An End Has a Start (Dean/Carmen, Sam/Jess R) 1/10
Title: An End Has a Start - Part 1
Rating: R
Pairings: Dean/Carmen, Sam/Jess
Word Count: 4,856 (50,221 overall)
Warnings: Wishverse fic, spoilers for S1 & S2 through 2x20
Summary: After Dean wakes up in the hospital with amnesia after an apparent attempted suicide, the answers he seeks just brings more questions before turning his world completely upside down.
Author's Note: Well here it is, everybody, my NaNo '07 fic. I am nervous as all hell to post this - I feel like it's my baby after working on it night and day everyday for a month. Never before has a piece of writing stressed me so much as this one.
This is dedicated to my flist. For isis2015, inthekeyofd, lostandalone22, hkath, cynthia_arrow, cheights, rawkin_ur_sox, zelda_zee, ellel, gottalovev, romelwen, alemyrddin, crowgirl13 for the cheerleading, the help when I posted questions in regard to specific details, the hand-holding, and the general, all around awesomeness that you guys are. For eponine119 and toestastegood for having your word counts constantly ahead of mine on the NaNo word count bar on the site, giving me motivation to get to where you were at. For nyuu_kon for telling me to go write on Thanksgiving. And for siluria for betaing, for dealing with the copy of this story that had sentences with verbs omitted because my brain was ahead of my fingers and my fingers were trying their damndest to keep up at the parts I got excited about writing and just couldn't stop. I ♥ you all.
+++
It was like the world had suddenly started moving in slow motion.
His brother had been acting strangely - so very unlike the Dean he knew - since Jess and he had shown up at the house for Mom’s birthday. He was acting like they were friends, called him Sammy. Dean had never called him Sammy; Mom and Dad did when he was little, when he fell off his bicycle and scraped his elbow, but Dean never did.
Sam had agreed to go with him to Joliet half out of curiosity and half out of a sense of responsibility that involved keeping Dean out of trouble.
When Dean started telling Sam how he wasn’t there, started talking to their mother and to Carmen who weren’t there, Sam had a painful flash of realization that he couldn’t help his brother with the type of trouble he was in, that he should have been clued in with the sudden behavioral changes, but then there was the knife and the blood and it took all of Sam’s strength to pull himself together, to keep his brother alive.
There was a surprising level of clarity in Dean’s eyes as he slumped forward against Sam’s shoulder, groaning in pain and shock. His gaze shifted, surprised by the darkness. Where the hell was he? And why was he in so much pain? He heard something metal fall to the ground as his hand reached for his stomach. Dean let out a startled moan when he pulled back his hand to see it covered in blood. He couldn’t figure out who was holding him up, but the solid presence kept him from crumbling to the ground.
Sam laid Dean down gently on the floor, his thoughts flashing back to his first aide training. He took off his jacket, draping it over Dean to help keep him warm and applying pressure with his hand as he pulled out his cell phone and called 9-1-1. The conversation was a blur, his mouth on autopilot as he told the operator that there’d been an accident, where they were, and to please hurry.
He couldn’t keep his eyes off the red blood that had soaked through and was now spreading underneath his hand that was pressed against Dean’s abdomen.
“Sam?” Dean coughed, his eyes glassy. “What the h-?”
“It’s going to be okay,” Sam interrupted, hoping his brother didn’t notice the slight waver in his voice. “The ambulance is going to be here soon.”
“I don’t remem…” His voice trailed off, head lolling to the side as he passed out. Sam swore to himself, to his brother for being such an idiot, to the paramedics who weren’t there yet, and to the blood that seemed to have stopped spreading but still seemed like too much.
Sam gave a start when he heard the sirens in the distance. “It’s going to be okay,” he repeated, more for his own benefit than for Dean’s. He listened to the wailing get louder and louder until they seemed right on top of him, the flashing red lights pulsing throughout the warehouse, illuminating the dark and empty corners. The siren covered the sound of the paramedics running towards them, announcing their presence when one of them grabbed Sam by the arm and pulled him away as the other looked Dean over.
“What happened?” she asked as Sam watched her partner hook his brother up to an IV and place an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth.
“There was a knife.”
“Did you stab him?”
“No!” He found himself yelling louder than he needed to, even over the noise of the still wailing sirens. “It was an accident. He… fell,” Sam offered lamely. He wasn’t even sure of how to explain what had happened himself yet.
She placed her hand on Sam’s shoulder briefly in a way that she seemed to think was comforting before going to help her partner lift Dean onto the gurney. Sam followed them outside, watching Dean until the back doors got shut in front of him making the white paint with Silver Cross written in blue all he could see.
“Do you need a ride?” the woman that had talked to Sam before asked as she rounded the back of the truck.
“I can follow.” Sam knew Dean had left the keys in the Impala’s ignition because Sam remembered thinking it was strange when they’d arrived at the warehouse. Dean was more protective of that car than anything and wouldn’t intentionally leave it unlocked unless… Sam forced away the possibility that Dean had come out to Joliet with the intention of killing himself.
Sam watched the ambulance pull away. He pulled up directions to the hospital on his phone’s browser, knowing there would have been no way he’d have been able to keep up with the ambulance. Sam opened the driver’s side door of the Impala, gingerly sliding behind the wheel.
The Impala had been their dad’s car since before Dean was born. Dean had loved it even as a kid, and it had only been a surprise to Dean when it was handed down to him on his eighteenth birthday. Sam had never been able to drive the car that was his dad’s and now his brother’s, and the weight of everything that just happened came crashing down on Sam all at once.
He couldn’t help but blame himself. Dean had reached out to him after dinner, been friendly, tried to get them all to go out together, but Sam had shot him down. He told Dean that they don’t get along and that he needed to stop pretending otherwise.
Rubbing at his eyes with his left hand, Sam started the Impala’s engine. There were still traces of heat on the steering wheel and Sam just sat there for a few minutes, idling the car as his hands rested where Dean’s had been and his father’s before that. Sam read the driving directions off his cell phone once more, eyes glancing to the corner of the screen to note that it was only 4:30 in the morning. He still had three hours before he knew Mom would be awake and wondering where he went.
He still had three hours before he would have to explain to Mom where he was and why Dean was in a hospital eight hours away.
Driving to the hospital was a blur of unfamiliar roads and traffic lights that insisted on staying red even though nobody else was on the roads. The hospital was twenty minutes from the warehouse, but it seemed like an eternity.
Dean had already been admitted by the time Sam got to the hospital, and he found himself being inundated with paperwork involving family history and health insurance without ever actually hearing if Dean would be okay or not. Sam hesitated when it came to filling out what had happened, remembering Dean talking to Mom, talking to Carmen, when it had just been him and Sam. Then, afterwards, trying to ask Sam through the haze of pain what had happened, telling him that he didn’t remember. Sam just wrote down “accident” like he’d been calling it all along. He then went and sat down in a room that was practically empty except for six other people looking as worried as he felt. Sam waited for news about his brother.
“Winchester?” a voice called, jolting Sam awake. It took a moment to realize that he’d fallen asleep in the waiting room at Silver Cross Hospital. He stood shakily, his legs having gone numb since the chair he’d been sprawled in had clearly been designed for much shorter people.
“Sam,” he introduced himself to the doctor. “Dean’s brother.”
“I’m Doctor Bass, I admitted your brother. We’ve had him in surgery for the last two hours and heard no one had been sent to tell you that his prognosis is good.” Doctor Bass had a very calming manner about him, which made Sam feel better as he let himself be lead to an area that was slightly more private. “The paperwork from the paramedics said that you were there when this happened.”
“I was.”
“The description of what happened was quite vague…”
“It happened so quickly,” Sam said, looking for truths he could say while thinking the doctor’s description of “vague” was the understatement of the century. He didn’t want to leave them with the impression that this was intentional, that Dean was crazy. Sure he was a little off before, but then afterwards, he had seemed so confused. “I’m not even really certain what happened.”
“I understand it might be difficult. The mind is strong and can omit traumatizing events, lessen the pain. We have several psychiatrists on hand if you feel like talking to someone.”
“What can you tell me about Dean?”
Doctor Bass let out a sigh that suggested that he was used to family members brushing off the idea of talking to someone, being more concerned about the state of those admitted than themselves. “Your brother will probably be in surgery for at most another four hours. No major organs got hit - just some grazing that we’re putting some sutures on to keep them from ripping further. We’ll then keep an eye on him in ICU. Due to the nature of this injury we’ll keep him on suicide watch for 72 hours, just to be on the safe side. I saw on the paperwork we had you fill out that you’re from Lawrence. After Dean has been moved from ICU it would be possible to transfer him to a hospital closer to home.”
Sam took it all in, the words “no major organs hit” and “suicide watch” echoing through his head.
“I can have someone contact family for you, if you like,” Doctor Bass suggested, an offer which Sam almost took him up on, but he didn’t think it would be fair to Mom to have the hospital tell her they were both there when Sam was perfectly fine. He knew he should be the one to call her.
“No that’s all right, I can do it.”
“Okay, then,” the doctor replied, smiling softly as he closed the folder that contained Dean’s charts.
Sam went outside, needing to get out of the space that smelled like sick people and floor cleaner. He needed to call home, tell them what happened. He felt obligated to stay, to be there when Dean got out of surgery, but he also knew that he and Jess needed to get back to Stanford since finals were soon approaching.
Pulling his phone out of his pocket, Sam scrolled through the address book, his thumb hovering over the send button with the entry labeled as Home lit up. He took a deep breath and made the call.
It rang three times before Sam heard the line get picked up and his mother’s voice saying, “Hello?” in a tone that suggested she couldn’t figure out who might call before 8:00. That she thought Sam was still asleep upstairs in his room because Jess certainly still was and they hadn’t even noticed yet that he wasn’t there.
“Hi, Mom,” Sam said, still looking for the words. “I’m in Joliet with Dean. There’s been an accident.”
+
The air felt thick, soupy, like no matter how hard he tried pushing through it, the particles just wouldn’t pass to the side and let him through. Everything was dark, too, and Dean felt as if he was floating but not… like he was also strapped down to something.
Dean couldn’t help but wonder what he had done the night before. He didn’t seem to remember going out, or even drinking anything. The last thing he seemed to remember, the more he thought as he was strapped down, feeling floaty, and moving through a heavy fog, was watching a 1950s horror movie marathon on television. Carmen hadn’t been able to stop giggling during Creature from the Black Lagoon, and the way her breasts heaved as she laughed made the plight of Gill-man much less interesting.
There were sounds now, wherever he was. A monotonous beeping nearby, reminding him of having a car door open with the engine running. Dean had a fleeting thought that maybe for some reason he had fallen asleep in the Impala even though he couldn’t for the life of him figure out why. He opened his eyes and instantly regretted it - the onslaught of all the white forced them back shut again. He didn’t see where he was for very long, but he had seen enough to know - he was in the hospital. In a flash of panic, Dean wondered if he’d had a stroke in his sleep as Dad had, wondered if he’d died and just didn’t know it yet, but then the heart monitor kept on keeping as it had been, and he crashed back to reality.
He opened his eyes, slowly this time, and nearly jumped out of his skin when he felt another hand get placed on his. Carmen was sitting to his right, chewing her lower lip and looking world-weary, but she quickly hid it behind a smile when she noticed that Dean was now watching her. “Hey, baby,” she said, placing her other hand on top of his, as well. She tried not too seem too happy, too worried, too scared - Carmen didn’t want to stress Dean out more than he was certainly going to be upon regaining consciousness, but she had seen too many similar circumstances go so wrong.
“Hey.” He winced from how dry his throat felt, how weak his voice sounded. Carmen seemed to notice this, too, frowning slightly and the corners of her eyes tightening. It felt like a reflex to try and get Carmen to smile.
Dean thought to how’d they had met - some punk ass high school kid had rear-ended him, and the insurance company had required a note from a doctor with the claim. He wouldn’t have cared normally, but the damage appraisal came to more than what he knew it would cost him to fix the Impala, so he planned on pocketing the difference. Dean found himself waiting in the hospital for hours just to get a piece of paper with a signature on it, harassing a nurse on her first day for most of that time. He offered to take her out for dinner to make up for the trouble he gave, and to Dean’s surprise, Carmen had said yes. This had been a little after his father passed away, and she had helped cheer him up when no one else could.
“Just need a signature from the doc and we can go home,” Dean smirked, but Carmen’s laugh sounded choked. She caught the way his smile wavered, watching Dean’s expression sober as he leaned slightly towards her. “I’m not quite sure what happened. We went to bed and then I was bleeding in a warehouse and Sam was there. I didn’t even know he was in Lawrence.”
“He and Jess came for your mother’s birthday. We all went out for dinner Tuesday night to celebrate.”
“Tuesday?” Dean paled. “Last thing that I remember was Monday night.” He noticed the way Carmen pressed her lips together, like there was a point he was missing and she wasn’t in a hurry to bring it up. “What day is today?”
Carmen sat up, pulling her hands away from his, folding her arms across her chest in what he recognized as her defensive posture. “You’ve been through a lot, Dean. They brought you here with significant blood loss and brought you into surgery to make sure you didn’t do any damage to your organs.” The more she spoke, the more upset Carmen got, repeating what she little knew, what little she had heard from Sam and the doctors. “Sam doesn’t even know what happened, or if he does, he hasn’t told anybody. They put you on suicide watch.” Her dark eyes started to tear up. “Why would you bring your brother to some abandoned warehouse in Joliet? I know things have been difficult, but please, Dean, tell me that you didn’t drive all the way out here to kill yourself.”
He couldn’t give her and answer since he didn’t know what the answer was. Dean just wanted to know how much time he was missing, how much he couldn’t remember. “Joliet?”
“You’re not in Kansas anymore, babe.” Carmen laughed, a brief snort, despite the tears that revealed how tired and how worried she was. “And it’s Friday.”
“Friday…” Dean repeated, absorbing it, hoping that maybe saying it out loud would allow him to recall the missing days in between. It didn’t work. “I can’t remember four whole days.”
“You… got hurt on Wednesday morning. The doctors said you were unconscious when you came in, and then you were brought into surgery. You’ve been sleeping mostly since we got here, but between the effects of the anesthesia and the painkillers they’ve had you on for recovery, it’s expected that you don’t remember these last two days. They switched what you’re on last night, though, so you’ll be able to remember this.”
“You said we.” Dean tried to sit up to get a better look out in the hallway, but the bandages around his stomach kept him from moving much, and the little he was able to move caused a lot of pain, despite whatever was filtering into his blood through the IV. “My mom’s here?”
“She stepped outside just before you woke up to talk to the doctor. Once they clear you from ICU you can transfer to Lawrence Memorial. Mary had to sign some forms as your medical proxy. I’ll let her know you’re awake.”
Dean watched her push the chair away and walk out of the room. He thought about telling her not to bother, to stay, fill him in on those days that he couldn’t remember, but Dean had a sudden, overwhelming desire to see Mom. He wanted to see that she was okay, that she knew he was fine despite the amnesia he seemed to be suffering from.
When she entered his room and smiled, Dean felt his heart ache, but he had no idea why.
“How are you feeling?”
A simple shrug - or at least as much of a shrug as he could manage still mostly lying down - was Dean’s answer. “Still trying to figure out what happened.” He could see Carmen still out in the hall, staying close but giving them some privacy. She was frowning at whatever voicemail she was listening to, and waved with her fingers when she caught Dean watching her. “Is Sam still here? I was hoping he could clear up some of the muddled bits.”
“I think you’ve scared him enough this week,” Mary said, her tone lighthearted but Dean could tell that she was talking about herself as much as Sam. “He drove back to Lawrence right after Carmen and I got here. He and Jess needed to get back to school for finals.” She sat down where Carmen had been, reaching out to run her fingers through Dean’s hair, holding his head. “I had Sam take your car.” She must have noticed the disgruntled expression on Dean’s face since Mary continued, “He got back a couple of hours ago, the Impala is perfectly fine. Even if he did get a scratch on it, you’d love any excuse to work on it. So be nice to your brother, he saved your life.”
Dean was about to mumble an apology but was interrupted by a polite knock on the door. Seeing Carmen follow the doctor into his room and Mary straighten up in the chair, Dean figured there was about to be something important announced when it came to his health. “Mister Winchester, it’s good to see you alert.” He was about to respond with something sarcastic but refrained at the warning glances from both his girlfriend and mother. “Since your condition is stable, we can have you transferred to Lawrence Memorial tomorrow. Because of the circumstances surrounding the injury, though, you won’t be able to check out until you’ve been physically and mentally cleared after about a week or two. They’re arranging a meeting with a staff psychiatrist who you’ll have daily sessions with while you’re still admitted and weekly sessions after.”
He didn’t have to like it, but it meant he could go home. Dean didn’t believe that paying a shrink to listen to your problems ever did any good, but he found himself willing to hope that talking to someone who didn’t know him would help expose those days he couldn’t remember, let him recall why he had gone to Joliet with Sam. Dean hoped to talk to his brother about what happened in the warehouse, of course, but he didn’t know when the first opportunity to talk to Sam would present itself. “Whatever it takes to get to go home.”
The doctor - Bass, Dean caught embroidered into his lab coat - looked at Dean’s charts. “We’ll just examine you once more - an MRI, some blood work, and an external check of the wound to make sure it isn’t gangrenous. If everything checks out okay, you’ll have a helicopter ride as early as tomorrow morning.” Doctor Bass rocked back on his heels. “I bet your family is looking forward to sleeping somewhere other than the chairs in the waiting room.” There was a pang of guilt - Dean hadn’t put together that he’d been at the hospital since Wednesday and that Mom and Carmen weren’t going to drive sixteen hours round trip to check on how he was doing. He wouldn’t have blamed them for not even bothering to come up. “I’ll let you spend some more time here, but keep in mind the MRI is scheduled in two hours.”
His mother gave the man a grateful smile as Carmen leaned against the arm of the chair that Mary was seated in. “Thanks, Doctor.” Once the doctor was out of earshot, Mary fixed Dean with a stern gaze. “You’re going to do everything the doctors ask of you without giving them any lip.”
“I’ll behave,” Dean said, and he meant it. He felt like another person had hijacked his body for a couple days, and he more than anything wanted to find out what they did with it.
+
The MRI went fine - the sutures hadn’t torn nor was there any sign of internal bleeding. The blood work also turned out normal, so the transfer looked like it was going to be tomorrow morning as promised. They were just going to change the bandages and check on the injury in the morning, and if everything looked okay still, Dean was going to get flown in an emergency services helicopter down to Lawrence.
After the intern took the blood sample and brought it down to the lab, Dean told his mom and Carmen to go back home. They had a long drive back, could get some sleep, and then he’d see them in Lawrence tomorrow. Dean tried not to get too excited about the prospect of getting out of Joliet - he was just moving from one hospital to another, not his own bed in his own apartment.
Dean quickly learned that healing was exhausting as he fell asleep almost immediately after the doctors were done with their poking and prodding. It wasn’t completely undisturbed, though, as he kept having nightmares that would linger like a bad smell in his conscious memory upon awakening in a cold sweat. Dreams involving someone crying, agonized yelling, and a dry, intense heat that kept playing over and over again. He woke up, meaning to ask for what Doctor Bass had heard from Sam about what happened in the warehouse, to see if maybe the vivid nightmares had been memories making their way through the cracks, but the harder he tried to recall, the more he forgot, like trying to squeeze a fistful of sand.
He’d forgotten that he even cared when Doctor Bass came in with a nurse to check the wound, change the bandages, and put his signature on the final papers for the transfer. The doctor had looked at Dean with a satisfied grin, another patient whose life he had saved. “Exciting day for you, isn’t it, Mister Winchester?”
Dean had chuckled in response. “You don’t need to call me that - makes me feel old.” It also ripped open a healing wound, every time he heard “Mister Winchester” he always expected to turn around to see his father standing there, not used to it being directed at him.
The helicopter ride would have been one of the more exciting experiences of Dean’s life if it weren’t for the fact that he couldn’t sit up to look out the windows as a precaution against possibly tearing the stitches that were keeping his insides on the inside. The psychiatric assessment he was subjected to upon arriving at Lawrence Memorial, on the other hand, was the least.
She’d told him to call her Charlie. She was older - Dean would guess in her mid to late fifties - and seemed like she’d done more than her fair share of partying back in the Seventies. Charlie had been running through a list of questions on her yellow legal pad, asking follow-ups to areas that she seemed to think needed more attention. “How would you describe your relationship with your father?”
“We were close,” Dean replied simply, hoping she wouldn’t try and get him to elaborate. He’d had a hard time dealing with Dad’s death, but he still wasn’t convinced that even that would be enough to make him attempt suicide. He had no idea why he was in Joliet, but he knew that he wouldn’t try to kill himself. “I’m dealing with it better now, though. I have to be strong for Mom since Sam’s never around.”
“Does it bother you that your brother gets to go back to college, pretend everything’s normal, and you have to stay here knowing that it isn’t?”
The question made Dean pause - he’d never thought of it like that before. Sam wasn’t there the day their mom had awoken and Dad was… Dean couldn’t even bring himself to finish the thought. Sam didn’t have to help contact family, make funeral arrangements, or deal with all the god damn paperwork the insurance companies made them fill out. He got to keep on living in California like his life in Lawrence didn’t exist. Dean thought that it was possible that he did begrudge his brother for being able to leave. “Yeah, it does.” He decided. “Sam acts like its okay to leave when he has obligations to his family.”
“Would you say your relationship with Sam was strained?” Charlie seemed to think that she was onto something here. “Would it be possible for you to consider that what happened in Joliet could have, in some way, been Sam’s fault?”
“You think Sam was the one that stabbed me?” Dean had a hard time imagining Sam as violent. Sure, they fought, but Sam had always adamantly protested the hunting trips John would end up just taking Dean on.
“Not exactly. But maybe he drove you to it, maybe you thought that you were punishing him by hurting yourself.”
Dean mulled over her idea, looking for it to light up any of the dark spots in his memory with familiarity or even a sense of déjà vu. There was no “Aha!” moment of sudden clarity. “I don’t think so.”
Chewing on the end of her pencil, Charlie looked between Dean over the top of her glasses and her notes from their conversation. “I’m going to give you a challenge.”
“Um… okay.”
“I’m going to challenge you to build a relationship with Sam.”
“Will that help me remember?”
Charlie straightened in her chair, clasping her hands in her lap. “It might, but it also might not. There’s no guarantee that you’ll ever get those memories back. It’s also possible something will trigger your brain into remembering today, tomorrow, next week, or even in ten years. Sam could tell you what happened, and even that might not enable you to recall anything or everything. I think having a relationship with your brother will help fill holes other than the ones in your memory - holes that were left when your father passed away. I think it’s the best thing either of you can do for each other right now.”
Dean gave the psychiatrist a tight-lipped smile, trying to disguise the fact that the thought it was the lamest idea that he had ever heard. Sam was busy with school until the summer. He wasn’t just going to drop everything because his brother, who he didn’t get along with, had a sudden lapse in sanity. Although, Dean considered, absent-mindedly running his fingers over where he knew the scar would form, stranger things had happened to him more recently. Now if he could only remember what they were.
Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8 - Part 9 - Part 10
Rating: R
Pairings: Dean/Carmen, Sam/Jess
Word Count: 4,856 (50,221 overall)
Warnings: Wishverse fic, spoilers for S1 & S2 through 2x20
Summary: After Dean wakes up in the hospital with amnesia after an apparent attempted suicide, the answers he seeks just brings more questions before turning his world completely upside down.
Author's Note: Well here it is, everybody, my NaNo '07 fic. I am nervous as all hell to post this - I feel like it's my baby after working on it night and day everyday for a month. Never before has a piece of writing stressed me so much as this one.
This is dedicated to my flist. For isis2015, inthekeyofd, lostandalone22, hkath, cynthia_arrow, cheights, rawkin_ur_sox, zelda_zee, ellel, gottalovev, romelwen, alemyrddin, crowgirl13 for the cheerleading, the help when I posted questions in regard to specific details, the hand-holding, and the general, all around awesomeness that you guys are. For eponine119 and toestastegood for having your word counts constantly ahead of mine on the NaNo word count bar on the site, giving me motivation to get to where you were at. For nyuu_kon for telling me to go write on Thanksgiving. And for siluria for betaing, for dealing with the copy of this story that had sentences with verbs omitted because my brain was ahead of my fingers and my fingers were trying their damndest to keep up at the parts I got excited about writing and just couldn't stop. I ♥ you all.
+++
It was like the world had suddenly started moving in slow motion.
His brother had been acting strangely - so very unlike the Dean he knew - since Jess and he had shown up at the house for Mom’s birthday. He was acting like they were friends, called him Sammy. Dean had never called him Sammy; Mom and Dad did when he was little, when he fell off his bicycle and scraped his elbow, but Dean never did.
Sam had agreed to go with him to Joliet half out of curiosity and half out of a sense of responsibility that involved keeping Dean out of trouble.
When Dean started telling Sam how he wasn’t there, started talking to their mother and to Carmen who weren’t there, Sam had a painful flash of realization that he couldn’t help his brother with the type of trouble he was in, that he should have been clued in with the sudden behavioral changes, but then there was the knife and the blood and it took all of Sam’s strength to pull himself together, to keep his brother alive.
There was a surprising level of clarity in Dean’s eyes as he slumped forward against Sam’s shoulder, groaning in pain and shock. His gaze shifted, surprised by the darkness. Where the hell was he? And why was he in so much pain? He heard something metal fall to the ground as his hand reached for his stomach. Dean let out a startled moan when he pulled back his hand to see it covered in blood. He couldn’t figure out who was holding him up, but the solid presence kept him from crumbling to the ground.
Sam laid Dean down gently on the floor, his thoughts flashing back to his first aide training. He took off his jacket, draping it over Dean to help keep him warm and applying pressure with his hand as he pulled out his cell phone and called 9-1-1. The conversation was a blur, his mouth on autopilot as he told the operator that there’d been an accident, where they were, and to please hurry.
He couldn’t keep his eyes off the red blood that had soaked through and was now spreading underneath his hand that was pressed against Dean’s abdomen.
“Sam?” Dean coughed, his eyes glassy. “What the h-?”
“It’s going to be okay,” Sam interrupted, hoping his brother didn’t notice the slight waver in his voice. “The ambulance is going to be here soon.”
“I don’t remem…” His voice trailed off, head lolling to the side as he passed out. Sam swore to himself, to his brother for being such an idiot, to the paramedics who weren’t there yet, and to the blood that seemed to have stopped spreading but still seemed like too much.
Sam gave a start when he heard the sirens in the distance. “It’s going to be okay,” he repeated, more for his own benefit than for Dean’s. He listened to the wailing get louder and louder until they seemed right on top of him, the flashing red lights pulsing throughout the warehouse, illuminating the dark and empty corners. The siren covered the sound of the paramedics running towards them, announcing their presence when one of them grabbed Sam by the arm and pulled him away as the other looked Dean over.
“What happened?” she asked as Sam watched her partner hook his brother up to an IV and place an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth.
“There was a knife.”
“Did you stab him?”
“No!” He found himself yelling louder than he needed to, even over the noise of the still wailing sirens. “It was an accident. He… fell,” Sam offered lamely. He wasn’t even sure of how to explain what had happened himself yet.
She placed her hand on Sam’s shoulder briefly in a way that she seemed to think was comforting before going to help her partner lift Dean onto the gurney. Sam followed them outside, watching Dean until the back doors got shut in front of him making the white paint with Silver Cross written in blue all he could see.
“Do you need a ride?” the woman that had talked to Sam before asked as she rounded the back of the truck.
“I can follow.” Sam knew Dean had left the keys in the Impala’s ignition because Sam remembered thinking it was strange when they’d arrived at the warehouse. Dean was more protective of that car than anything and wouldn’t intentionally leave it unlocked unless… Sam forced away the possibility that Dean had come out to Joliet with the intention of killing himself.
Sam watched the ambulance pull away. He pulled up directions to the hospital on his phone’s browser, knowing there would have been no way he’d have been able to keep up with the ambulance. Sam opened the driver’s side door of the Impala, gingerly sliding behind the wheel.
The Impala had been their dad’s car since before Dean was born. Dean had loved it even as a kid, and it had only been a surprise to Dean when it was handed down to him on his eighteenth birthday. Sam had never been able to drive the car that was his dad’s and now his brother’s, and the weight of everything that just happened came crashing down on Sam all at once.
He couldn’t help but blame himself. Dean had reached out to him after dinner, been friendly, tried to get them all to go out together, but Sam had shot him down. He told Dean that they don’t get along and that he needed to stop pretending otherwise.
Rubbing at his eyes with his left hand, Sam started the Impala’s engine. There were still traces of heat on the steering wheel and Sam just sat there for a few minutes, idling the car as his hands rested where Dean’s had been and his father’s before that. Sam read the driving directions off his cell phone once more, eyes glancing to the corner of the screen to note that it was only 4:30 in the morning. He still had three hours before he knew Mom would be awake and wondering where he went.
He still had three hours before he would have to explain to Mom where he was and why Dean was in a hospital eight hours away.
Driving to the hospital was a blur of unfamiliar roads and traffic lights that insisted on staying red even though nobody else was on the roads. The hospital was twenty minutes from the warehouse, but it seemed like an eternity.
Dean had already been admitted by the time Sam got to the hospital, and he found himself being inundated with paperwork involving family history and health insurance without ever actually hearing if Dean would be okay or not. Sam hesitated when it came to filling out what had happened, remembering Dean talking to Mom, talking to Carmen, when it had just been him and Sam. Then, afterwards, trying to ask Sam through the haze of pain what had happened, telling him that he didn’t remember. Sam just wrote down “accident” like he’d been calling it all along. He then went and sat down in a room that was practically empty except for six other people looking as worried as he felt. Sam waited for news about his brother.
“Winchester?” a voice called, jolting Sam awake. It took a moment to realize that he’d fallen asleep in the waiting room at Silver Cross Hospital. He stood shakily, his legs having gone numb since the chair he’d been sprawled in had clearly been designed for much shorter people.
“Sam,” he introduced himself to the doctor. “Dean’s brother.”
“I’m Doctor Bass, I admitted your brother. We’ve had him in surgery for the last two hours and heard no one had been sent to tell you that his prognosis is good.” Doctor Bass had a very calming manner about him, which made Sam feel better as he let himself be lead to an area that was slightly more private. “The paperwork from the paramedics said that you were there when this happened.”
“I was.”
“The description of what happened was quite vague…”
“It happened so quickly,” Sam said, looking for truths he could say while thinking the doctor’s description of “vague” was the understatement of the century. He didn’t want to leave them with the impression that this was intentional, that Dean was crazy. Sure he was a little off before, but then afterwards, he had seemed so confused. “I’m not even really certain what happened.”
“I understand it might be difficult. The mind is strong and can omit traumatizing events, lessen the pain. We have several psychiatrists on hand if you feel like talking to someone.”
“What can you tell me about Dean?”
Doctor Bass let out a sigh that suggested that he was used to family members brushing off the idea of talking to someone, being more concerned about the state of those admitted than themselves. “Your brother will probably be in surgery for at most another four hours. No major organs got hit - just some grazing that we’re putting some sutures on to keep them from ripping further. We’ll then keep an eye on him in ICU. Due to the nature of this injury we’ll keep him on suicide watch for 72 hours, just to be on the safe side. I saw on the paperwork we had you fill out that you’re from Lawrence. After Dean has been moved from ICU it would be possible to transfer him to a hospital closer to home.”
Sam took it all in, the words “no major organs hit” and “suicide watch” echoing through his head.
“I can have someone contact family for you, if you like,” Doctor Bass suggested, an offer which Sam almost took him up on, but he didn’t think it would be fair to Mom to have the hospital tell her they were both there when Sam was perfectly fine. He knew he should be the one to call her.
“No that’s all right, I can do it.”
“Okay, then,” the doctor replied, smiling softly as he closed the folder that contained Dean’s charts.
Sam went outside, needing to get out of the space that smelled like sick people and floor cleaner. He needed to call home, tell them what happened. He felt obligated to stay, to be there when Dean got out of surgery, but he also knew that he and Jess needed to get back to Stanford since finals were soon approaching.
Pulling his phone out of his pocket, Sam scrolled through the address book, his thumb hovering over the send button with the entry labeled as Home lit up. He took a deep breath and made the call.
It rang three times before Sam heard the line get picked up and his mother’s voice saying, “Hello?” in a tone that suggested she couldn’t figure out who might call before 8:00. That she thought Sam was still asleep upstairs in his room because Jess certainly still was and they hadn’t even noticed yet that he wasn’t there.
“Hi, Mom,” Sam said, still looking for the words. “I’m in Joliet with Dean. There’s been an accident.”
+
The air felt thick, soupy, like no matter how hard he tried pushing through it, the particles just wouldn’t pass to the side and let him through. Everything was dark, too, and Dean felt as if he was floating but not… like he was also strapped down to something.
Dean couldn’t help but wonder what he had done the night before. He didn’t seem to remember going out, or even drinking anything. The last thing he seemed to remember, the more he thought as he was strapped down, feeling floaty, and moving through a heavy fog, was watching a 1950s horror movie marathon on television. Carmen hadn’t been able to stop giggling during Creature from the Black Lagoon, and the way her breasts heaved as she laughed made the plight of Gill-man much less interesting.
There were sounds now, wherever he was. A monotonous beeping nearby, reminding him of having a car door open with the engine running. Dean had a fleeting thought that maybe for some reason he had fallen asleep in the Impala even though he couldn’t for the life of him figure out why. He opened his eyes and instantly regretted it - the onslaught of all the white forced them back shut again. He didn’t see where he was for very long, but he had seen enough to know - he was in the hospital. In a flash of panic, Dean wondered if he’d had a stroke in his sleep as Dad had, wondered if he’d died and just didn’t know it yet, but then the heart monitor kept on keeping as it had been, and he crashed back to reality.
He opened his eyes, slowly this time, and nearly jumped out of his skin when he felt another hand get placed on his. Carmen was sitting to his right, chewing her lower lip and looking world-weary, but she quickly hid it behind a smile when she noticed that Dean was now watching her. “Hey, baby,” she said, placing her other hand on top of his, as well. She tried not too seem too happy, too worried, too scared - Carmen didn’t want to stress Dean out more than he was certainly going to be upon regaining consciousness, but she had seen too many similar circumstances go so wrong.
“Hey.” He winced from how dry his throat felt, how weak his voice sounded. Carmen seemed to notice this, too, frowning slightly and the corners of her eyes tightening. It felt like a reflex to try and get Carmen to smile.
Dean thought to how’d they had met - some punk ass high school kid had rear-ended him, and the insurance company had required a note from a doctor with the claim. He wouldn’t have cared normally, but the damage appraisal came to more than what he knew it would cost him to fix the Impala, so he planned on pocketing the difference. Dean found himself waiting in the hospital for hours just to get a piece of paper with a signature on it, harassing a nurse on her first day for most of that time. He offered to take her out for dinner to make up for the trouble he gave, and to Dean’s surprise, Carmen had said yes. This had been a little after his father passed away, and she had helped cheer him up when no one else could.
“Just need a signature from the doc and we can go home,” Dean smirked, but Carmen’s laugh sounded choked. She caught the way his smile wavered, watching Dean’s expression sober as he leaned slightly towards her. “I’m not quite sure what happened. We went to bed and then I was bleeding in a warehouse and Sam was there. I didn’t even know he was in Lawrence.”
“He and Jess came for your mother’s birthday. We all went out for dinner Tuesday night to celebrate.”
“Tuesday?” Dean paled. “Last thing that I remember was Monday night.” He noticed the way Carmen pressed her lips together, like there was a point he was missing and she wasn’t in a hurry to bring it up. “What day is today?”
Carmen sat up, pulling her hands away from his, folding her arms across her chest in what he recognized as her defensive posture. “You’ve been through a lot, Dean. They brought you here with significant blood loss and brought you into surgery to make sure you didn’t do any damage to your organs.” The more she spoke, the more upset Carmen got, repeating what she little knew, what little she had heard from Sam and the doctors. “Sam doesn’t even know what happened, or if he does, he hasn’t told anybody. They put you on suicide watch.” Her dark eyes started to tear up. “Why would you bring your brother to some abandoned warehouse in Joliet? I know things have been difficult, but please, Dean, tell me that you didn’t drive all the way out here to kill yourself.”
He couldn’t give her and answer since he didn’t know what the answer was. Dean just wanted to know how much time he was missing, how much he couldn’t remember. “Joliet?”
“You’re not in Kansas anymore, babe.” Carmen laughed, a brief snort, despite the tears that revealed how tired and how worried she was. “And it’s Friday.”
“Friday…” Dean repeated, absorbing it, hoping that maybe saying it out loud would allow him to recall the missing days in between. It didn’t work. “I can’t remember four whole days.”
“You… got hurt on Wednesday morning. The doctors said you were unconscious when you came in, and then you were brought into surgery. You’ve been sleeping mostly since we got here, but between the effects of the anesthesia and the painkillers they’ve had you on for recovery, it’s expected that you don’t remember these last two days. They switched what you’re on last night, though, so you’ll be able to remember this.”
“You said we.” Dean tried to sit up to get a better look out in the hallway, but the bandages around his stomach kept him from moving much, and the little he was able to move caused a lot of pain, despite whatever was filtering into his blood through the IV. “My mom’s here?”
“She stepped outside just before you woke up to talk to the doctor. Once they clear you from ICU you can transfer to Lawrence Memorial. Mary had to sign some forms as your medical proxy. I’ll let her know you’re awake.”
Dean watched her push the chair away and walk out of the room. He thought about telling her not to bother, to stay, fill him in on those days that he couldn’t remember, but Dean had a sudden, overwhelming desire to see Mom. He wanted to see that she was okay, that she knew he was fine despite the amnesia he seemed to be suffering from.
When she entered his room and smiled, Dean felt his heart ache, but he had no idea why.
“How are you feeling?”
A simple shrug - or at least as much of a shrug as he could manage still mostly lying down - was Dean’s answer. “Still trying to figure out what happened.” He could see Carmen still out in the hall, staying close but giving them some privacy. She was frowning at whatever voicemail she was listening to, and waved with her fingers when she caught Dean watching her. “Is Sam still here? I was hoping he could clear up some of the muddled bits.”
“I think you’ve scared him enough this week,” Mary said, her tone lighthearted but Dean could tell that she was talking about herself as much as Sam. “He drove back to Lawrence right after Carmen and I got here. He and Jess needed to get back to school for finals.” She sat down where Carmen had been, reaching out to run her fingers through Dean’s hair, holding his head. “I had Sam take your car.” She must have noticed the disgruntled expression on Dean’s face since Mary continued, “He got back a couple of hours ago, the Impala is perfectly fine. Even if he did get a scratch on it, you’d love any excuse to work on it. So be nice to your brother, he saved your life.”
Dean was about to mumble an apology but was interrupted by a polite knock on the door. Seeing Carmen follow the doctor into his room and Mary straighten up in the chair, Dean figured there was about to be something important announced when it came to his health. “Mister Winchester, it’s good to see you alert.” He was about to respond with something sarcastic but refrained at the warning glances from both his girlfriend and mother. “Since your condition is stable, we can have you transferred to Lawrence Memorial tomorrow. Because of the circumstances surrounding the injury, though, you won’t be able to check out until you’ve been physically and mentally cleared after about a week or two. They’re arranging a meeting with a staff psychiatrist who you’ll have daily sessions with while you’re still admitted and weekly sessions after.”
He didn’t have to like it, but it meant he could go home. Dean didn’t believe that paying a shrink to listen to your problems ever did any good, but he found himself willing to hope that talking to someone who didn’t know him would help expose those days he couldn’t remember, let him recall why he had gone to Joliet with Sam. Dean hoped to talk to his brother about what happened in the warehouse, of course, but he didn’t know when the first opportunity to talk to Sam would present itself. “Whatever it takes to get to go home.”
The doctor - Bass, Dean caught embroidered into his lab coat - looked at Dean’s charts. “We’ll just examine you once more - an MRI, some blood work, and an external check of the wound to make sure it isn’t gangrenous. If everything checks out okay, you’ll have a helicopter ride as early as tomorrow morning.” Doctor Bass rocked back on his heels. “I bet your family is looking forward to sleeping somewhere other than the chairs in the waiting room.” There was a pang of guilt - Dean hadn’t put together that he’d been at the hospital since Wednesday and that Mom and Carmen weren’t going to drive sixteen hours round trip to check on how he was doing. He wouldn’t have blamed them for not even bothering to come up. “I’ll let you spend some more time here, but keep in mind the MRI is scheduled in two hours.”
His mother gave the man a grateful smile as Carmen leaned against the arm of the chair that Mary was seated in. “Thanks, Doctor.” Once the doctor was out of earshot, Mary fixed Dean with a stern gaze. “You’re going to do everything the doctors ask of you without giving them any lip.”
“I’ll behave,” Dean said, and he meant it. He felt like another person had hijacked his body for a couple days, and he more than anything wanted to find out what they did with it.
+
The MRI went fine - the sutures hadn’t torn nor was there any sign of internal bleeding. The blood work also turned out normal, so the transfer looked like it was going to be tomorrow morning as promised. They were just going to change the bandages and check on the injury in the morning, and if everything looked okay still, Dean was going to get flown in an emergency services helicopter down to Lawrence.
After the intern took the blood sample and brought it down to the lab, Dean told his mom and Carmen to go back home. They had a long drive back, could get some sleep, and then he’d see them in Lawrence tomorrow. Dean tried not to get too excited about the prospect of getting out of Joliet - he was just moving from one hospital to another, not his own bed in his own apartment.
Dean quickly learned that healing was exhausting as he fell asleep almost immediately after the doctors were done with their poking and prodding. It wasn’t completely undisturbed, though, as he kept having nightmares that would linger like a bad smell in his conscious memory upon awakening in a cold sweat. Dreams involving someone crying, agonized yelling, and a dry, intense heat that kept playing over and over again. He woke up, meaning to ask for what Doctor Bass had heard from Sam about what happened in the warehouse, to see if maybe the vivid nightmares had been memories making their way through the cracks, but the harder he tried to recall, the more he forgot, like trying to squeeze a fistful of sand.
He’d forgotten that he even cared when Doctor Bass came in with a nurse to check the wound, change the bandages, and put his signature on the final papers for the transfer. The doctor had looked at Dean with a satisfied grin, another patient whose life he had saved. “Exciting day for you, isn’t it, Mister Winchester?”
Dean had chuckled in response. “You don’t need to call me that - makes me feel old.” It also ripped open a healing wound, every time he heard “Mister Winchester” he always expected to turn around to see his father standing there, not used to it being directed at him.
The helicopter ride would have been one of the more exciting experiences of Dean’s life if it weren’t for the fact that he couldn’t sit up to look out the windows as a precaution against possibly tearing the stitches that were keeping his insides on the inside. The psychiatric assessment he was subjected to upon arriving at Lawrence Memorial, on the other hand, was the least.
She’d told him to call her Charlie. She was older - Dean would guess in her mid to late fifties - and seemed like she’d done more than her fair share of partying back in the Seventies. Charlie had been running through a list of questions on her yellow legal pad, asking follow-ups to areas that she seemed to think needed more attention. “How would you describe your relationship with your father?”
“We were close,” Dean replied simply, hoping she wouldn’t try and get him to elaborate. He’d had a hard time dealing with Dad’s death, but he still wasn’t convinced that even that would be enough to make him attempt suicide. He had no idea why he was in Joliet, but he knew that he wouldn’t try to kill himself. “I’m dealing with it better now, though. I have to be strong for Mom since Sam’s never around.”
“Does it bother you that your brother gets to go back to college, pretend everything’s normal, and you have to stay here knowing that it isn’t?”
The question made Dean pause - he’d never thought of it like that before. Sam wasn’t there the day their mom had awoken and Dad was… Dean couldn’t even bring himself to finish the thought. Sam didn’t have to help contact family, make funeral arrangements, or deal with all the god damn paperwork the insurance companies made them fill out. He got to keep on living in California like his life in Lawrence didn’t exist. Dean thought that it was possible that he did begrudge his brother for being able to leave. “Yeah, it does.” He decided. “Sam acts like its okay to leave when he has obligations to his family.”
“Would you say your relationship with Sam was strained?” Charlie seemed to think that she was onto something here. “Would it be possible for you to consider that what happened in Joliet could have, in some way, been Sam’s fault?”
“You think Sam was the one that stabbed me?” Dean had a hard time imagining Sam as violent. Sure, they fought, but Sam had always adamantly protested the hunting trips John would end up just taking Dean on.
“Not exactly. But maybe he drove you to it, maybe you thought that you were punishing him by hurting yourself.”
Dean mulled over her idea, looking for it to light up any of the dark spots in his memory with familiarity or even a sense of déjà vu. There was no “Aha!” moment of sudden clarity. “I don’t think so.”
Chewing on the end of her pencil, Charlie looked between Dean over the top of her glasses and her notes from their conversation. “I’m going to give you a challenge.”
“Um… okay.”
“I’m going to challenge you to build a relationship with Sam.”
“Will that help me remember?”
Charlie straightened in her chair, clasping her hands in her lap. “It might, but it also might not. There’s no guarantee that you’ll ever get those memories back. It’s also possible something will trigger your brain into remembering today, tomorrow, next week, or even in ten years. Sam could tell you what happened, and even that might not enable you to recall anything or everything. I think having a relationship with your brother will help fill holes other than the ones in your memory - holes that were left when your father passed away. I think it’s the best thing either of you can do for each other right now.”
Dean gave the psychiatrist a tight-lipped smile, trying to disguise the fact that the thought it was the lamest idea that he had ever heard. Sam was busy with school until the summer. He wasn’t just going to drop everything because his brother, who he didn’t get along with, had a sudden lapse in sanity. Although, Dean considered, absent-mindedly running his fingers over where he knew the scar would form, stranger things had happened to him more recently. Now if he could only remember what they were.
Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8 - Part 9 - Part 10