Traces >> Two
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More than once in his life, Dean had seen the inside of an ambulance, but it wasn’t nearly as often as one might think. Ever since he was six years old, he’d had more than his fair share of near death experiences, which mostly tended to result in his father racing him to the emergency room in the Impala or, if the Impala was out of commission for whatever reason or they were unable to get to it, he would call an ambulance. This had only happened four or five times in Dean’s memory and now, lying on a gurney with Sam at his side, the world a lot dimmer than it would have been normally, he knew this would be his last.
There was a reason people hid their bleach from their children and not only because if you swallowed some your life was in danger, but also because if you got any in your eyes, it could blind you and, though Dean had swallowed a fair amount and he knew that getting his stomach pumped was something in his immediate future, he had gotten even more in his eyes and he knew he was going to go blind. He clutched his brother’s hand, struggling not to seem like he needed him, needed to see him because soon he wouldn’t be able to, but he kept pulling Sam closer and closer, looking into his eyes, memorizing his face, doing everything in his power to commit to memory what he wouldn’t be given a chance to later.
Sam had no idea what was going on, to be honest. All he knew was that they’d been fighting Leviathan, he’d flung some bleach at the creature and, instead of coating the thing he’d aimed for, it’d blanketed his brother, who had swallowed some. Bleach was bad for you when you swallowed the stuff. People had died from swallowing it before. Sam and the rest of the world knew that much and that was the only thing he was panicking about as the ambulance raced in the direction of the hospital and Dean’s vision, once so clear and bright, slowly, slowly began to fade.
-
The minute the ambulance arrived at the hospital, Sam was pushed out of the way as the paramedics rushed his brother into the emergency room and behind a blue paper curtain where they forced a tube down his throat and began to pump his stomach, forcing everything that he’d put into it recently back out. Sam tried to get to the curtain, tried to be there with his brother as they did this and he threw up over and over again into a bucket one of the other nurses was holding, but every time he got close, he was pushed back, told he had to sit in the waiting room until he was told to do otherwise.
Sam didn’t know what they were doing behind that blue curtain, but they eventually wheeled his brother away, unconscious. When Sam tried to get to him again, another doctor held him back, explaining to him as patiently as he could manage that the bleach had thrown of the pH of Dean’s stomach acids and had eaten a hole in the side of his stomach.
“We have to operate quickly if we’re going to save his other internal organs and his life,” the doctor explained. This calmed Sam down considerably and, for the second time in too short a time, he sat down in the waiting room, pressed his palms together and placed his lips against his fingertips, struggling to keep calm while waiting for his brother to come out of surgery.
“How do you think they’re going to fix that, Sammy?” Lucifer asked, sitting down next to him. He placed his forefinger against his chin, taking on a puzzled expression. “How are they going to replace his stomach acids? Is that even possible?”
Sam kept silent. He didn’t want to think about it.
“Dean’s probably going to die,” Lucifer said, sounding genuinely depressed. “And just when you lost Bobby, too? That’s got to hurt.”
“Shut up,” Sam hissed, a little too loudly, since a couple people looked over at him, wondering who on earth he could be talking to. Sam pressed his thumb into the scar on his palm, but, in his current state of panic and anxiety, this didn’t seem to help anything.
“Lots of people have died from ingesting bleach,” the devil informed him. “It happens all the time. It could be worse. At least he’s dying from something normal.” Lucifer chuckled. “Well, moderately normal. You were hunting a Leviathan after all.”
Sam’s hands balled into fists. He didn’t want to hear this.
“I mean, he’s died from other things before. Hellhounds, gunshot wounds, even tacos. Bleach is new, but it’s mundane. Almost normal. You’ve always wanted to be normal, right Sam? Well, now here’s your chance! When people ask you what your brother died of, you won’t have to make anything up! For the most part, anyway.”
Sam opened his mouth to, again, tell Lucifer to shut up, but the devil seemed to have vanished. He ran his fingers through his hair, trying to ignore how much his hands were shaking, how tired he was, how Dean could die - this time for good - and how he would be all alone in the world with nowhere to go and no one to turn to. The devil was right. He did want to be normal. But like this. Never like this. His last chance at being normal had been Jess, but she’d died seven years ago and, afterwards, his life of normalcy had gone up in flames just as she had.
Three hours passed where he was unable to see Dean. He alternated between pacing around the waiting room with the other families waiting for news of their loved ones and sitting impatiently, hoping that if he stared at the hallway Dean had been wheeled down long enough, he might suddenly appear, happy and healthy, and this all would have just been a bad dream.
Finally, after Sam had just about given up hope on hearing any news of his brother and was thinking of heading back to the motel for the night, he heard the sound of shoes on linoleum and, along with the rest of the people in the waiting room, lifted his head to see if maybe this time the news was for him. The doctor scanned the waiting room, found Sam sitting in the corner by himself, and walked over to him. Sam immediately stood, managing to somehow look smaller than six feet with the look of fear mixed with hope etched into his features.
“Hey, doc, how is he?” he asked, struggling to keep his voice steady.
“He’s dead,” Lucifer singsonged, slinging an arm around his waist, sounding far too merry to be the devil. “He died during surgery. He’s gone. Dead as a doornail. Not coming back. Nothing you can do this time, Sammy.”
Sam clenched his hand into a fist, digging his nails as deeply into the scar near his thumb as he could, praying this would make the devil disappear at least for now. He heard Lucifer sigh and say, “Fine,” before he flickered out of existence and Sam was able to turn his full attention to the man in front of him and silently pray that what the devil had said was wrong and Dean was just fine. Or at least on his way to being just fine.
The doctor flipped through the sheets on his clipboard and said, “For the most part, your brother is alright. He’ll recover from the bleach poisoning and should be able to be released from the hospital within the next week. He’ll need at least another couple of days of bedrest after release, but after that he should be fine.” Sam let out a sigh of relief, ready to march through the hospital to his brother and tell him that everything was going to be alright and they’d be back to hunting Dick Roman in now time, but the doctor wasn’t finished and he stopped Sam before he could even move with one word: “However…the bleach did get in his eyes. We got as much out of them as we could, but it wasn’t enough. I’m afraid your brother is now irreversibly blind. He will never be able to see again.”
Sam froze, tensing up again. Dean? Blind? Those were two words that should never be used in the same sentences unless, the words ‘wouldn’t be able to handle being’ were between them, but that wasn’t what the doctor had said. He’d told him that Dean was irreversibly blind. He’d told him that they’d tried to save his eyes, but hadn’t been able to. He’d told him his brother, who had far too big of a head for his own good, who used his eyes every day, who needed them to do his job, would never be able to see again. Suddenly, Sam was nervous about sitting by his brother’s bedside until he woke up, nervous about having to deal with him realizing he couldn’t see. He didn’t want to be the one to break the news to him.
Fortunately for him, he wouldn’t be. The doctor wrote down Dean’s room number on a the back of a business card and told Sam that he’d been awake for about thirty minutes and already been talked to about his condition. “We were unable to fully explain it to him, seeing as he told us he didn’t want to hear it and yelled at us when we tried to tell him that this would be important in the future. We warned him we’d have to sedate him and that calmed him down, but I don’t think he was listening when our eye expert tried again to tell him what exactly is going on. I understand he is very upset about his condition, but he needs to know these things for the future, since this is now what his life is.”
Sam nodded only once in assent before he moved past the doctor and down the hall, thinking, Not for Dean it isn’t and he knows it. They’d find a way to cure his blindness. They’d figured it out before, they’d do it again now. They had to. Dean couldn’t hunt without his eyes.
The room the doctor had written on the business card was at the end of the hall, away from everything else it seemed, just where Dean would like it. He hated hospitals, but when he had to be in one, he preferred the quiet secluded rooms to the loud ones stuck right in the middle of everything.
“How am I supposed to get better when I have to hear doctors shouting things at each other all fucking day?” he’d said more than once when a request to move rooms had been denied. This tended to get him his way, but there were times when he wasn’t sick enough to have his needs above everyone else’s and he had to suffer through some noise while he recovered, grumbling to Sam the entire time. Sam always smiled and told him he sounded like an old man. Dean would tease back that it was Sam who had made him old.
There wasn’t much happiness in their lives anymore, so, when the pain wasn’t too much and the despair was minimal, they made their own.
Before he entered the room, Sam rapped on the door to let Dean know he was there. He opened his mouth to say something, to let him know it was him, when Dean turned towards him and Sam’s words left his mouth.
Dean had always had beautiful green eyes. They were the first things Sam remembered seeing and he was certain they would also be the last. They lit up when Dean laughed, they dimmed when Dean was sad, they showed every would-be emotion that Dean had, even when he was struggling to keep said emotions hidden from his brother who knew him better than anyone else in the world. If anyone had asked Sam how to read Dean, he would’ve told them to look into his eyes and, if they didn’t get lost, they’d understand his brother immediately.
But that green was gone now, washed away by the bleach that he, Sam, had thrown at them. It had been replaced by a milky sky blue that covered the iris where the green should have been. At the center, on Dean’s pupils, was a grayish-white, shading his eyes from every sight that the world had to offer forever.
Normally, Sam would’ve been focusing on the machines his brother was connected to. The heart monitor set up in the corner, the IV pole nearby, the tube of oxygen that was fixed into the wall. But none of that seemed at all important compared with the sight of Dean’s eyes and the fact he would never be able to read any emotion out of them ever again.
“Heya, Sammy,” Dean said, smiling slightly, turning his head in the general direction of his brother, his eyes staring straight past him. Sam had no idea why he was surprised that, though he hadn’t said a word, Dean knew it was him. “Check it out. I’ve got no eyes anymore. No more hunting for me!”
He said this cheerfully, like it was a good thing, like he wasn’t bothered at all, but Sam could hear Dean’s bitter undertones and knew his brother was just saying this for his benefit, trying to reassure him that he was fine, just as he had when they were younger and he was bleeding out from whatever what they’d been hunting had done to him.
“It’s going to be okay, Dean,” Sam said, not knowing what else to say. “I’ll find someone who can reverse this. I’ll make it okay.”
Dean laughed humorlessly and shook his head. Suddenly Sam knew that Dean hadn’t ever been trying to make him feel better. Sam had just been hearing what little optimism there was in his voice because he was hoping that somehow his brother hadn’t already lost all hope, that maybe Dean wouldn’t feel like there was no way this could be changed, that perhaps he would have faith in Sam’s ability to help him. He’d done it every time before, so why didn’t he trust him to pull through now?
“Because you’ve betrayed him a lot, too, Sammy,” Lucifer said. He was blowing his pinwheel again, leaning against the wall by the window. “Why would he ever trust you? Don’t you remember when you released me?”
Again, Sam ignored the devil as Dean said, “The doctors already told me this is irreversible blindness, Sammy. Nothing we can do.”
“No,” Sam said, firmly. “Nothing, they can do. It’ll be okay. We know about things they don’t, Dean. You and I both know that we can -”
“Stop, Sam,” Dean said, firmly, turning back to his brother, his eyes fixed on Sam’s, almost as though he weren’t blind at all. “The last faith healer we found had a wife with a reaper on a leash. Remember that? The only other person that might be able to heal me is an angel and the only we know that likes us is dead. There is no way to make this better, Sam.”
“It’s going to be okay. Please have faith in me, Dean -” Sam tried to begin again, but Dean cut him off.
“I can’t see you, Sam.” His voice was so soft that Sam wasn’t even really sure he’d head him to begin with. “I can’t see you all grown up. I can’t see the dimples on your face when you smile. Hell, I can’t see if you smile anymore…do you?”
“Dean -” Sam began yet again, struggling to ignore the way Dean looked at him, with such sadness etched into his features as he spoke those last two words.
“Sam, I swear to God, if you tell me it’s going to be okay one more time…” he turned away again, shaking his head, his unseeing eyes on the blanket bunched in his lap. “It’s not going to be okay…because it already isn’t…”
This time when Sam closed his mouth, it was permanently. He didn’t have anything to add, anything else to say. Sam knew it was a blessing and a curse that he had always had so much hope, even when everyone else had none. A part of him thought that maybe he shouldn’t search for a cure for Dean’s eyes. Maybe they should just settle down and forget about this and leave the hunting life for good. But another part, the part full of hope, told him he couldn’t fail Dean like that. He had failed him in too many other ways. And, no matter how this turned out, he had to at least try to find a cure for his eyes. He had to try to find someone who could return his brother’s sight.
No, a voice in his mind corrected as he made himself comfortable in the chair that was sitting next to Dean’s bed. You have to find someone who can help Dean. You can’t stop searching until you’ve found someone. You can’t let him down again.
And Sam knew the voice was right. He had to help Dean. Too many times in his life he’d let him down and the very last possible thing he could do was let him down again.
Dean may have lost all hope that his sight will return, that I’ll find someone to help him, but I haven’t and I won’t. He needs me to help him. And that is exactly what I will do.
On to Ch. 3
More than once in his life, Dean had seen the inside of an ambulance, but it wasn’t nearly as often as one might think. Ever since he was six years old, he’d had more than his fair share of near death experiences, which mostly tended to result in his father racing him to the emergency room in the Impala or, if the Impala was out of commission for whatever reason or they were unable to get to it, he would call an ambulance. This had only happened four or five times in Dean’s memory and now, lying on a gurney with Sam at his side, the world a lot dimmer than it would have been normally, he knew this would be his last.
There was a reason people hid their bleach from their children and not only because if you swallowed some your life was in danger, but also because if you got any in your eyes, it could blind you and, though Dean had swallowed a fair amount and he knew that getting his stomach pumped was something in his immediate future, he had gotten even more in his eyes and he knew he was going to go blind. He clutched his brother’s hand, struggling not to seem like he needed him, needed to see him because soon he wouldn’t be able to, but he kept pulling Sam closer and closer, looking into his eyes, memorizing his face, doing everything in his power to commit to memory what he wouldn’t be given a chance to later.
Sam had no idea what was going on, to be honest. All he knew was that they’d been fighting Leviathan, he’d flung some bleach at the creature and, instead of coating the thing he’d aimed for, it’d blanketed his brother, who had swallowed some. Bleach was bad for you when you swallowed the stuff. People had died from swallowing it before. Sam and the rest of the world knew that much and that was the only thing he was panicking about as the ambulance raced in the direction of the hospital and Dean’s vision, once so clear and bright, slowly, slowly began to fade.
-
The minute the ambulance arrived at the hospital, Sam was pushed out of the way as the paramedics rushed his brother into the emergency room and behind a blue paper curtain where they forced a tube down his throat and began to pump his stomach, forcing everything that he’d put into it recently back out. Sam tried to get to the curtain, tried to be there with his brother as they did this and he threw up over and over again into a bucket one of the other nurses was holding, but every time he got close, he was pushed back, told he had to sit in the waiting room until he was told to do otherwise.
Sam didn’t know what they were doing behind that blue curtain, but they eventually wheeled his brother away, unconscious. When Sam tried to get to him again, another doctor held him back, explaining to him as patiently as he could manage that the bleach had thrown of the pH of Dean’s stomach acids and had eaten a hole in the side of his stomach.
“We have to operate quickly if we’re going to save his other internal organs and his life,” the doctor explained. This calmed Sam down considerably and, for the second time in too short a time, he sat down in the waiting room, pressed his palms together and placed his lips against his fingertips, struggling to keep calm while waiting for his brother to come out of surgery.
“How do you think they’re going to fix that, Sammy?” Lucifer asked, sitting down next to him. He placed his forefinger against his chin, taking on a puzzled expression. “How are they going to replace his stomach acids? Is that even possible?”
Sam kept silent. He didn’t want to think about it.
“Dean’s probably going to die,” Lucifer said, sounding genuinely depressed. “And just when you lost Bobby, too? That’s got to hurt.”
“Shut up,” Sam hissed, a little too loudly, since a couple people looked over at him, wondering who on earth he could be talking to. Sam pressed his thumb into the scar on his palm, but, in his current state of panic and anxiety, this didn’t seem to help anything.
“Lots of people have died from ingesting bleach,” the devil informed him. “It happens all the time. It could be worse. At least he’s dying from something normal.” Lucifer chuckled. “Well, moderately normal. You were hunting a Leviathan after all.”
Sam’s hands balled into fists. He didn’t want to hear this.
“I mean, he’s died from other things before. Hellhounds, gunshot wounds, even tacos. Bleach is new, but it’s mundane. Almost normal. You’ve always wanted to be normal, right Sam? Well, now here’s your chance! When people ask you what your brother died of, you won’t have to make anything up! For the most part, anyway.”
Sam opened his mouth to, again, tell Lucifer to shut up, but the devil seemed to have vanished. He ran his fingers through his hair, trying to ignore how much his hands were shaking, how tired he was, how Dean could die - this time for good - and how he would be all alone in the world with nowhere to go and no one to turn to. The devil was right. He did want to be normal. But like this. Never like this. His last chance at being normal had been Jess, but she’d died seven years ago and, afterwards, his life of normalcy had gone up in flames just as she had.
Three hours passed where he was unable to see Dean. He alternated between pacing around the waiting room with the other families waiting for news of their loved ones and sitting impatiently, hoping that if he stared at the hallway Dean had been wheeled down long enough, he might suddenly appear, happy and healthy, and this all would have just been a bad dream.
Finally, after Sam had just about given up hope on hearing any news of his brother and was thinking of heading back to the motel for the night, he heard the sound of shoes on linoleum and, along with the rest of the people in the waiting room, lifted his head to see if maybe this time the news was for him. The doctor scanned the waiting room, found Sam sitting in the corner by himself, and walked over to him. Sam immediately stood, managing to somehow look smaller than six feet with the look of fear mixed with hope etched into his features.
“Hey, doc, how is he?” he asked, struggling to keep his voice steady.
“He’s dead,” Lucifer singsonged, slinging an arm around his waist, sounding far too merry to be the devil. “He died during surgery. He’s gone. Dead as a doornail. Not coming back. Nothing you can do this time, Sammy.”
Sam clenched his hand into a fist, digging his nails as deeply into the scar near his thumb as he could, praying this would make the devil disappear at least for now. He heard Lucifer sigh and say, “Fine,” before he flickered out of existence and Sam was able to turn his full attention to the man in front of him and silently pray that what the devil had said was wrong and Dean was just fine. Or at least on his way to being just fine.
The doctor flipped through the sheets on his clipboard and said, “For the most part, your brother is alright. He’ll recover from the bleach poisoning and should be able to be released from the hospital within the next week. He’ll need at least another couple of days of bedrest after release, but after that he should be fine.” Sam let out a sigh of relief, ready to march through the hospital to his brother and tell him that everything was going to be alright and they’d be back to hunting Dick Roman in now time, but the doctor wasn’t finished and he stopped Sam before he could even move with one word: “However…the bleach did get in his eyes. We got as much out of them as we could, but it wasn’t enough. I’m afraid your brother is now irreversibly blind. He will never be able to see again.”
Sam froze, tensing up again. Dean? Blind? Those were two words that should never be used in the same sentences unless, the words ‘wouldn’t be able to handle being’ were between them, but that wasn’t what the doctor had said. He’d told him that Dean was irreversibly blind. He’d told him that they’d tried to save his eyes, but hadn’t been able to. He’d told him his brother, who had far too big of a head for his own good, who used his eyes every day, who needed them to do his job, would never be able to see again. Suddenly, Sam was nervous about sitting by his brother’s bedside until he woke up, nervous about having to deal with him realizing he couldn’t see. He didn’t want to be the one to break the news to him.
Fortunately for him, he wouldn’t be. The doctor wrote down Dean’s room number on a the back of a business card and told Sam that he’d been awake for about thirty minutes and already been talked to about his condition. “We were unable to fully explain it to him, seeing as he told us he didn’t want to hear it and yelled at us when we tried to tell him that this would be important in the future. We warned him we’d have to sedate him and that calmed him down, but I don’t think he was listening when our eye expert tried again to tell him what exactly is going on. I understand he is very upset about his condition, but he needs to know these things for the future, since this is now what his life is.”
Sam nodded only once in assent before he moved past the doctor and down the hall, thinking, Not for Dean it isn’t and he knows it. They’d find a way to cure his blindness. They’d figured it out before, they’d do it again now. They had to. Dean couldn’t hunt without his eyes.
The room the doctor had written on the business card was at the end of the hall, away from everything else it seemed, just where Dean would like it. He hated hospitals, but when he had to be in one, he preferred the quiet secluded rooms to the loud ones stuck right in the middle of everything.
“How am I supposed to get better when I have to hear doctors shouting things at each other all fucking day?” he’d said more than once when a request to move rooms had been denied. This tended to get him his way, but there were times when he wasn’t sick enough to have his needs above everyone else’s and he had to suffer through some noise while he recovered, grumbling to Sam the entire time. Sam always smiled and told him he sounded like an old man. Dean would tease back that it was Sam who had made him old.
There wasn’t much happiness in their lives anymore, so, when the pain wasn’t too much and the despair was minimal, they made their own.
Before he entered the room, Sam rapped on the door to let Dean know he was there. He opened his mouth to say something, to let him know it was him, when Dean turned towards him and Sam’s words left his mouth.
Dean had always had beautiful green eyes. They were the first things Sam remembered seeing and he was certain they would also be the last. They lit up when Dean laughed, they dimmed when Dean was sad, they showed every would-be emotion that Dean had, even when he was struggling to keep said emotions hidden from his brother who knew him better than anyone else in the world. If anyone had asked Sam how to read Dean, he would’ve told them to look into his eyes and, if they didn’t get lost, they’d understand his brother immediately.
But that green was gone now, washed away by the bleach that he, Sam, had thrown at them. It had been replaced by a milky sky blue that covered the iris where the green should have been. At the center, on Dean’s pupils, was a grayish-white, shading his eyes from every sight that the world had to offer forever.
Normally, Sam would’ve been focusing on the machines his brother was connected to. The heart monitor set up in the corner, the IV pole nearby, the tube of oxygen that was fixed into the wall. But none of that seemed at all important compared with the sight of Dean’s eyes and the fact he would never be able to read any emotion out of them ever again.
“Heya, Sammy,” Dean said, smiling slightly, turning his head in the general direction of his brother, his eyes staring straight past him. Sam had no idea why he was surprised that, though he hadn’t said a word, Dean knew it was him. “Check it out. I’ve got no eyes anymore. No more hunting for me!”
He said this cheerfully, like it was a good thing, like he wasn’t bothered at all, but Sam could hear Dean’s bitter undertones and knew his brother was just saying this for his benefit, trying to reassure him that he was fine, just as he had when they were younger and he was bleeding out from whatever what they’d been hunting had done to him.
“It’s going to be okay, Dean,” Sam said, not knowing what else to say. “I’ll find someone who can reverse this. I’ll make it okay.”
Dean laughed humorlessly and shook his head. Suddenly Sam knew that Dean hadn’t ever been trying to make him feel better. Sam had just been hearing what little optimism there was in his voice because he was hoping that somehow his brother hadn’t already lost all hope, that maybe Dean wouldn’t feel like there was no way this could be changed, that perhaps he would have faith in Sam’s ability to help him. He’d done it every time before, so why didn’t he trust him to pull through now?
“Because you’ve betrayed him a lot, too, Sammy,” Lucifer said. He was blowing his pinwheel again, leaning against the wall by the window. “Why would he ever trust you? Don’t you remember when you released me?”
Again, Sam ignored the devil as Dean said, “The doctors already told me this is irreversible blindness, Sammy. Nothing we can do.”
“No,” Sam said, firmly. “Nothing, they can do. It’ll be okay. We know about things they don’t, Dean. You and I both know that we can -”
“Stop, Sam,” Dean said, firmly, turning back to his brother, his eyes fixed on Sam’s, almost as though he weren’t blind at all. “The last faith healer we found had a wife with a reaper on a leash. Remember that? The only other person that might be able to heal me is an angel and the only we know that likes us is dead. There is no way to make this better, Sam.”
“It’s going to be okay. Please have faith in me, Dean -” Sam tried to begin again, but Dean cut him off.
“I can’t see you, Sam.” His voice was so soft that Sam wasn’t even really sure he’d head him to begin with. “I can’t see you all grown up. I can’t see the dimples on your face when you smile. Hell, I can’t see if you smile anymore…do you?”
“Dean -” Sam began yet again, struggling to ignore the way Dean looked at him, with such sadness etched into his features as he spoke those last two words.
“Sam, I swear to God, if you tell me it’s going to be okay one more time…” he turned away again, shaking his head, his unseeing eyes on the blanket bunched in his lap. “It’s not going to be okay…because it already isn’t…”
This time when Sam closed his mouth, it was permanently. He didn’t have anything to add, anything else to say. Sam knew it was a blessing and a curse that he had always had so much hope, even when everyone else had none. A part of him thought that maybe he shouldn’t search for a cure for Dean’s eyes. Maybe they should just settle down and forget about this and leave the hunting life for good. But another part, the part full of hope, told him he couldn’t fail Dean like that. He had failed him in too many other ways. And, no matter how this turned out, he had to at least try to find a cure for his eyes. He had to try to find someone who could return his brother’s sight.
No, a voice in his mind corrected as he made himself comfortable in the chair that was sitting next to Dean’s bed. You have to find someone who can help Dean. You can’t stop searching until you’ve found someone. You can’t let him down again.
And Sam knew the voice was right. He had to help Dean. Too many times in his life he’d let him down and the very last possible thing he could do was let him down again.
Dean may have lost all hope that his sight will return, that I’ll find someone to help him, but I haven’t and I won’t. He needs me to help him. And that is exactly what I will do.
On to Ch. 3