blankets and unpaused another episode of Bonanza, this one called Vendetta.

"It'll be okay," she mouthed, not even whispering the words anymore. "It's okay. I'm fine." But she curled tighter and tighter into a ball, until she couldn't move any further into herself, but at least her pain felt properly bound within her, chained into its proper place.

"I'm fine," she whispered, needing to hear the words just once.

()()()

She wasn't fine. What had once seemed like a vague but sharp pain had become a fire burning distinctly over the right half of her stomach, and Anna could barely distinguish anything beyond that pain. Her senses honed in on it, and before she'd even come fully awake, she was whimpering with it.

Her breathing grew erratic almost immediately. "Sammy!" she cried on a plea. "Sammy," she whimpered again when he didn't reply. If her eyes hadn't been squeezed so tightly shut, she'd have seen sooner that the room was empty. But, as it were, it took her nearly a minute of agonized whimpering to give in and force them open. And then she saw, and her face crumpled in misery. "Sam!" she begged anyway, fully aware of how irrational she was being. There was, of course, no reply, though.

a

Releasing a pathetic sob, Anna forced herself to move, and froze again almost immediately when the pain dialed up even higher at the slight change in position. Her next few breaths were shuddered through a wide open mouth as she tried to get through the shock of how painful this was. How could a stomach bug have gotten so severe so quickly?

"Dean," she whispered, not a cry this time, but an idea. She pushed herself to her hands and knees, her breathing breaking in and out of keening as she tried not to scream at how badly her stomach hurt. There was something very, very wrong with her, and the thought made her burst into real, sloppy tears as she dug into the pocket of her jacket, hung on the bedpost. She dropped her thumb onto Dean's name and hit speaker phone immediately after. The phone fell to lay on the mattress beside her head, and Anna curled tightly around herself again. It didn't help anymore. The pain just punched at her, demanding her attention and giving her not a single moment of respite.

"Anna?"

"It hurts really bad, Dean. I think something's wrong." And well, at least the words had come out somewhat coherent, because she hadn't even tried to sound less terrified than she was, and every ounce of her panic had come out clearly.

"Wha-? Woah. Alright. Everything's alright, Anna, I promise. So just- just calm down."

"No, it hurts!"

"What hurts? Your stomach?"

"Yes," Anna said as if the word had been punched out of her. She sniffled and curled in on herself as tight as she could, but nothing got better. "Help me," she begged.

"Hey. Hey. It's alright," Dean said so calmly that Anna knew he must be freaking out. "Where's Sam?"

"I don't know," Anna said in a rushed, short breath. "Not here. It- it hurts, Dean, it hurts. Make it stop," she sobbed.

"Okay, okay. I need you to listen to me, okay? I'm ten minutes away right now even if I break every speed limit between the two of us, and believe me, I'm gonna do it. But I need you to hang up and call an ambulance."

Maybe the word ambulance should have been the scariest part of that sentence, but for Anna it was the words "hang up," which meant she would be letting Dean go long enough to call somebody else. "No," she argued without hesitation.

"Anna, there could be a serious problem right now, so you hang up on me, and you call an ambulance."

"No!" she argued again, this time more frantic about it. She uncurled herself slightly and picked up the phone. "No, I can wait. I can..." she just breathed for a moment, and she could hear him doing the same. It hurt almost as bad as her stomach did, because as good as Dean was at making his voice sound level and calm, he couldn't force his breathing into line when his heart was racing in his chest, and Anna could hear how fast he was breathing through the phone. Probably that was because he had the phone gripped tight to his face. "I'm scared," she admitted more softly into the phone, as if that had been clear since the moment Dean picked up.

"I know. I'm coming. I'm coming," Dean soothed, and Anna could have sworn she heard Baby's engine roar a little louder in the background. It was a welcome sound, and it made her feel bad, though that, too, was dulled by the pain. She was getting reassurances every few seconds, and all Dean would be hearing was the sound of her crying, sometimes whispering another plea for him to hurry or make it stop.

But mostly, it would just be the numb sound of tears hitting a blanket, and the choked whimpering of a little girl trying to take a man's advice and breathe through a nightmare.

It took nine minutes.

Then, green eyes, bloodshot, hands on her face, on her side, examining her stomach, the right side, then wiping tears off her face. Anna's hysteria faded into the pain, and she felt herself numbing, but she could hear Dean cursing and making promises. "Don't, don't, don't," she muttered when he slid his arms under her to lift her off the bed.

"Sorry, kiddo," came the lying calm. "It's alright. I gotcha. I've gotcha."

How that helped, Anna didn't know. But it did, because there was no better alternative. Just this. Just a voice making promises that she trusted would be kept, and arms keeping her afloat on a leather bench seat and in the doorway of an emergency room. Just the whispered repetitions of tests explained as blood was drawn. Just the hand that squeezed hers when the words "emergency appendectomy" filtered in and all Anna could think was surgery surgery surgery. Just Dean.

And then just nothing, her world dark and mercifully numb.

()()()

"-the hell were you thinking?" Anna heard when she first woke up, minus an appendix. It took her a moment to come fully around, by which point Sam was trying to defend himself. Both voices were out in the hallway, but they were loud enough to be distinctly heard.

"Dean-"

"No, Sam. Some things just have to come first," Dean shot back. "You used to know that." There was a pause, and Anna thought for a second that whatever this argument was, it was over. But Dean started up again before long. "Whatever's gotten into you lately, it has to stop, 'cause, you know, I'm done pretending you're fine. You haven't been fine since you got back. If you need to talk about something, cry on my shoulder, whatever, then do it. Do whatever you need to, Sam, but stop being a careless dick!"

He sounded angry. About as angry, in fact, as Anna had ever heard him, at least when it came to Sam. And she understood that, because she'd been scared out of her mind when she called Dean, and he'd probably nearly had a heart attack on his way to her, hearing her cry and beg him to help her, to make the pain go away.

"I'm not careless!" Sam argued. But he sounded so calm, too calm. "I'm worried about her, Dean. I am. I just didn't know until now. How do you think I felt when I heard that message?"

"I don't know, Sam. How do you think I felt when you didn't pick up the phone? Or better yet, how do you think I felt when she called me scared out of her wits because she was alone and in the worst pain of her life?"

"That's not fair, Dean. How was I supposed to know she had appendicitis?"

"I'm not saying you should have known, Sam. I'm saying you should've been there."

It was quiet for a minute, and Anna hovered in a sleepy state of half-consciousness, pain-free but not numb anymore.

Finally, Sam spoke again. "You're right," he said in that increasingly familiar state of too-calm, too-calm, too-calm. "I messed up. It won't happen again. Now can we go in and see her? Because I'm sure we woke her up."

There were no more words, but Anna blinked drowsily at the boys as they entered the room. She was watching at the moment Dean's deep-seated frown melted into an easy, confident smile. "Hey. You look pretty good considering you're down an organ."

Anna smiled lazily at him. "Feel good," she said, and it wasn't a lie until the next second, when Sam sat down on the edge of her bed, took her hand, and started to apologize. It didn't feel all that artificial. That wasn't the problem.

The problem was that, as sorry as Sam may be, it didn't matter that he was sorry. It mattered that he hadn't been there. Not in an angry, bitter, hold a grudge kind of way-- because Anna was always quick to forgive when it came to family-- but because she couldn't pretend it hadn't happened. It meant something, Sam running out to do God knew what while she was sick and he'd agreed to play protector for the night. It meant that he wasn't her brother the way he had been.

Maybe she should have been angry with Sam the way that Dean was, for not being there when she could really have used his help. But she wasn't angry at him. She was scared for him, because Sam would have been there unless he couldn't be. She wondered if he was running from something, if he was running from himself. She itched absently at the stitches in her side, wincing when she wasn't as gentle as she should have been, but there was a hand there-- Sam's-- to pull hers away from her healing stomach.

Sam hadn't been right since his return but... he'd at least seemed like he might still be Sam. It was getting harder to believe, though, that this was the brother they'd lost, come back to life. Even if it was Sam, it wasn't Sam. Anna felt grief crash over her in the same way it had on an hourly basis for nearly the entire year Sam had spent in hell.

He was right beside her, but he was nowhere to be found. She had him, but she missed him, or at least the part of him that had yet to come back.

La Fin