Phantom Pain
word count: 2600
rating: PG-13
characters/pairing: Sam, Dean
warnings: graphic permanent injury, blood
Also on AO3
Written for the OhSam comment fic prompt that Sam struggles after losing an arm.
I don’t even know what to call it. Sam thought to himself, watching arterial blood spurting from where his left arm had been moments before. It just killed me, and I don’t even know what it is.
Dean screamed like Sam probably should have and chased the monster down one of the tunnels.
Sam recognized that he was going into shock, but didn’t seem to be able to do anything about it.
There was an explosion down the tunnel where Dean had gone, and then footsteps that Sam hoped were Dean splashing back toward him.
“I told you clowns kill people.” Sam told Dean with a calmness that even surprised him.
“Yeah, well, you’re not dying.” Dean informed him.
He pulled off Sam’s belt and tightened it down as a tourniquet before Sam even registered what Dean was doing.
“Come on, we gotta get you to a hospital so they can stop the bleeding until we can get Cas here to fix this.” Dean said, pulling Sam toward the tunnel that led out toward the river
“Is it dead?” Sam asked.
“I don’t think so.” Dean shook his head, pulling Sam along. “I chased it back and caved in the tunnel. There’s probably some connecting tunnels that it can still use to get out.”
As soon as they were out in the daylight, Dean pulled out his cell phone, called 911, and requested they send a helicopter because his brother was bleeding out.
“Crocodile?” Sam suggested, still weirdly complacent about the whole situation. “Even though they don’t usually live around here?”
Dean looked at Sam’s wound and nodded. “Yeah. Crocodile. There’s nothing else around here that make a bite like that. We’ll tell them it got you out here, though. We don’t need Fish and Wildlife guys going in after that thing.”
The medivac came, taking Sam to the hospital while Dean followed in the car.
The next day and a half were a blur of anesthesia and surgeries.
When Sam finally woke up, Dean was sitting by the bed, looking both dejected and furious, somehow.
There was a whole discussion of how Cas couldn’t fix Sam’s severed arm. He could repair humans, but not replace body parts that were missing. Only God could do that.
Over the next week, Dean tried contacting Chuck. He called, he emailed, he stood outside and shouted at the sky. When those things failed, he summoned a couple angels and threatened them.
Chuck still didn’t answer.
Meanwhile, Sam was transferred to a rehab center across the street from the hospital.
Dean moved on from trying to find Chuck to summoning Crowley, hunting up witches, and calling other hunters to see if anyone knew of any other gods that might currently be on Earth and answering their phones.
There was an epic argument that degenerated into actual punches thrown over the fact that Cas had never mentioned that Stephen King was a prophet and the things he wrote were real, which would have been good for the Winchesters to know before now.
The day Dean, Jody’s bunch, and Garth sealed and flooded the sewers to drown Pennywise the Clown, Sam checked himself out of the rehab center.
He had done physical and occupational therapy daily since … well, Since.
Dean had been occupied with A) trying to make someone fix Sam, and B) killing the monster. Now that the monster was dead and Dean was running out of options for getting Sam’s arm regenerated, Dean was going to turn his efforts to smothering Sam. Sam knew it as certainly as he knew his own name.
Sam wasn’t going to have it.
He was a grown man, and even if he only had one arm, he could wash his own ass, thank you very much.
The rehab asked him to stay, and told him that he was welcome to come back if he changed his mind because his insurance had approved a full thirty days of inpatient physical therapy.
They gave him the name of a doctor to follow up with in Kansas, and the name of a company that could make him a prosthesis when his stump had healed enough.
Dean was worried, but admitted that he was glad to be going home instead of spending a whole month in Maine.
Once they got home, Dean tried to mother Sam more than he ever had before.
All of Sam’s meals were laid out for him, the table set, his beer opened. Sam’s clothes were washed, dried, folded, and put away for him. If Sam even looked like he might want something, Dean offered it or jumped up and got it for Sam. Dean popped into whatever room Sam was in at least once an hour to see if he needed anything.
There were daily arguments over that.
“Dean, lots of people live normal lives with only one arm! They even live alone! Just let me do something for myself so I can be independent!”
Dean dragged Sam to the doctor and to the prosthesis clinic, only to be told exactly what Sam said they were going to say, which was that Sam’s stump still had a lot of swelling, not to mention the fact that the wound needed to heal more before they could make his prosthesis. Because it was an above the elbow amputation, making the prosthesis was going to be more complex, so Sam agreed with waiting so they could make it right the first time rather than making one and then having to redo it as Sam’s arm healed.
In the meantime, Sam spent a lot of time in catalogs intended for senior citizens and ordered himself a entire assortment of adaptive devices. He got everything from a one handed shirt buttoner to a tray to hold his bread still while he spread peanut butter on it. He ordered a camera tripod from Amazon and rigged it to hold all sorts of things. He took his watch (Henry’s watch, the one the Men of Letters were supposed to give him after his initiation) to a jeweler and had the leather strap replaced with a stretch band.
He drew the line, however, at the support group that the doctor’s office kept giving him information about.
Cas spent more time in the bunker more than usual, lurking in the shadows and watching Sam quietly. When Crowley stopped by, he didn’t even make snarky comments. Sam wanted to punch both of them, but was afraid of hurting the only hand he had left.
Jody came to visit several times, offering to listen but Sam insisted everything was fine.
“Sam, you’re not fine, and bottling everything up so that you can pretend you are is just going to make things worse in the long run.”
On an intellectual level Sam knew that, but if he broke down and admitted weakness, he was afraid that his other weaknesses would come flooding out. He could ignore everything that was wrong just like he learned to ignore the pains in the arm he didn't have any more.
The third time Sam heard Dean pass a hunt to someone else, he put his foot down.
“There’s no reason you can’t hunt. We know enough people. Just call someone and ask them to go with you. If you can’t find anyone, ask Garth to find you someone.”
“Sam … “
“No, Dean. You’re not going to sit here and babysit me until I get my prosthesis. And after I get it, we’re going back hunting. We’ll have to start with some easier cases until I get used to it, but we’re not going to sit around here when people are dying and we can stop it.”
The argument lasted two days, but eventually Dean rounded up a couple guys named Asa and Bucky and went off the hunt the Raku.
Dean stocked the freezer with meals Sam only needed to put in the microwave before he left and called to check on Sam eight times the first day.
Surprisingly, the whole three days that Dean was gone went very well. Sam spent most of the time cataloging the Men of Letters’ library into the online database he was building. He missed his second hand while typing, but this task was fairly easy to do one handed.
He managed to make a salad using his special knife and kitchen aids. He even cleaned up after himself.
He washed a load of clothes, but had to hang them up on the rack in the laundry room because he hadn’t bought an assistive device to fold clothes yet.
He ordered one as soon as he got back to his room.
Dean seemed to be torn between proud and offended at how independent Sam was.
Dean called on his way home, telling Sam that he would be there in two hours. They needed some things from the grocery store, but Sam wanted to ride along, so Dean told Sam to be ready and he would swing by the bunker to pick him up.
That’s when everything started falling apart.
First, Sam told Dean that they could just meet in town.
Dean said “Uh, Sam … “
That’s when he remembered that the two cars and motorcycle in the bunker garage that Dean had gotten running all had manual transmissions.
Sam couldn’t drive any of them.
And he probably wouldn’t have anyway, because they wanted to continue living in the area, but he couldn’t hotwire a car with one hand.
So okay, fine, they could just go back to the original plan, where Dean would stop by and pick up Sam on the way.
They hung up, and Sam went down to the laundry room in the basement to get clean clothes.
He threw them over his shoulder and started back to the main level to take a shower when he realized that the door at the stairs had locked behind him.
Before, he could have picked the lock in under a minute. The door had done that before, so he and Dean had left a lock picking kit there in the basement.
But you can’t pick a lock with one hand, so Sam had to walk all the way to the far side of the bunker to use the other stairs.
Sam showered and went back to his room to get dressed. He used his assistive equipment and got his underwear, shirts, jeans, and socks on.
Then came his boots.
He had bought elastic laces for his running shoes so he didn’t have to tie them, but elastic laces didn’t come in a big enough size for his boots.
That was fine, because he had prepared for this. Someone had posted a tutorial video on how to lace up and tie boots one handed, and Sam had watched it four times.
He managed to get the boots on and laced up.
Tying them did not work as easily as it did in the video.
Sam tried four times on the right foot and twice on the left before he gave up and watched the video again.
He tried again. This time he actually managed to get the first boot tied, but when he moved his leg for easier access to the other foot, it came undone.
He could have just given up and worn his running shoes, but it was cold and he wanted his boots.
Mostly, he just wanted to be normal, or Normal For A Winchester, at least.
After watching the video again and propping a mirror against the wall at floor level so he could see what he was doing, he tried again.
It still didn’t work, but at least he knew why.
Sam’s hands were much larger than the woman’s hands shown in the video. His laces weren’t quite long enough to leave long ends out of the loops, and when he tried to wrap one loop around the other with the shorter ends, his big hands pulled the string out of the loop.
So he found another tutorial, showing a totally different method of lacing and tying boots with one hand. It meant he had to take his boots back off, completely unlace them, and lace them up differently. The finished knot didn’t look like the traditional method of tying a shoe, but the knot seemed simple enough to do with one hand and wouldn’t require one loop to be wrapped around the other.
It took some time, but he managed to get the boots laced up. The right one he tied successfully on the second try, and the left one on the third try.
The laces were way too long for this method, so he tucked the loose ends into his boots.
He stood and put his jacket on.
By that time, Dean should be there within a few minutes, so Sam decided to go outside or at least closer to the front door to wait.
He was halfway across the War Room when he suddenly found himself toppling face first toward the floor.
He instinctively threw his hands forward to catch himself, except, oh yeah, he was missing one, so all of his weight came down on his right arm, and he heard his shoulder pop out of place with a sickening crunch.
He groaned, remembering surgery and months of rehab and a second surgery after a demon had tried to rip his arm off because his shoulder had previously been dislocated four times due to hunting injuries. And now at least part of it was going to have to be redone, leaving Sam with exactly zero good arms.
He couldn’t even throw things in his rage right now.
He laid in the floor and kicked the table until his foot throbbed to go along with his aching right shoulder and the phantom pain in his missing left arm.
He survived demon blood, what should have been a fatal car accident, a fatal stabbing, being struck by lightning, having his lungs removed by an angel, being possessed by Satan, over a year in Hell, being soulless, The Trials, and having his arm bitten off by a sewer-dwelling clown, just to die on the floor of his own home after tripping over his shoelace.
He laid in the floor and screamed out his frustration. He screamed until there was nothing left in him, and he just sagged into the floor, too drained to even sit up.
He hadn’t heard the door open, and he hadn’t realized he was crying, but suddenly Dean was leaning over him, wiping away his tears.
“I gotcha, Sammy.” Dean murmured softly, carefully pulling Sam into his lap.
Somehow, the same brother who care was stifling and smothering a week ago, felt like security and comfort right this minute.
“I fell and I hurt my shoulder.” Sam said, sounding like a hurt child even to his own ears. “My right one. I think it’s dislocated again.”
“I’ll look at it in a minute.” Dean offered. “I’ll see if I can pop it back in. The doctor said that you might be unsteady and fall because you have to relearn your balance all over again.”
Sam didn’t answer aloud, just nodded.
“Sam, you know all those times that you’ve yelled at me for not letting you help me when I needed help?” Dean continued. “Works both ways, Sasquatch.”
“I know.” Sam agreed.
“You ready to get up or you want to sit here a few more minutes?” Dean asked.
“Just give me a couple minutes.” Sam told him.
“Whenever you’re ready.” Dean said. “Bitch.”
Sam smiled, in spite of everything.
“Jerk.”
rating: PG-13
characters/pairing: Sam, Dean
warnings: graphic permanent injury, blood
Also on AO3
Written for the OhSam comment fic prompt that Sam struggles after losing an arm.
I don’t even know what to call it. Sam thought to himself, watching arterial blood spurting from where his left arm had been moments before. It just killed me, and I don’t even know what it is.
Dean screamed like Sam probably should have and chased the monster down one of the tunnels.
Sam recognized that he was going into shock, but didn’t seem to be able to do anything about it.
There was an explosion down the tunnel where Dean had gone, and then footsteps that Sam hoped were Dean splashing back toward him.
“I told you clowns kill people.” Sam told Dean with a calmness that even surprised him.
“Yeah, well, you’re not dying.” Dean informed him.
He pulled off Sam’s belt and tightened it down as a tourniquet before Sam even registered what Dean was doing.
“Come on, we gotta get you to a hospital so they can stop the bleeding until we can get Cas here to fix this.” Dean said, pulling Sam toward the tunnel that led out toward the river
“Is it dead?” Sam asked.
“I don’t think so.” Dean shook his head, pulling Sam along. “I chased it back and caved in the tunnel. There’s probably some connecting tunnels that it can still use to get out.”
As soon as they were out in the daylight, Dean pulled out his cell phone, called 911, and requested they send a helicopter because his brother was bleeding out.
“Crocodile?” Sam suggested, still weirdly complacent about the whole situation. “Even though they don’t usually live around here?”
Dean looked at Sam’s wound and nodded. “Yeah. Crocodile. There’s nothing else around here that make a bite like that. We’ll tell them it got you out here, though. We don’t need Fish and Wildlife guys going in after that thing.”
The medivac came, taking Sam to the hospital while Dean followed in the car.
The next day and a half were a blur of anesthesia and surgeries.
When Sam finally woke up, Dean was sitting by the bed, looking both dejected and furious, somehow.
There was a whole discussion of how Cas couldn’t fix Sam’s severed arm. He could repair humans, but not replace body parts that were missing. Only God could do that.
Over the next week, Dean tried contacting Chuck. He called, he emailed, he stood outside and shouted at the sky. When those things failed, he summoned a couple angels and threatened them.
Chuck still didn’t answer.
Meanwhile, Sam was transferred to a rehab center across the street from the hospital.
Dean moved on from trying to find Chuck to summoning Crowley, hunting up witches, and calling other hunters to see if anyone knew of any other gods that might currently be on Earth and answering their phones.
There was an epic argument that degenerated into actual punches thrown over the fact that Cas had never mentioned that Stephen King was a prophet and the things he wrote were real, which would have been good for the Winchesters to know before now.
The day Dean, Jody’s bunch, and Garth sealed and flooded the sewers to drown Pennywise the Clown, Sam checked himself out of the rehab center.
He had done physical and occupational therapy daily since … well, Since.
Dean had been occupied with A) trying to make someone fix Sam, and B) killing the monster. Now that the monster was dead and Dean was running out of options for getting Sam’s arm regenerated, Dean was going to turn his efforts to smothering Sam. Sam knew it as certainly as he knew his own name.
Sam wasn’t going to have it.
He was a grown man, and even if he only had one arm, he could wash his own ass, thank you very much.
The rehab asked him to stay, and told him that he was welcome to come back if he changed his mind because his insurance had approved a full thirty days of inpatient physical therapy.
They gave him the name of a doctor to follow up with in Kansas, and the name of a company that could make him a prosthesis when his stump had healed enough.
Dean was worried, but admitted that he was glad to be going home instead of spending a whole month in Maine.
Once they got home, Dean tried to mother Sam more than he ever had before.
All of Sam’s meals were laid out for him, the table set, his beer opened. Sam’s clothes were washed, dried, folded, and put away for him. If Sam even looked like he might want something, Dean offered it or jumped up and got it for Sam. Dean popped into whatever room Sam was in at least once an hour to see if he needed anything.
There were daily arguments over that.
“Dean, lots of people live normal lives with only one arm! They even live alone! Just let me do something for myself so I can be independent!”
Dean dragged Sam to the doctor and to the prosthesis clinic, only to be told exactly what Sam said they were going to say, which was that Sam’s stump still had a lot of swelling, not to mention the fact that the wound needed to heal more before they could make his prosthesis. Because it was an above the elbow amputation, making the prosthesis was going to be more complex, so Sam agreed with waiting so they could make it right the first time rather than making one and then having to redo it as Sam’s arm healed.
In the meantime, Sam spent a lot of time in catalogs intended for senior citizens and ordered himself a entire assortment of adaptive devices. He got everything from a one handed shirt buttoner to a tray to hold his bread still while he spread peanut butter on it. He ordered a camera tripod from Amazon and rigged it to hold all sorts of things. He took his watch (Henry’s watch, the one the Men of Letters were supposed to give him after his initiation) to a jeweler and had the leather strap replaced with a stretch band.
He drew the line, however, at the support group that the doctor’s office kept giving him information about.
Cas spent more time in the bunker more than usual, lurking in the shadows and watching Sam quietly. When Crowley stopped by, he didn’t even make snarky comments. Sam wanted to punch both of them, but was afraid of hurting the only hand he had left.
Jody came to visit several times, offering to listen but Sam insisted everything was fine.
“Sam, you’re not fine, and bottling everything up so that you can pretend you are is just going to make things worse in the long run.”
On an intellectual level Sam knew that, but if he broke down and admitted weakness, he was afraid that his other weaknesses would come flooding out. He could ignore everything that was wrong just like he learned to ignore the pains in the arm he didn't have any more.
The third time Sam heard Dean pass a hunt to someone else, he put his foot down.
“There’s no reason you can’t hunt. We know enough people. Just call someone and ask them to go with you. If you can’t find anyone, ask Garth to find you someone.”
“Sam … “
“No, Dean. You’re not going to sit here and babysit me until I get my prosthesis. And after I get it, we’re going back hunting. We’ll have to start with some easier cases until I get used to it, but we’re not going to sit around here when people are dying and we can stop it.”
The argument lasted two days, but eventually Dean rounded up a couple guys named Asa and Bucky and went off the hunt the Raku.
Dean stocked the freezer with meals Sam only needed to put in the microwave before he left and called to check on Sam eight times the first day.
Surprisingly, the whole three days that Dean was gone went very well. Sam spent most of the time cataloging the Men of Letters’ library into the online database he was building. He missed his second hand while typing, but this task was fairly easy to do one handed.
He managed to make a salad using his special knife and kitchen aids. He even cleaned up after himself.
He washed a load of clothes, but had to hang them up on the rack in the laundry room because he hadn’t bought an assistive device to fold clothes yet.
He ordered one as soon as he got back to his room.
Dean seemed to be torn between proud and offended at how independent Sam was.
Dean called on his way home, telling Sam that he would be there in two hours. They needed some things from the grocery store, but Sam wanted to ride along, so Dean told Sam to be ready and he would swing by the bunker to pick him up.
That’s when everything started falling apart.
First, Sam told Dean that they could just meet in town.
Dean said “Uh, Sam … “
That’s when he remembered that the two cars and motorcycle in the bunker garage that Dean had gotten running all had manual transmissions.
Sam couldn’t drive any of them.
And he probably wouldn’t have anyway, because they wanted to continue living in the area, but he couldn’t hotwire a car with one hand.
So okay, fine, they could just go back to the original plan, where Dean would stop by and pick up Sam on the way.
They hung up, and Sam went down to the laundry room in the basement to get clean clothes.
He threw them over his shoulder and started back to the main level to take a shower when he realized that the door at the stairs had locked behind him.
Before, he could have picked the lock in under a minute. The door had done that before, so he and Dean had left a lock picking kit there in the basement.
But you can’t pick a lock with one hand, so Sam had to walk all the way to the far side of the bunker to use the other stairs.
Sam showered and went back to his room to get dressed. He used his assistive equipment and got his underwear, shirts, jeans, and socks on.
Then came his boots.
He had bought elastic laces for his running shoes so he didn’t have to tie them, but elastic laces didn’t come in a big enough size for his boots.
That was fine, because he had prepared for this. Someone had posted a tutorial video on how to lace up and tie boots one handed, and Sam had watched it four times.
He managed to get the boots on and laced up.
Tying them did not work as easily as it did in the video.
Sam tried four times on the right foot and twice on the left before he gave up and watched the video again.
He tried again. This time he actually managed to get the first boot tied, but when he moved his leg for easier access to the other foot, it came undone.
He could have just given up and worn his running shoes, but it was cold and he wanted his boots.
Mostly, he just wanted to be normal, or Normal For A Winchester, at least.
After watching the video again and propping a mirror against the wall at floor level so he could see what he was doing, he tried again.
It still didn’t work, but at least he knew why.
Sam’s hands were much larger than the woman’s hands shown in the video. His laces weren’t quite long enough to leave long ends out of the loops, and when he tried to wrap one loop around the other with the shorter ends, his big hands pulled the string out of the loop.
So he found another tutorial, showing a totally different method of lacing and tying boots with one hand. It meant he had to take his boots back off, completely unlace them, and lace them up differently. The finished knot didn’t look like the traditional method of tying a shoe, but the knot seemed simple enough to do with one hand and wouldn’t require one loop to be wrapped around the other.
It took some time, but he managed to get the boots laced up. The right one he tied successfully on the second try, and the left one on the third try.
The laces were way too long for this method, so he tucked the loose ends into his boots.
He stood and put his jacket on.
By that time, Dean should be there within a few minutes, so Sam decided to go outside or at least closer to the front door to wait.
He was halfway across the War Room when he suddenly found himself toppling face first toward the floor.
He instinctively threw his hands forward to catch himself, except, oh yeah, he was missing one, so all of his weight came down on his right arm, and he heard his shoulder pop out of place with a sickening crunch.
He groaned, remembering surgery and months of rehab and a second surgery after a demon had tried to rip his arm off because his shoulder had previously been dislocated four times due to hunting injuries. And now at least part of it was going to have to be redone, leaving Sam with exactly zero good arms.
He couldn’t even throw things in his rage right now.
He laid in the floor and kicked the table until his foot throbbed to go along with his aching right shoulder and the phantom pain in his missing left arm.
He survived demon blood, what should have been a fatal car accident, a fatal stabbing, being struck by lightning, having his lungs removed by an angel, being possessed by Satan, over a year in Hell, being soulless, The Trials, and having his arm bitten off by a sewer-dwelling clown, just to die on the floor of his own home after tripping over his shoelace.
He laid in the floor and screamed out his frustration. He screamed until there was nothing left in him, and he just sagged into the floor, too drained to even sit up.
He hadn’t heard the door open, and he hadn’t realized he was crying, but suddenly Dean was leaning over him, wiping away his tears.
“I gotcha, Sammy.” Dean murmured softly, carefully pulling Sam into his lap.
Somehow, the same brother who care was stifling and smothering a week ago, felt like security and comfort right this minute.
“I fell and I hurt my shoulder.” Sam said, sounding like a hurt child even to his own ears. “My right one. I think it’s dislocated again.”
“I’ll look at it in a minute.” Dean offered. “I’ll see if I can pop it back in. The doctor said that you might be unsteady and fall because you have to relearn your balance all over again.”
Sam didn’t answer aloud, just nodded.
“Sam, you know all those times that you’ve yelled at me for not letting you help me when I needed help?” Dean continued. “Works both ways, Sasquatch.”
“I know.” Sam agreed.
“You ready to get up or you want to sit here a few more minutes?” Dean asked.
“Just give me a couple minutes.” Sam told him.
“Whenever you’re ready.” Dean said. “Bitch.”
Sam smiled, in spite of everything.
“Jerk.”