Contact 15
Title: Contact 15/36
Author: Deanish
Rating: PG13
Length: 3,100 / 60,700 words
Characters/Pairings: Dean, Sam/Jess (but I'd still say it's more gen than het)
Summary: A 'what might have been.' What if the demon had stayed in hibernation for just a little longer?
Note: I am neither a doctor nor a hustler, so please excuse any glaring idiocy in the bits about pool and medicine.
Chapter 15
The small crowd that had gathered around the pool table broke out in appreciative applause as Dean sank yet another ball. He grinned deviously at his brother, who only rolled his eyes in response.
“Hope you brought your money, Sammy, ‘cause you’re gonna need it.”
“Dude. So far you’ve only won the coin toss. And since that’s more of a statistics thing than a physics thing, it doesn’t prove anything.”
“Sure it does. You said studying physics would improve my game,” Dean said as he lined up his next shot, “but if my game is already perfect,” and sank it as well, “ then what do I need physics for?” Another wolfish grin.
“As soon as you miss a shot, I’ll show you,” was Sam’s sardonic reply.
But, Dean noted with immense satisfaction, the only solid left on the table was the 8 ball. He called it, pocketed it and turned to Sam.
“No reason to fix what ain’t broken,” he said. “I think that makes the next round your treat?”
“Nuh uh,” Sam groused. “Another game. And I’ll break this time.”
Dean narrowed his eyes and surveyed his brother. Sam’s jaw was jutting out, a sure sign that he wasn’t going to back down. Dean grinned to himself. ‘And Sam says I’m competitive,’ he thought. If there’s on thing Sam hated, it was losing.
Dean gave a put-upon sigh designed to infuriate his brother and stepped away from the table. “Fine,” he shrugged. “But I think we both know this is only going to end in tears.”
“Yours,” Sam grunted, and Dean’s grin broke loose. Only a thoroughly provoked little brother would let such a lame retort by. Oh how he’d missed that. There were few things more fun than poking at a petulant Sammy.
He watched as Sam gathered the balls and began to re-rack them. Dean swaggered up behind him and said in his most contemplative voice, “That is a superb example of a triangle. Stanford obviously knows its shapes.”
He was close enough to hear Sam’s teeth grind.
“What kind of triangle would you call that?” he continued. “Equilateral? Isosceles?”
That earned him an actual glare, but Sam stayed quiet.
“Oh. Right. I guess that’s geometry. Not physics. You haven’t taken geometry?”
This time the glare was more of a warning glance. Still, Sam looked confident when he leaned forward to make his first shot.
Three balls went in and Sam cocked his eyebrows at Dean. ‘See?’ they challenged.
Dean rolled his eyes. “Dude. I taught you to play. If you had screwed up the break, I’d have had to kick your ass for making me look bad.”
That sent Sam back to scowling. But he made his next shot. And the one after that, he sank another three balls into assorted pockets.”
Dean practically had to clamp a hand over his forehead to keep his eyebrows from shooting up to his hairline. No way had Sam been able to do that when he left home.
There was still one striped ball left, but Sam went ahead and called the 8 ball. Dean frowned.
“What?” he scoffed. “What about the 11? You’ve got to get rid of it first.”
Sam just smirked and turned to line up his shot, which did not look at all easy. Even so, the 8 ball went into the appointed corner hole - but not before the 11 skittered off down one of the sides.
When he turned back to Dean, the smirk had grown into a full-fledged leer.
“And that, dear brother, is what a college education is good for.”
Now Dean was the one frowning. Possibly Sam was right when he called Dean competitive.
“Doesn’t matter,” he grumbled.
“What?” Sam exclaimed childishly.
“Already told you, Sam. The bet was that you could improve my game. You only proved you could improve yours.” Here he turned on a careless smile. “Good job with that, by the way.”
Sam glowered.
“Now. I’m ready for my beer.”
Sam added an eye roll to the frown, but headed toward the bar anyway. Dean moved to set up the table again.
When he heard the crash a few minutes later, his first instinct was to tease Sam on his lack of grace. ‘Maybe you weren’t lying, after all, when you told Jess you were clumsy,’ he prepared to say.
The words died on his lips, however. Sam was standing stock still in a puddle of beer and broken glass, his hands clutching his head and a grimace of pain on his face.
“Sam?” Dean stopped to watch his brother.
Whose knees promptly gave out.
Dean crossed the room in about three steps, but he wasn’t quick enough to keep Sam from landing in a heap on the floor. Dean skidded on his knees to a halt beside his brother, who was still clutching his head.
“Sam? Sam! What’s wrong? Talk to me, Sam!”
Sam choked out a cry of, “My head,” but Dean had no idea what to do with it. Sam wasn’t bleeding, except for from a few cuts from the beer mug remnants beneath him. There was no one close enough to have hit him, and he hadn’t heard any gunshots. Dean shook his own head in confusion and panic.
“Someone call an ambulance,” he bellowed in the direction of the bar.
He turned back to Sam, intending to move him off the floor. But a cry of pain stopped him.
“Sam?”
Suddenly Sam’s eyes flew open, and he stopped moving at all.
Dean stared at his brother in horror. What was going on? Was it a seizure? What should he be doing? This wasn’t something Dad had trained them for.
He grabbed the sides of Sam’s face and positioned himself in the sight line of Sam’s suddenly wild eyes.
“Sam? Sam, come on. What’s wrong? Tell me what’s going on?”
As far as he could tell, Sam couldn’t even hear him, and he certainly made no attempt to answer. In the meantime, he seemed close to hyperventilating. Dean checked his pulse and found it to be racing.
“Where’s that ambulance?” he called out desperately, even though he knew it was too soon to expect one.
“Just hold on, Sam, hold on,” he tried to soothe - but he figured it sounded less comforting than panicked. “Help is coming.”
Just then, however, it ended.
“No!” Sam yelled, bolting upright. Dean grabbed his shoulders to hold him down. Sam shivered beneath his hands.
“Sam! What? What’s going on?” How many times had he said that in the past minute and a half?
Sam was looking frantically around the room, confusion written plainly on his face. He seemed disoriented, which did nothing to calm Dean’s fears. But he was slowly settling down. When his breathing evened out a little, he said, “Dean? What …” but didn’t bother finishing the question.
“Dude,” Dean said, still shaky with fright, but trying to hide it. “I know you don’t like to lose, but that tantrum was a little dramatic, even for you.”
Sam just looked at him, wide-eyed.
“What … happened?”
Dean shook his head. “You tell me.”
“I,” Sam drew in a shuddering breath then looked down. When he looked back up, he looked more scared than Dean had ever seen him. “I think I’m losing my mind.”
OOO
Thirty minutes later, Dean was meeting Jessica at the hospital entrance.
“What happened?” she called out, sprinting across the parking lot, blonde hair flying out behind her. She was wearing what seemed to be pajama bottoms and a hoodie that Dean recognized as belonging to Sam.
“I don’t know. I … don’t know. We were playing pool and he just … I don’t know. Collapsed. He just stopped and grabbed his head and fell down. And then. I don’t know. He was hyperventilating and his eyes were everywhere but he didn’t see me, wouldn’t answer me - ”
“Oh God,” Jess looked stricken.
“But,” Dean hastened to add, “he’s awake now. And fine. Fine. It’s just …” He wasn’t sure how to put the next part. They were back in the waiting room so he put a hand out to stop her. “He said when he … zoned out? He said he had some kind of … hallucination or something.”
Jess froze.
“Wha … Hallucination? What do you … I don’t understand.”
Dean shook his head in frustration. “I don’t either. I don’t know. The ambulance came, and now the doctors are looking at him. So I … I don’t know. I don’t know!”
Dean couldn’t remember ever feeling so out of control. He’d seen Sam hurt before, in the hospital before. But there was always an obvious cause and an obvious course of action. The ghost threw Sam down the stairs: put pressure on the puncture wound on his thigh and splint the arm. Find something to stop the bleeding where he’d hit his head. That was bad, but …
But. Tonight there had been no explanation and nothing he could do. And Sam’s eyes had held more fear than any of the times he’d passed out on a hunt or woken up in a hospital.
Dean suddenly realized that Jess was no longer standing in front of him. He looked around and found her sitting in a nearby chair looking completely terrified, her hand over her mouth as if trying to hold in sobs. He suddenly felt guilty for letting his own panic show.
“Hey,” he soothed, sitting down beside her. “It’ll be all right. Like I said - he was awake and fine by the time the ambulance got there. I mean … it was … weird. But he’s fine.”
She turned toward him with wide, tear-filled eyes.
”Dean,” she said in a jagged whisper, “you don’t … That, what you said …” She swallowed hard. “I mean, what happened - it sounds like symptoms of a brain tumor.”
The word hit him like a punch in the stomach, and the sounds of the hospital were suddenly drowned out by the white noise between his ears.
“No,” he denied, giving his head a small shake that grew into a defiant wag. “No. No, you don’t know. You’re not a doctor. You haven’t even started med school yet.”
The tears had spilled over now. “I know,” Jess said, brokenly. “But … I have studied. And I … I just …”
She shook her head and didn’t go on.
Speechless, Dean leaned back in his chair and stared into space. The words hallucination and brain tumor echoed through his mind, providing a soundtrack to images of Sam clutching his head and falling down. After a minute he felt two arms snake around his waist. He looked down to see Jess curled into a tiny ball at his side, shoulders shaking. It didn’t take long before he started to feel wet spots on his shirt where her face was buried. He raised his own trembling arm to pat her on the back.
They were still sitting like that when a doctor called out, “Dean Winchester?”
Dean jumped up, almost spilling Jess in the process. She quickly caught up, though, and began wiping her eyes and nose on Sam’s sweatshirt.
“Mr. Winchester?” the doctor asked.
“Uh. Yeah,” Dean said. “Sam’s brother. And this is his fiancée, Jessica.”
The doctor nodded politely, but didn’t take much time to look up from the clipboard he was studying. “Well, if you’ll come with me, I’ll show you to your brother. He’s being moved into a room right now.” He started walking.
“What’s wrong with him?” Dean asked around the lump in his throat.
“Well,” the doctor began thoughtfully, “so far, nothing that we can find. We’ve got a lot of tests in the works, and we want to keep him here for observation while we wait for the results. Right now, though, he’s resting comfortably. He was pretty shaken up when he got here, but he’s calming down.”
Dean nodded, but chewed on his bottom lip and shared a glance with Jessica before finally getting up the courage to ask his next question.
“What …” his voice cracked a little, so he started over. “Uh, what are you testing for?”
The doctor stopped and turned, evidently deciding to give Dean his full attention.
“Well,” he said, “like I said, right now nothing seems wrong, so it’s hard to know where to look. Based on what he told us, we’re testing his blood for hallucinogens -”
“What?” Dean sputtered. “Drugs? Sam doesn’t do drugs!”
Jess laid a hand on his arm, probably trying to calm him. But Dean didn’t feel calm.
“That’s what he said, too,” the doctor said. “But it’s standard procedure. And besides, he doesn’t have to do drugs to have a hallucinogen in his system. He might have inhaled something inadvertently or been given something without his knowledge.”
Dean backed down a little. That seemed reasonable - and it was certainly preferable to a brain tumor.
But the doctor wasn’t done talking.
“And I’ve ordered a CAT scan and an MRI to get a look at his brain, as well.”
Jess let out a strangled sob.
“Could it … Do you think it might …” Dean had a hard time getting the words out. “Is a brain tumor … a possibility?”
The doctor nodded solemnly. “It’s a possibility. I certainly can’t rule it out. Though, I’m not sure I expect that to be the answer.”
“You don’t?” Jess asked hopefully.
“Well, as I said it’s too early to rule it out, and I don’t want to get your hopes up. But the hallucination Sam described isn’t what I’d expect from a brain tumor.” He paused. “The pain he mentioned though - that does worry me and is the main reason I ordered the tests. But we’ll have to see.”
“If it’s not a brain tumor and it’s not drugs,” Jess began, “then what?”
“Well, at that point, I’d say we’d start considering neurological problems. Again, the symptoms seem a little off, but he’s the right age for schizophrenia.”
Dean felt nauseous just hearing the word. And if the doctor started one more sentence with “well” he might snap.
Still, he pulled himself together enough to ask, “How do you know if it’s that?”
“Well, there’s no way to test for schizophrenia, but if we’re able to rule out physical causes, we’d get a psychiatrist up to examine him.”
“But you said he doesn’t fit those symptoms, either?” Jess asked.
“Right. That’s not my specialty, of course, but you don’t normally expect schizophrenics to be aware that they’re hallucinating. And the headache … that’s not typical either. But, well, there are other neurological problems to consider. It’s just going to take time.”
Dean nodded and noticed Jess doing the same. He felt about as numb as she looked.
The doctor must have noticed.
“I’m sorry if I’ve overwhelmed you,” he said. “Why don’t we just wait and see what we find out and save the worry for later. We might not find anything, and this may never happen again. Come on. Sam’s room is just around the corner.”
Sam was sitting up in the hospital bed. He looked tired and embarrassed, but he gave them a weary smile when they walked in.
“Hey,” he said softly.
Jessica leapt the last few feet to his bed and threw her arms around him, but didn’t say anything.
“Hey,” he said again, this time in a soothing voice. He reached up to return the hug. “It’s all right. I’m OK. I promise.”
Jessica gave a loud sniff in reply, and Dean took a few steps forward.
“You really OK?” he asked hesitantly. He figured he was hiding his emotions better than Jess, but he doubted Sam was fooled.
“Yeah,” Sam said as Jess disentangled herself. “Still a little bit of a headache, but nothing special.”
“What happened?” Jess demanded in a soggy voice.
Sam sighed.
“I … don’t know,” he began haltingly, staring into space. “I was … getting the beer. And then … it just hit me. There was this sharp, hot pain in my head and then … I was seeing things. Somewhere else. Bad things.”
“What?” Dean asked.
Sam turned haunted eyes on him.
“It was … a man. In an apartment. And there was … something there. Something I couldn’t see. It opened his window. And he closed it. But it opened it again. And he … went over to check it out. And he … leaned out to get a better look at it. And it … the window … slammed down on his neck. And …” here Sam’s voice got husky. “And his … head … rolled. Into the window box.”
Dean couldn’t do anything but blink. He was stunned. He didn’t know what he had been expecting, but it definitely hadn’t been that … graphic. Why would Sam be hallucinating that?
He looked at Sam and could tell he was asking himself the same question. Jessica, meanwhile, looked like she was about to fly apart.
“Sam?” she whispered. He turned to her, but she didn’t say anything else. He looked down.
“I know,” he said. “I don’t know. I … don’t know.”
The fraying edges of Sam’s voice brought Dean back to himself, and he jumped into big brother mode.
“That’s right. We don’t know anything. And until we do, we’re not going to worry about it. The doctors will figure it out. I’m sure it’s nothing. They’ll give you a pill, and it will never happen again.”
“A pill.” Sam said flatly. “You think there’s a pill for that?”
“You think there’s not?” It was the kind of nonsensical argument that drove Sam nuts. Soon he was gearing up for an argument, which at least took the shell-shocked look out of Sam’s eyes for a minute.
“Dean.”
“Marie.”
Sam’s forehead creased. “Marie?”
“Antoinette.”
Sam rolled his eyes and grunted. “Dean … if you’re going to try historical insults, at least get the facts straight. Marie Antoinette didn’t cut off people’s heads. She lost her head.”
Now Dean was rolling his eyes. “Geek.”
Sam gave a resigned sigh. “Jerk.”
But he backed it up with a small smile, which Dean returned.
Having dampened the tension a bit, the trio was able to wait somewhat calmly for the doctor to come to get Sam for his MRI. Jess went with him, but Dean made an excuse to stay behind. He had a call to make.
He pressed #1 on his speed dial and waited for an answer.
“Dad?
Chapter 16
Author: Deanish
Rating: PG13
Length: 3,100 / 60,700 words
Characters/Pairings: Dean, Sam/Jess (but I'd still say it's more gen than het)
Summary: A 'what might have been.' What if the demon had stayed in hibernation for just a little longer?
Note: I am neither a doctor nor a hustler, so please excuse any glaring idiocy in the bits about pool and medicine.
Chapter 15
The small crowd that had gathered around the pool table broke out in appreciative applause as Dean sank yet another ball. He grinned deviously at his brother, who only rolled his eyes in response.
“Hope you brought your money, Sammy, ‘cause you’re gonna need it.”
“Dude. So far you’ve only won the coin toss. And since that’s more of a statistics thing than a physics thing, it doesn’t prove anything.”
“Sure it does. You said studying physics would improve my game,” Dean said as he lined up his next shot, “but if my game is already perfect,” and sank it as well, “ then what do I need physics for?” Another wolfish grin.
“As soon as you miss a shot, I’ll show you,” was Sam’s sardonic reply.
But, Dean noted with immense satisfaction, the only solid left on the table was the 8 ball. He called it, pocketed it and turned to Sam.
“No reason to fix what ain’t broken,” he said. “I think that makes the next round your treat?”
“Nuh uh,” Sam groused. “Another game. And I’ll break this time.”
Dean narrowed his eyes and surveyed his brother. Sam’s jaw was jutting out, a sure sign that he wasn’t going to back down. Dean grinned to himself. ‘And Sam says I’m competitive,’ he thought. If there’s on thing Sam hated, it was losing.
Dean gave a put-upon sigh designed to infuriate his brother and stepped away from the table. “Fine,” he shrugged. “But I think we both know this is only going to end in tears.”
“Yours,” Sam grunted, and Dean’s grin broke loose. Only a thoroughly provoked little brother would let such a lame retort by. Oh how he’d missed that. There were few things more fun than poking at a petulant Sammy.
He watched as Sam gathered the balls and began to re-rack them. Dean swaggered up behind him and said in his most contemplative voice, “That is a superb example of a triangle. Stanford obviously knows its shapes.”
He was close enough to hear Sam’s teeth grind.
“What kind of triangle would you call that?” he continued. “Equilateral? Isosceles?”
That earned him an actual glare, but Sam stayed quiet.
“Oh. Right. I guess that’s geometry. Not physics. You haven’t taken geometry?”
This time the glare was more of a warning glance. Still, Sam looked confident when he leaned forward to make his first shot.
Three balls went in and Sam cocked his eyebrows at Dean. ‘See?’ they challenged.
Dean rolled his eyes. “Dude. I taught you to play. If you had screwed up the break, I’d have had to kick your ass for making me look bad.”
That sent Sam back to scowling. But he made his next shot. And the one after that, he sank another three balls into assorted pockets.”
Dean practically had to clamp a hand over his forehead to keep his eyebrows from shooting up to his hairline. No way had Sam been able to do that when he left home.
There was still one striped ball left, but Sam went ahead and called the 8 ball. Dean frowned.
“What?” he scoffed. “What about the 11? You’ve got to get rid of it first.”
Sam just smirked and turned to line up his shot, which did not look at all easy. Even so, the 8 ball went into the appointed corner hole - but not before the 11 skittered off down one of the sides.
When he turned back to Dean, the smirk had grown into a full-fledged leer.
“And that, dear brother, is what a college education is good for.”
Now Dean was the one frowning. Possibly Sam was right when he called Dean competitive.
“Doesn’t matter,” he grumbled.
“What?” Sam exclaimed childishly.
“Already told you, Sam. The bet was that you could improve my game. You only proved you could improve yours.” Here he turned on a careless smile. “Good job with that, by the way.”
Sam glowered.
“Now. I’m ready for my beer.”
Sam added an eye roll to the frown, but headed toward the bar anyway. Dean moved to set up the table again.
When he heard the crash a few minutes later, his first instinct was to tease Sam on his lack of grace. ‘Maybe you weren’t lying, after all, when you told Jess you were clumsy,’ he prepared to say.
The words died on his lips, however. Sam was standing stock still in a puddle of beer and broken glass, his hands clutching his head and a grimace of pain on his face.
“Sam?” Dean stopped to watch his brother.
Whose knees promptly gave out.
Dean crossed the room in about three steps, but he wasn’t quick enough to keep Sam from landing in a heap on the floor. Dean skidded on his knees to a halt beside his brother, who was still clutching his head.
“Sam? Sam! What’s wrong? Talk to me, Sam!”
Sam choked out a cry of, “My head,” but Dean had no idea what to do with it. Sam wasn’t bleeding, except for from a few cuts from the beer mug remnants beneath him. There was no one close enough to have hit him, and he hadn’t heard any gunshots. Dean shook his own head in confusion and panic.
“Someone call an ambulance,” he bellowed in the direction of the bar.
He turned back to Sam, intending to move him off the floor. But a cry of pain stopped him.
“Sam?”
Suddenly Sam’s eyes flew open, and he stopped moving at all.
Dean stared at his brother in horror. What was going on? Was it a seizure? What should he be doing? This wasn’t something Dad had trained them for.
He grabbed the sides of Sam’s face and positioned himself in the sight line of Sam’s suddenly wild eyes.
“Sam? Sam, come on. What’s wrong? Tell me what’s going on?”
As far as he could tell, Sam couldn’t even hear him, and he certainly made no attempt to answer. In the meantime, he seemed close to hyperventilating. Dean checked his pulse and found it to be racing.
“Where’s that ambulance?” he called out desperately, even though he knew it was too soon to expect one.
“Just hold on, Sam, hold on,” he tried to soothe - but he figured it sounded less comforting than panicked. “Help is coming.”
Just then, however, it ended.
“No!” Sam yelled, bolting upright. Dean grabbed his shoulders to hold him down. Sam shivered beneath his hands.
“Sam! What? What’s going on?” How many times had he said that in the past minute and a half?
Sam was looking frantically around the room, confusion written plainly on his face. He seemed disoriented, which did nothing to calm Dean’s fears. But he was slowly settling down. When his breathing evened out a little, he said, “Dean? What …” but didn’t bother finishing the question.
“Dude,” Dean said, still shaky with fright, but trying to hide it. “I know you don’t like to lose, but that tantrum was a little dramatic, even for you.”
Sam just looked at him, wide-eyed.
“What … happened?”
Dean shook his head. “You tell me.”
“I,” Sam drew in a shuddering breath then looked down. When he looked back up, he looked more scared than Dean had ever seen him. “I think I’m losing my mind.”
OOO
Thirty minutes later, Dean was meeting Jessica at the hospital entrance.
“What happened?” she called out, sprinting across the parking lot, blonde hair flying out behind her. She was wearing what seemed to be pajama bottoms and a hoodie that Dean recognized as belonging to Sam.
“I don’t know. I … don’t know. We were playing pool and he just … I don’t know. Collapsed. He just stopped and grabbed his head and fell down. And then. I don’t know. He was hyperventilating and his eyes were everywhere but he didn’t see me, wouldn’t answer me - ”
“Oh God,” Jess looked stricken.
“But,” Dean hastened to add, “he’s awake now. And fine. Fine. It’s just …” He wasn’t sure how to put the next part. They were back in the waiting room so he put a hand out to stop her. “He said when he … zoned out? He said he had some kind of … hallucination or something.”
Jess froze.
“Wha … Hallucination? What do you … I don’t understand.”
Dean shook his head in frustration. “I don’t either. I don’t know. The ambulance came, and now the doctors are looking at him. So I … I don’t know. I don’t know!”
Dean couldn’t remember ever feeling so out of control. He’d seen Sam hurt before, in the hospital before. But there was always an obvious cause and an obvious course of action. The ghost threw Sam down the stairs: put pressure on the puncture wound on his thigh and splint the arm. Find something to stop the bleeding where he’d hit his head. That was bad, but …
But. Tonight there had been no explanation and nothing he could do. And Sam’s eyes had held more fear than any of the times he’d passed out on a hunt or woken up in a hospital.
Dean suddenly realized that Jess was no longer standing in front of him. He looked around and found her sitting in a nearby chair looking completely terrified, her hand over her mouth as if trying to hold in sobs. He suddenly felt guilty for letting his own panic show.
“Hey,” he soothed, sitting down beside her. “It’ll be all right. Like I said - he was awake and fine by the time the ambulance got there. I mean … it was … weird. But he’s fine.”
She turned toward him with wide, tear-filled eyes.
”Dean,” she said in a jagged whisper, “you don’t … That, what you said …” She swallowed hard. “I mean, what happened - it sounds like symptoms of a brain tumor.”
The word hit him like a punch in the stomach, and the sounds of the hospital were suddenly drowned out by the white noise between his ears.
“No,” he denied, giving his head a small shake that grew into a defiant wag. “No. No, you don’t know. You’re not a doctor. You haven’t even started med school yet.”
The tears had spilled over now. “I know,” Jess said, brokenly. “But … I have studied. And I … I just …”
She shook her head and didn’t go on.
Speechless, Dean leaned back in his chair and stared into space. The words hallucination and brain tumor echoed through his mind, providing a soundtrack to images of Sam clutching his head and falling down. After a minute he felt two arms snake around his waist. He looked down to see Jess curled into a tiny ball at his side, shoulders shaking. It didn’t take long before he started to feel wet spots on his shirt where her face was buried. He raised his own trembling arm to pat her on the back.
They were still sitting like that when a doctor called out, “Dean Winchester?”
Dean jumped up, almost spilling Jess in the process. She quickly caught up, though, and began wiping her eyes and nose on Sam’s sweatshirt.
“Mr. Winchester?” the doctor asked.
“Uh. Yeah,” Dean said. “Sam’s brother. And this is his fiancée, Jessica.”
The doctor nodded politely, but didn’t take much time to look up from the clipboard he was studying. “Well, if you’ll come with me, I’ll show you to your brother. He’s being moved into a room right now.” He started walking.
“What’s wrong with him?” Dean asked around the lump in his throat.
“Well,” the doctor began thoughtfully, “so far, nothing that we can find. We’ve got a lot of tests in the works, and we want to keep him here for observation while we wait for the results. Right now, though, he’s resting comfortably. He was pretty shaken up when he got here, but he’s calming down.”
Dean nodded, but chewed on his bottom lip and shared a glance with Jessica before finally getting up the courage to ask his next question.
“What …” his voice cracked a little, so he started over. “Uh, what are you testing for?”
The doctor stopped and turned, evidently deciding to give Dean his full attention.
“Well,” he said, “like I said, right now nothing seems wrong, so it’s hard to know where to look. Based on what he told us, we’re testing his blood for hallucinogens -”
“What?” Dean sputtered. “Drugs? Sam doesn’t do drugs!”
Jess laid a hand on his arm, probably trying to calm him. But Dean didn’t feel calm.
“That’s what he said, too,” the doctor said. “But it’s standard procedure. And besides, he doesn’t have to do drugs to have a hallucinogen in his system. He might have inhaled something inadvertently or been given something without his knowledge.”
Dean backed down a little. That seemed reasonable - and it was certainly preferable to a brain tumor.
But the doctor wasn’t done talking.
“And I’ve ordered a CAT scan and an MRI to get a look at his brain, as well.”
Jess let out a strangled sob.
“Could it … Do you think it might …” Dean had a hard time getting the words out. “Is a brain tumor … a possibility?”
The doctor nodded solemnly. “It’s a possibility. I certainly can’t rule it out. Though, I’m not sure I expect that to be the answer.”
“You don’t?” Jess asked hopefully.
“Well, as I said it’s too early to rule it out, and I don’t want to get your hopes up. But the hallucination Sam described isn’t what I’d expect from a brain tumor.” He paused. “The pain he mentioned though - that does worry me and is the main reason I ordered the tests. But we’ll have to see.”
“If it’s not a brain tumor and it’s not drugs,” Jess began, “then what?”
“Well, at that point, I’d say we’d start considering neurological problems. Again, the symptoms seem a little off, but he’s the right age for schizophrenia.”
Dean felt nauseous just hearing the word. And if the doctor started one more sentence with “well” he might snap.
Still, he pulled himself together enough to ask, “How do you know if it’s that?”
“Well, there’s no way to test for schizophrenia, but if we’re able to rule out physical causes, we’d get a psychiatrist up to examine him.”
“But you said he doesn’t fit those symptoms, either?” Jess asked.
“Right. That’s not my specialty, of course, but you don’t normally expect schizophrenics to be aware that they’re hallucinating. And the headache … that’s not typical either. But, well, there are other neurological problems to consider. It’s just going to take time.”
Dean nodded and noticed Jess doing the same. He felt about as numb as she looked.
The doctor must have noticed.
“I’m sorry if I’ve overwhelmed you,” he said. “Why don’t we just wait and see what we find out and save the worry for later. We might not find anything, and this may never happen again. Come on. Sam’s room is just around the corner.”
Sam was sitting up in the hospital bed. He looked tired and embarrassed, but he gave them a weary smile when they walked in.
“Hey,” he said softly.
Jessica leapt the last few feet to his bed and threw her arms around him, but didn’t say anything.
“Hey,” he said again, this time in a soothing voice. He reached up to return the hug. “It’s all right. I’m OK. I promise.”
Jessica gave a loud sniff in reply, and Dean took a few steps forward.
“You really OK?” he asked hesitantly. He figured he was hiding his emotions better than Jess, but he doubted Sam was fooled.
“Yeah,” Sam said as Jess disentangled herself. “Still a little bit of a headache, but nothing special.”
“What happened?” Jess demanded in a soggy voice.
Sam sighed.
“I … don’t know,” he began haltingly, staring into space. “I was … getting the beer. And then … it just hit me. There was this sharp, hot pain in my head and then … I was seeing things. Somewhere else. Bad things.”
“What?” Dean asked.
Sam turned haunted eyes on him.
“It was … a man. In an apartment. And there was … something there. Something I couldn’t see. It opened his window. And he closed it. But it opened it again. And he … went over to check it out. And he … leaned out to get a better look at it. And it … the window … slammed down on his neck. And …” here Sam’s voice got husky. “And his … head … rolled. Into the window box.”
Dean couldn’t do anything but blink. He was stunned. He didn’t know what he had been expecting, but it definitely hadn’t been that … graphic. Why would Sam be hallucinating that?
He looked at Sam and could tell he was asking himself the same question. Jessica, meanwhile, looked like she was about to fly apart.
“Sam?” she whispered. He turned to her, but she didn’t say anything else. He looked down.
“I know,” he said. “I don’t know. I … don’t know.”
The fraying edges of Sam’s voice brought Dean back to himself, and he jumped into big brother mode.
“That’s right. We don’t know anything. And until we do, we’re not going to worry about it. The doctors will figure it out. I’m sure it’s nothing. They’ll give you a pill, and it will never happen again.”
“A pill.” Sam said flatly. “You think there’s a pill for that?”
“You think there’s not?” It was the kind of nonsensical argument that drove Sam nuts. Soon he was gearing up for an argument, which at least took the shell-shocked look out of Sam’s eyes for a minute.
“Dean.”
“Marie.”
Sam’s forehead creased. “Marie?”
“Antoinette.”
Sam rolled his eyes and grunted. “Dean … if you’re going to try historical insults, at least get the facts straight. Marie Antoinette didn’t cut off people’s heads. She lost her head.”
Now Dean was rolling his eyes. “Geek.”
Sam gave a resigned sigh. “Jerk.”
But he backed it up with a small smile, which Dean returned.
Having dampened the tension a bit, the trio was able to wait somewhat calmly for the doctor to come to get Sam for his MRI. Jess went with him, but Dean made an excuse to stay behind. He had a call to make.
He pressed #1 on his speed dial and waited for an answer.
“Dad?
Chapter 16