hi! i would love a sister!reader fic where reader is cursed and is just extremely ill and the boys have to take care of her/find a cure and it’s just angsty and fluffy..ty <33
╰┈➤ Burn It Out
Dean Winchester x sister!reader Sam Winchester x sister!reader
Summary: You touched something you shouldn't have. What can you say? You were curious. Now you're suffering from a curse sickness, and your brothers are taking care of you. Worth it? A little. Warnings: illness, fever, slight angst but fluffy too Notes: This weekend is going to be a lot of posts! I'm on the grind before my lock-in for finals starts.
The first sign something was wrong was that you couldn't finish your coffee.
That in itself was enough to make Dean look up from his plate of eggs. You always finished your coffee. You'd once drunk a gas station thermos-worth of the stuff on a stakeout and spent four hours vibrating in the passenger seat while he threatened to leave you on the side of the highway.
"You good?" he asked, nodding at your mug.
"Fine," you said, and you almost meant it.
By the time you got back to the motel room, you weren't fine.
The case had been a standard-issue haunting — a vengeful spirit, 1940s farmhouse, the whole miserable package. You'd split up to cover more ground. Sam had gone to the archives, Dean to the cemetery, and you'd taken the house.
You'd handled it. You always handled it.
What you hadn't accounted for was the locked trunk in the root cellar, the hex bag inside it, and the stupid, split-second decision to pick it up with your bare hands instead of using the iron tongs in your kit like you'd been trained.
The spirit had touched it. Something had transferred. You'd felt it like static electricity up your arm — sharp, bright, then gone.
You hadn't mentioned it to either of them.
That had been yesterday morning.
⛧
"Y/n."
Sam's voice came from somewhere above you. You were lying on the motel bed and couldn't quite remember deciding to do that.
"Mmm."
"Y/n, look at me."
With more effort than it should have taken, you opened your eyes. Sam was crouched at the side of the bed, and the expression on his face — carefully neutral, mouth pressed into a thin line, eyes doing that thing where they went very still — made something cold slide through you despite the fact that you felt like you were on fire.
"Hey, Sammy."
"Hey." His hand came to your forehead, and you heard his sharp inhale even though he tried to hide it. "You're burning up."
"It's hot in here."
"It's sixty-two degrees, the AC is off, and Dean's been complaining about it for an hour." He pulled his hand back and turned his head. "Dean."
"Yeah, I see it." Dean was already there — you hadn't even heard him cross the room. He was holding a glass of water and had that look on his face, the one he only got when something was actually bad. Not-a-scratch bad. Not you're-being-dramatic bad. The other kind.
The kind that meant he was scared.
"I'm fine," you said again. It came out more threadbare this time.
"Right," Dean said flatly. He set the water on the nightstand, sat on the edge of the bed. "That's why you're sweating through your shirt and your eyes are glassed over." He tilted your chin up — not roughly, just the way he used to when you were little and he was checking if you'd been crying. "What happened at the house?"
You hesitated one second too long.
"Y/n." His voice dropped. "What happened?"
"There was a hex bag," you said. "In a trunk. I picked it up."
The silence that followed was the particular flavor of silence that preceded Dean absolutely losing his mind at you, and you were braced for it. You'd earned it. But it didn't come.
He just closed his eyes for a moment, jaw working, and when he opened them again he said, very quietly, "Okay."
Sam was already on his laptop.
⛧
By midnight you couldn't stand up without gripping the wall.
The fever had climbed — Sam had checked it three times and stopped telling you the number after the second reading, which told you everything. Your skin felt like it was one size too small. When you slept, which wasn't often, you dreamed of smoke.
Dean had gone back to the farmhouse. He wouldn't tell you why, which meant he thought you'd try to come with him, which was fair.
The first time you had to get up was around 10.
You'd been half-dozing in that miserable middle space between sick and asleep when your stomach lurched — sudden, non-negotiable, the kind of warning that gives you about four seconds. You threw the covers back and made it to the bathroom on pure adrenaline, catching yourself on the doorframe before you hit the tile floor.
You didn't make it to the toilet. You made it to the sink.
You were still gripping the edge of it, shaking, when you heard Sam get up. He appeared in the doorway behind you — you could see him in the mirror, already moving, already reaching — and you started to say I'm fine out of pure reflex, but what came out instead was a sound that was definitely not that, and then you were sick again.
Sam didn't say anything. He just came in, gathered your hair back from your face with one hand, and put his other hand flat between your shoulder blades.
It lasted longer than you wanted it to. Long enough that you stopped fighting it and just let it happen, because that was all you could do. Sam stayed the whole time — steady, quiet, not making it weird — and when it was finally over and you were just standing there with your hands on the sink and your whole body feeling scraped out and wrong, he reached past you and ran cold water.
"Rinse," he said.
You did.
He handed you a towel. You pressed it to your face and breathed.
"Done?" he asked.
"God, I hope so."
He made a small sound — not quite a laugh, but close enough that it almost helped. He turned you gently by the shoulder and took a look at you: the pale skin, the glassy eyes, the way you were leaning against the sink because you weren't quite sure your legs were going to cooperate.
"Come on," he said, and walked you back to the bed like it was nothing, like he hadn't just held your hair over a motel sink at 10:30 at night. He waited until you were settled against the pillows and then went to the bathroom again, came back with a damp washcloth. He folded it and set it over your forehead without asking.
The cold was such an immediate relief that you had to close your eyes.
"Thank you," you said.
"You don't have to thank me."
"I just threw up in the sink, Sam."
"You had nowhere else to go." He sat back down in his chair, pulling his research back into his lap like nothing had happened. "Go back to sleep."
You didn't sleep. But you lay still, and the washcloth helped, and Sam was there, and that was enough.
Sam sat in the chair between the two beds with the kind of focused intensity that meant he'd gone full research mode — three books open, laptop screen scrolling, a yellow legal pad covered in his cramped handwriting. He'd called someone — Bobby, you thought, though you'd drifted in and out — and you'd caught fragments.
—transferred through contact, yeah—
—secondary curse, the spirit was the anchor—
—how long does she have—
You hadn't caught the answer to that last one. Maybe that was also on purpose.
"You can stop pretending to sleep," Sam said.
You opened your eyes. "I wasn't pretending."
"You were. You do this thing where your breathing changes when you're actually out." He turned a page without looking up. "You've done it since you were four."
"That's unsettling that you know that."
"We shared a room for like six years." He glanced up then, and the yellow lamplight made him look younger and older at the same time. "How do you feel?"
"Like I got hit by a truck. And then the truck came back and hit me again to make sure." You shifted against the pillow and felt the ache deep in your bones, the kind that had nothing to do with bruises. "Tell me what you found."
"Y/n—"
"Sam." You met his eyes. "I'm not twelve. Tell me."
He held your gaze for a moment, then nodded — the concession you'd always been able to get out of him when Dean would have stonewalled you. Sam had always believed in you knowing things.
"The spirit was a folk healer who practiced something in the Dutch Pow-Wow tradition," he said, pulling the legal pad into his lap. "The hex bag was one of hers — meant as a curse for a neighbor she had a dispute with. It's been sitting in that trunk for almost eighty years. The spirit's energy soaked into it." He paused. "When you touched it, it latched onto you."
"What does it do?"
"It essentially — " He pressed his mouth together. "It burns. Like a fever that won't break, that gets progressively worse. In the original records, the neighbor she cursed—"
"Died," you finished.
"In three days." He said it steadily, the way he'd learned to deliver bad news. "You touched it yesterday morning. It's been about thirty hours."
Less than two days, then.
You stared at the water-stained ceiling and let that sit in you. It was strange — you weren't as frightened as you would have expected. Mostly you were tired, and hot, and a little angry, and you kept thinking about Dean's face when you'd told him about the hex bag. The way he'd gone so still.
"What breaks it?" you asked.
"That's what I'm working on."
"Okay." You closed your eyes. "Then work faster."
Dean came back at two in the morning.
You heard the door, heard Sam get up, heard low voices in the entryway — not quite arguing, something more urgent than that. You heard your name. You heard Sam say thirty hours in a tone that made the air feel tight, and then you heard Dean say something short and clipped that you couldn't make out.
Then footsteps. The squeak of the other bed as Dean sat on it.
You didn't open your eyes. If you opened your eyes and saw his face again—
"I went back to the house," he said, quietly. Not to you — you were supposed to be asleep, and he probably knew you weren't, but he was going to pretend for now and you were grateful for it. "Went through the whole root cellar. Found the spirit's original ritual space. There was a — Sam, there was a second bag. A counter-charm. Same tradition. Like she'd built in a way to undo it."
Rustling. Sam must have come to look.
"Can you use it?"
"I don't know. Maybe. Bobby's looking into the method." A pause. "She's — it's moving fast."
"I know."
"She looks—"
"I know, Dean."
Silence.
You became aware, gradually, that Dean had moved to sit on the edge of your bed. You could feel the shift in the mattress, the warmth of him nearby. He didn't say anything. He just sat there.
After a while, you felt him settle his hand over yours — covering it completely, the way he had when you were seven and scared of thunderstorms and he would sit in the dark between your bed and Sammy's with one hand on each of you, like he could hold you both in place by sheer force of will.
You turned your hand over and held on.
You woke at six to Dean asleep in the chair Sam had vacated, his head tipped back at an angle that was going to hurt him later, one arm braced on the armrest and the other hanging loose. Sam was stretched out on the other bed with a book open on his chest. Nobody had slept properly. Nobody was going to say so.
The fever was worse.
You knew it before you were fully awake — knew it in the way the sheets felt wrong, too heavy and too hot, and the way the light coming under the curtain seemed sharper than it should. Your head was packed full of something dense and slow. Moving your arm took more thought than it should have.
You needed water.
The glass was on the nightstand, six inches away, which was fine. The bathroom was eight feet across the room, which was also manageable. You'd covered longer distances in worse shape. You'd dragged yourself out of a hunting blind with a dislocated shoulder once, and nobody had—
You got to the edge of the bed. Got your feet on the floor. Put your weight on your legs.
The room tilted.
Not metaphorically. The floor actually seemed to shift under you, the walls swinging to one side, and your legs did exactly nothing useful — they just stopped working, like someone had cut the power — and then you were going sideways and there was nothing to grab and you thought, distantly, oh, that's going to—
Dean caught you.
He wasn't fully awake yet — you could tell from his face, the dazed split-second before instinct took over — but he was there, out of the chair and across the room faster than should have been possible, and he caught you under the arms before you hit the floor and took your weight so completely that for a moment you were just — suspended. Held. Not on the ground.
"I've got you," he said. His voice was rough with sleep and came out sharp. "I've got you, I've got you."
"I'm okay," you managed.
"You almost ate the carpet, so."
He got you back onto the bed — not gently, exactly, but carefully, the way he handled things he was afraid of dropping. You were sitting on the edge of it with your head down and your hands between your knees and you could hear how fast your pulse was going, which wasn't great information.
"What were you doing?" he asked. He sat next to you, close, and you could feel the heat of him beside you even though you were already burning.
"Getting up."
"Why didn't you wake me up?"
"Because you were asleep."
"Y/n." He said your name like it was the entire argument. Like obviously was built into it.
"Dean—"
"I was asleep six feet away." His voice cracked slightly on the last word, just barely, just enough that you heard it and he heard that you heard it and neither of you was going to address that directly. "You wake me up. That's the whole point."
"I just wanted water."
He leaned over, picked up the glass from the nightstand, and held it out to you.
You looked at it.
"Thank you," you said.
"Yeah." He watched you drink, made sure you didn't tip over, and then took the glass back when your hands started to shake. He set it down and stayed where he was, shoulder pressed to yours, and you let yourself lean into him just slightly — not enough to make a thing of it, just enough.
Across the room, Sam was sitting up on his elbows. He'd been awake the whole time. You could tell from the way he was watching you — alert, careful, not moving yet. Giving Dean the space to handle it, because he understood the geometry of the three of you the same as you did.
"I'm okay," you said, mostly for him.
"You're going to stay in that bed," Dean said.
"I'm already in the bed."
"Good. Stay there."
You stayed there.
By morning, the fever had your thoughts going sideways.
You knew, logically, that the walls weren't moving. The knowledge didn't help much.
You got sick again around 7:30 — this time with Dean in the bathroom doorway, leaning against the frame with his arms crossed in a way that was trying to look casual and failing completely. He didn't say anything while it happened, which you appreciated. He didn't look away either, which you also, in a different way, appreciated. It was one thing to be watched when you were sick. It was another thing entirely to be watched by someone who wasn't flinching.
After, he crouched down to where you'd ended up sitting against the bathtub and pressed a cold, damp cloth to the back of your neck.
"Breathe," he said.
"I'm breathing."
"Slower."
You breathed slower. It helped kind of. Dean kept the cloth against your neck, and you focused on that — the cold, the pressure of it — while the worst of the nausea passed.
"You're doing okay," he said.
"I threw up twice."
"And you're still here." He said it like it was obvious. Like that was the only metric that counted. "That's the part that matters."
You leaned your head back against the edge of the tub and looked at him. He looked back, level, steady, the way he always was when things were bad. Dean Winchester, who caught you before you hit the floor and made sixteen miles of round-trip in the middle of the night and sat in chairs that weren't meant for sleeping because he would not be in another room when you were like this. Dean who was scared, you knew, and who would not say so, and who showed it instead by pressing cold cloths to the back of your neck and bringing soup from somewhere impossible and not looking away.
"Okay," you said.
He helped you back to the bed.
Sam had been on the phone with Bobby since before dawn — you could hear snatches of it, his voice steady and low, taking notes. Dean had gone somewhere and come back, gone somewhere and come back, unable to sit still for longer than twenty minutes, which was so him that it would have made you laugh on any other day.
At some point he brought you soup from somewhere. You had no idea where. The nearest town was eleven miles away and it was eight in the morning. You didn't ask. With Dean, sometimes you just accepted the logistics without questioning them.
He sat on the edge of the bed and held the cup until you were ready to take it, which told you your hands were still shaking more than you'd realized.
"I can hold it," you said.
"I know you can." He didn't hand it over yet.
"Dean."
"Just—" He exhaled through his nose. "Just give me a minute."
You didn't push. He sat there holding a paper cup of chicken soup in a motel room in the middle of nowhere, jaw tight, and you understood that this was him processing something he wasn't going to say out loud. You watched him do it — watched the line of his shoulders, the way he was looking at the soup instead of at you because looking at you still had too much in it.
After a moment he passed you the cup.
"Eat," he said, and there was enough command in it that you pushed yourself up and tried.
He sat on the edge of the bed and watched you like he thought you'd disappear if he looked away. You'd been on the other side of that — you'd sat with both of them through things, injuries and hexes and worse — and you understood now, in a way you hadn't quite let yourself before, what it cost. The just having to wait. The not being able to do the thing that was hurting the person you loved.
"Dean."
"Eat the soup."
"I am eating the soup." You took another spoonful to demonstrate. "You don't have to babysit me."
"I know I don't have to."
"You could be helping Sam."
"Sam's good. Sam's got it." His eyes flicked to you, away, back. "Eat."
You ate the soup.
When you'd gotten about halfway through it, you set the cup down and said, "I'm sorry I didn't tell you about the hex bag."
He didn't answer right away. You watched his profile — the line of his jaw, the furrow that had been between his brows since yesterday and hadn't left.
"Why didn't you?" he asked. No heat in it. Just asking.
"Because I thought it was nothing. Because I didn't want to—" You stopped. Tried again. "You both worry enough. I didn't want to add to it over what I thought was static electricity."
"It wasn't static electricity."
"I know that now, Dean."
He turned to look at you then, full-on, and the thing in his face was complicated enough that you couldn't name it all. There was anger in there — not at you exactly, more like the ambient fury he carried about the universe in general when it directed itself at the people he loved. And underneath that, something rawer.
"You're allowed to tell us things," he said.
"I know."
"No, I mean—" He exhaled. Rubbed the back of his neck. "You're allowed to not be fine sometimes, Y/n. You don't have to have it handled before you say anything. You don't have to wait until—" He stopped. His voice had gone rough at the edges. "You're allowed to just say when something's wrong."
You looked at him for a long moment. You thought about all the times you'd watched him do exactly the same thing — walk off an injury, wave off a question, say I'm fine in a voice made of gravel and stubbornness. You didn't say that out loud. It wasn't the moment for it, and more than that: he was right, and it wasn't a contest.
"Okay," you said softly.
"Okay?"
"Okay." You held his gaze. "Next time I pick up an eighty-year-old cursed artifact I'll mention it."
He made a sound that was almost — almost — a laugh. Not quite. Close enough.
"Yeah," he said. "Do that."
Sam found the answer at 11:47 in the morning.
You knew because you heard him say yes — quiet, certain, the sound of a man who had been holding his breath for eighteen hours and finally let it go. And then his voice pitched up: "Dean."
What followed was a lot of rapid information exchange that washed over you in waves — something about a ritual reversal, something about ash from the original space, something about spoken intent in the traditional form. Sam had the whole thing written out.
Dean was already getting his jacket.
"Stay with her," he said.
"I'm going with you," you said.
Both of them turned to look at you.
"No," said Dean.
"It's my curse."
"You can barely—"
"It's my curse," you repeated, and the steadiness in your own voice surprised you. "I'm not sitting in a motel room while you two go fix something that's mine to fix. I can walk. I can stand. I'm going."
Another silence. Sam looked at Dean. Dean looked at you.
"If you pass out," Dean said, "I'm carrying you back to the car."
"Fine."
"And you're not driving."
"Obviously."
He held out his hand and you took it, letting him pull you to your feet. The world tilted — he steadied you without comment, one hand at your elbow, waiting. When you nodded, he let you move.
Sam held the door.
The farmhouse was worse in daylight.
It sat back from an overgrown track, grey and weathered, windows like closed eyes. The root cellar door was around the back, half-hidden by dead grass. Sam went first with a flashlight; Dean stayed close enough behind you that you could feel him there without looking.
The ritual space was a small alcove cut into the stone — shelves built into the wall, the remnants of old workings still visible in the shapes of things, in the marks left behind. Sam had the counter-charm laid out on the flat stone shelf that had clearly served as a workbench. He talked you through it as he set up: the ash from the original hex, combined with specific herbs from her recorded practice, arranged in a deliberate pattern.
"The spoken component has to come from you," he said. "You're the one carrying it."
He showed you the words — handwritten on a notepad. You read through them twice, feeling the way they sat in your mouth.
"Ready?" Sam asked.
You looked at Dean. He was standing just back from the alcove, arms crossed, watching you with that careful, contained focus he used when he was trying not to show how much he was feeling.
"Yeah," you said. "Ready."
You said the words.
It wasn't dramatic. That was the thing no one told you about moments like this — you always expected dramatic. A crack of something, a visible shift, light or sound or sensation. This was just: one breath, another breath, and then the thing that had been coiled tight inside your sternum for thirty-some hours simply — loosened.
Like a hand had been holding you from the inside and let go.
You stood very still, taking stock.
"Y/n?" Sam.
"I think—" You pressed a hand to your chest, not sure what you were checking for. "Yeah. I think that's — I think it worked."
Sam's exhale was long and audible. He closed the notepad.
Dean moved before you had time to brace for it — crossed the alcove in two strides and pulled you into a hug that was more like a collision, one arm around your back, one hand at the back of your head, and it was firm enough that you felt it in your ribs and you didn't care even slightly. You grabbed onto his jacket and held on.
He didn't say anything. Neither did you. There wasn't anything that needed saying.
After a moment Sam put his long arms around both of you from behind and you heard Dean mutter Sam, come on, and Sam said shut up, and it was so perfectly, them that you laughed — actually laughed, the first time since the coffee you hadn't finished yesterday morning.
"Okay," Dean said, pulling back. He held you by the shoulders and looked at you, actually looked, like he was checking every part of you. Then something in him settled. "Okay."
"Okay," you confirmed.
"We're getting real food," he said. "Not diner food. Actual food."
"Dean, everything you eat is diner food."
"I know a place forty minutes out that does a burger that would fix any curse."
"The curse is already fixed."
"Then it'll be preventative." He steered you toward the stairs with one hand between your shoulder blades. "Move, Sam."
"I'm moving," Sam said, but he was smiling.
⛧
You got the burger.
It was, objectively, a very good burger.
You sat in a booth between the two of them — Sam's shoulder against yours on one side, Dean's knee knocking against yours under the table on the other — and ate without talking much, which after the last thirty-six hours felt like exactly the right thing.
Halfway through, Dean reached over and stole one of your fries.
"Hey," you said.
"Tax," he said.
"That's not a thing."
"Oldest sibling tax. It's in the rulebook."
"There is no rulebook."
"There's definitely a rulebook." He took another fry. "Chapter one: little sisters don't touch cursed hex bags."
You pointed at him. "That is a fair rule and I will not debate it."
Sam snorted into his water.
You stole one of Dean's fries in retaliation. He let you.
Outside, the afternoon light was coming through the window at a low angle, turning everything amber. Your bones didn't ache anymore. Your head was clear. You were tired in the ordinary, fixable way — the kind that a night's sleep would actually address.
You thought about what Dean had said at the motel, about being allowed to say when something was wrong.
You thought about the two of them — Sam with his books and his legal pad, working through the night; Dean who had gone back to that farmhouse alone in the dark because he couldn't stand still; the hand over your hand in the early hours of the morning.
You'd patch it up, you thought. All three of you always did. That was the thing about this — about them. The world kept putting its hands on all of you, and you kept finding each other on the other side of it.
You leaned your head against Sam's shoulder.
He didn't say anything. Just shifted slightly, making room.
Dean glanced over, something soft moving across his face for one unguarded second before he looked back at his food.
"Eat your fries," he said.
You did.
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