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“It’s not fair.” Sam fills the cheap plastic motel cup with water and downs the Benadryl pill with a single gulp. “We’re brothers.”
“Yeah,” Dean agrees. “Not fair that I get Mr. Itchy here as a brother. Didn’t you learn anything in Dad’s survival classes?”
Sam looks at him wide-eyed. “Dean, when you’re fighting for your life, you don’t stop to count the number of leaves on a plant.” He swings his hand over, fingers curled, ready to rake his red forearm, but Dean swats his hand away. A little noise in the back of Sam’s throat expresses his annoyance. “I just want to scratch a couple times then I’ll be done.”
“Yeah you will be if you make that rash worse and it starts blistering.” He reaches up and starts unbuttoning Sam’s shirt. He pulls it off, not remotely surprised to see that the rash has spread all the way up Sam’s arm. It looks red and blotchy and miserable. Once again, Dean thanks his luck that he seems to be immune to poison ivy.
Sam goes to scratch again, an involuntary reaction to the intense itch crawling all over his skin. But Dean grabs his wrist and holds tight. Sam whimpers and wriggles in place, wanting to get free. Wanting to scratch. “Deeean!” he moans helplessly.
“I gotcha Sammy. Just wait two more minutes.” He keeps a tight hold on Sam’s wrist, though, not trusting his brother to wait the two minutes. So he unbuttons and unzips Sam’s jeans using only one hand. Sam tries to rotate his arm and rub it against his side, and succeeds partly, but it doesn’t do anything except probably start it spreading on his side and chest now. Dean sighs and pulls down Sam’s pants.
Off comes one leg, then two. And Sam is wriggling so badly with pent-up energy and need that he cries out and kicks the little trashcan wedged between toilet and sink cabinet. It topples over and out fall a couple Kleenexes, a store receipt, and the paper wrapping with the motel logo on it that had been around the bar of hand soap at the sink. He groans in frustration.
Dean just shakes his head, still holding tight to Sam’s wrist. “Boy. Stanford sure did turn you grumpy.” He leads Sam over to the bathtub, tests the water temperature, than guides Sam in. It’s thick and milky with Aveeno oatmeal bath solution and even though Sam tries to pretend nothing’s changed, the way his shoulders relax tips Dean off that Sam is relaxing and the itch is backing away a little. “There. That’s better, right?” He lets go of Sam’s wrist, letting Sam slip beneath the water, submerging both hands and arms as well as his side and chest and ankles and calves—everywhere the redness has taken up residence on his skin. “That’s a good Sammy. No more itching now.”
Sam’s eyes shoot daggers at him. “This is precisely why I went away.”
Dean gets up and turns back a few seconds later with a bottle of pink stuff in one hand and a bag of cotton balls in the other, ready to start the application. “Because you hate when I bathe you?”
Sam hesitates then gets this shy look on his face. “Well, no. I kind of like that part.”