Who's afraid of the dark?
Title: Who's afraid of the dark?
Pairing: Dean/Sam
Rating: NC-17
Summary: It should have been just another birthday, but it wasn't. When Sam disappears mysteriously, John, Dean and Bobby team up to start a desperate search for him. Meanwhile, Sam wakes up in a strange, cold room, where no one talks to him, although he knows he's being watched. He's just a boy, and when things go terribly wrong, can Dean help him survive the darkness that creeps through his skin and nestles in his bones? This is a story of great darkness and pain, but also of great love and comfort.
Warnings and A/N: Top!Dean, bottom!Sam, not for the faint of heart, graphic violence/torture and maybe more. Read at your own risk. Wee!cest, pre-series. Hurt/Comfort, protective Dean.
Previous chapters
Chapter 18
“Let’s go, before the other demon comes back.” John said and they started moving.
Dean clutched Sam as tightly as he could to his own body to avoid hurting him any further, and then he followed his father and Bobby outside the building and into the Impala.
John sat behind the wheel and Bobby took the seat next to him. Dean laid Sam as gently as possible on the backseat. He took off his jacket and tried to improvise a pillow where Sam’s head could rest. He then sat and pulled Sam’s legs on top of his, all the while looking at his brother’s bruised and unconscious face.
“John, where will we take him?” Bobby asked urgently, as soon as the car started moving.
“To a hospital, of course!” Dean answered quickly.
“It’s not that simple, Dean,” Bobby frowned. “What will we say? That a demon hurt Sam? They will call social service and the police the minute they examine your brother,” Bobby explained, “and we won’t be able to see him.”
“Bobby’s right,” John said, causing Dean’s worry to grow. “But maybe there’s someone who can help.”
“Who are you calling?” Bobby asked when he saw John pick up his cell phone and dial.
“I know a doctor who works in a hospital in the city. His parents are hunters, and we worked together once. Michael hates hunting and everything related to it, but I believe he will help. I’ll see if he can send an ambulance to meet us on the way.”
“Good,” Bobby nodded and then stole a glance towards the backseat, where Sam breathed with difficulty and Dean stared at him with worry that was thick enough to fill the car.
“Yes, Michael? Listen, it’s John Winchester here. I need a favor.”
As his father talked to someone to try and get an ambulance to come their way, Dean studied his brother’s injuries as much as he could without actually touching him.
In the process of getting Sam in the backseat, his pajama shirt had lifted and exposed part of Sam’s naked torso. On it, Dean could see angry bruises in all stages of coloring. There was also a cut on Sam’s hip bone that had apparently bled a lot, and Dean couldn’t tell whether or not it was still bleeding because Sam’s clothing was a mess of fresh and dried blood.
“Hmmm!” Sam suddenly voiced a loud, disoriented moan and shuddered.
“Hang in there son, help’s on the way,” John ended the call with his heart aching with worry, and he tried looking through the rearview mirror, but he could not see his boy’s face. So, instead, he just stepped further into the accelerator and drove dangerously faster.
Bobby looked over his shoulder at Sam’s painful frown and Dean’s worried sick face. “How is he?” He asked, knowing the answer was bad, but unable to help his own concern.
“I don’t know…” Dean whispered, looking at Sam as he struggled with something invisible, his eyes squeezed shut and his broken face expressing all the hurting his body was drowning into. “We need to get help fast.”
Sam gasped and choked, and another intense shudder raked him before he lost consciousness once again.
During what felt like a long ride towards help, Sam drifted in and out of consciousness a few times, moaning and shaking on the occasions he felt more lucid.
Sometimes he could even open his eyes, but it was hard to tell whether he was actually seeing something.
“Sam?” Dean called, his hand covering his brother’s, his eyes desperately trying to give him strength.
There was no recognition in Sam’s eyes, there was only pain in there, pain that broke Dean’s heart, pain that came in loud, scared gasps and low, muffled moans, and that caused everyone in the car to get goosebumps.
When Sam’s lips quivered as if he might say something, Dean squeezed his hand and got closer.
“Shh, don’t try to speak. It’s alright, Sam. We’re going to a hospital,” he said, watching him intently.
Sam felt everything inside him hurt and tighten, and he turned his head the moment he could not control the urge to throw up.
Dean tried to help him as best he could, holding his hair as rippling waves of pain and nausea took control of Sam’s body. There was nothing in his stomach, so on the Impala’s floor Sam vomited bile until he blacked out again, out of sheer exhaustion.
“What’s going on?” John asked worriedly.
“Sam’s throwing up,” Bobby said, looking at Dean trying to help his brother. “He’s hanging in there. Will the ambulance meet us?”
“Michael said it’s on the way.”
“C’mon, Sam… just a bit more…” Dean whispered, and he looked at Sam as if the concern seeping from his eyes could wrap Sam with care and heal him.
~ * ~
It was roughly an hour of driving before they heard the sirens and spotted the ambulance heading towards the Impala.
John brought the car to a quick stop, and soon there was the hurried talking of the nurses pulling Sam out of the car and onto the stretcher.
Dean watched, somewhat paralyzed with shock, as an oxygen mask was immediately put over Sam’s face while they pushed the stretcher into the ambulance.
“Who’s coming with us? A family member can come inside,” one of the female nurses said.
John looked at Dean and they held the eye lock for a moment. They both wanted to be there, but Dean knew his father was desperate to look at Sam and spend some time with him. Dean had already felt Sam’s weak pulse against his body, and his father hadn’t even had a chance to look into his eyes, so Dean nodded towards him.
“You go, dad. Bobby and I will drive right behind you.”
John nodded. He knew how much Dean wanted to be with Sam - hell, being with Sam was the very thing Dean had been doing since he could remember - and he was glad for the chance to follow Sam in the ambulance.
John got inside the vehicle as Dean and Bobby went back into the Impala. Soon they were all heading towards the hospital, although the ambulance carrying Sam made it there much faster than the Impala could possibly without any sirens.
~ * ~
Inside the ambulance, John sat beside Sam and stared as the two nurses listened to the doctor and started first aid care. He saw as one of them got Sam’s vein in order to start him on an I.V. drip, according to the doctor’s commands.
“Where’s doctor Michael?” John asked. He had thought that maybe his friend would have come in the ambulance.
“He’s at the hospital, waiting for the patient,” the other doctor replied.
“Is my son going to be alright?” John asked as he looked at his boy and all the hospital gear being used on him. One of the other nurses put a probe on Sam’s finger and turned on the cardiac monitor so they could listen to the rhythm of Sam’s heartbeats.
“Sir, please… I must ask you to stay calm. He’s in good hands now. We’re doing everything we can to save him.”
John nodded. He didn’t want to be inconvenient, far from him to disturb the work of the medical staff, but every time he looked at Sam he seemed to find a new injury in his young body, and it broke his father’s heart that he was unable to prevent all those injuries from happening.
John took Sam’s hand in his and squeezed gently.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he thought, worrying his bottom lip. “Please be alright,” he whispered quietly.
Sam groaned weakly and tried to move.
“Take it easy, don’t move,” the female nurse said softly and put a hand on Sam’s chest.
John’s eyes looked worriedly from her face to Sam’s, and for a moment he could see Sam’s hazel eyes opening to look at them through the pain and confusion that consumed him.
John gasped at the sight and squeezed Sam’s hand tighter.
“Please sir,” the male nurse tugged at Sam’s hand and John let go, nodding quickly.
“Hmm,” Sam groaned and was taken by tremors, but it didn’t last long. There was a mild painkiller in the drip, and soon he drifted into unconsciousness once again.
“Hang in there kid, we’re almost there,” the female nurse spoke softly to him.
During every mile they covered on the way to the hospital, John’s heart beat steadily fast with worry.
~ * ~
When the ambulance arrived and the doors burst open, doctor Michael was there to receive Sam into the emergency room. He took one look at the boy’s injuries and started talking to the other doctor on his team.
“I’m gonna need five milligrams of morphine, now!” He lifted Sam’s pajamas and checked out his bruised ribcage. There was something obviously broken there, and he needed to make sure it was not about to pierce into his lungs. “Prepare the X-ray room. I need to know just how bad he is on the inside.”
John listened to all that, his eyes wide and his heart swollen in his chest.
“Micheal… please,” he began. "My boy...how bad is it? He's gonna make it, isn't he?"
Doctor Michael looked at John Winchester briefly. "I can’t tell you anything right now, John. But hang in there, let me do my job, and I’ll be back to talk to you as soon as I can.”
“Okay. Thank you.” John swallowed hard and nodded a last time at the doctor before he disappeared with Sam on a stretcher inside another room, followed by more people in white lab coats.
~ * ~
In the exam room, the doctor stripped Sam naked in order to assess all of his injuries. Doctor Camille, a member of his staff, gasped at the extent of the boy’s wounds.
“Dear God, Mike… what has happened to this boy?” She frowned.
Michael thought of the kind of life John led - hunting monsters, saving people - the kind of life he had desperately run away from. He supposed something had gone terribly wrong for John to come looking for his help.
“I have no idea…”
“Hmm!” Sam groaned and started to grow restless. The doctor hadn’t injected the morphine yet, and the pain was buzzing loud in Sam’s ears. “Hmm!” He groaned again and tried to move.
“Shh, take it easy. You’re in a hospital. Can you hear me?”
Sam had one of those flashes of lucidity. He looked at the doctor and focused on his face, and he tried to understand his words.
“What happened to you, son?” The doctor tried to talk to him.
“I…” Sam tried, but speaking hurt so much with his dry throat. “…he tortured me,” Sam managed to voice.
“He? Who?” The doctor leaned over him.
“Ahh!” Sam screamed with pain and his whole body started to shake uncontrollably.
“Hand me the morphine, Camille.”
“Here you go.”
Doctor Michael injected Sam with the powerful drug and soon the boy was drifting into peaceful, pain free sleep.
“Mike… Did you hear what he just said? ‘He tortured me’. Shouldn’t we be calling social work? The police? I mean, who did that to him?”
“Not his father, Camille, this much I can assure you. My family knows him. John would kill for any of his kids. Something else must have happened. And we’re not reporting this to anyone. Tell the nurses this case should not be discussed with anyone outside the staff. We’re not bringing the authorities into this,” Michael had seen his father worry about it way too many times to know by now how it worked in the hunting world.
The woman studied Sam’s bruises and the visible fractures. “Are you sure? You do know we are supposed to report it. What about our boss?”
“I’ll deal with him. And I’m sure.”
“Michael, this could get us in trouble. Is it worth lying for the boy’s father? I mean, he might not have hurt him, but he certainly didn’t take good care of him or else he wouldn’t be here in such a state.”
“Camille, you don’t know the kind of life John Winchester leads. I’m sure he tried everything he could to prevent this. And yes, it is worth it. I owe it to him.”
“Why?” She insisted, the sight of the boy so broken was extremely unsettling.
“Because,” Michael took a deep breath. “If it weren’t for John Winchester I would have grown up an orphan. So yes, Camille. I owe him big time. That’s why we’re gonna take care of his son without asking questions he can’t answer, and that’s why you’ll help me make sure the nurses obey.”
“I, I didn’t know, Mike…”
“Right. Now please help me move him.”
Camille fell shut and helped him. As they placed Sam on a table to perform several X-rays, the doctor studied a cut on the boy’s hipbone. It wasn’t deep, but it was in a very bad place, one that would never allow it to close if he didn’t do some stitches.
There were so many things to do that it was hard deciding where to start, but the doctor settled for the X-ray of his ribs. The most life threatening injury seemed to be the possibility of a broken rib perforating a lung.
Luckily for his patient, that was not the case. Although Sam had two broken ribs and a third one that was just cracked, his lungs were fine.
The doctor then stitched the cut on his hipbone and studied his other injuries. There were broken toes and a broken wrist too. But other than those he didn’t think there was anything else that was broken. There might be a lot of damage to soft tissue, as he confirmed later with the ultrasound . There was a torn ligament in his left thigh, and if he didn’t rest and wasn’t careful enough, then surgery would be necessary to fix it. His shoulder had a recent lesion, but it seemed okay now.
Clinically, though, the boy was still at risk. He was obviously underweight and dehydrated, and the doctor soon started him on antibiotics to fight any ongoing infection.
“Please,” he called two of the nurses about two hours later.
“Yes, doctor?” One of them asked.
“Give him a bath. I’m sure he’s going to feel better. Just be very careful with him, he’s extremely injured, specially in his ribcage.”
“Sure, doctor.”
The nurses took Sam away and a moment later they were letting his body under warm, cleaning water from one of the hospital’s bathtubs. They scrubbed Sam’s skin clean of blood, urine and vomit, and they washed his greasy hair with shampoo until it smelled good and felt soft again.
Sam slept through everything. After the doctor injected him with the drug he was completely unaware of what was being done to him, and he would be like that, in that sort of drug induced coma, for at least a few more hours.
~ * ~
When Dean and Bobby arrived at the hospital, John had been in the waiting area for about half an hour.
“Where is he?” Dean asked.
“Inside, with the doctors,” John pointed towards a set of double doors.
“And how is he?” Bobby asked.
“I don’t know. No one has come here to tell me anything yet. The doctor just told me to wait.”
So that was exactly what the three of them did. For the next few hours they waited without any piece of information, biting nails and checking clocks, exchanging a few worried words every now and then and looking desperately at each person who exited through those doors dressed in white.
They tried talking to some of them, but they would just shake their heads and say they didn’t have any information on the boy admitted a few hours earlier.
Dean still had Sam’s dried blood on his own clothes, but he refused to leave until they heard anything from Sam.
It was the end of the day, the sun was setting and it was getting dark outside, when doctor Michael came back to talk to them in the waiting area.
The three men rose to meet the doctor.
“How is he?” They asked, practically in unison.
Doctor Michael sighed and seemed to ponder for a moment.
“Sam is alive,” he said, seeing the impact those words had on the worried expressions of the three men listening carefully to him. “We believe he’s not in imminent danger, but the next forty eight hours will be crucial to tell that. Until then, unfortunately, anything could happen, and we just need to keep watch.”
John nodded.
“Do you have any idea of what happened to him?” Michael asked, looking at Sam’s medical file and frowning.
Dean swallowed hard as his father answered. “We don’t know, Mike. We are still very much in the dark.”
“Before we gave him something for the pain, he spoke to us.”
“What did he say?” John asked.
“He said, ‘he tortured me’.”
Dean flinched at that, and he saw that Bobby did too. It felt as if someone had grabbed his heart and squeezed it until it hurt.
“We don’t know who had him, or why. He was gone for three months, and when we found him this morning I called you immediately,” John explained.
“Well,” the doctor said, "you might want to sit, because the list of injuries is long.”
Neither men sat.
“Sam’s got two broken ribs, another cracked one, a cut on his hipbone that required stitches. There’s a ligament in his thigh that requires absolute rest for a few days if we want to avoid surgery. He has three broken toes, a broken wrist, a sprained ankle and a black eye.”
Every word felt like it punished them physically.
“He’s severely dehydrated and malnourished. We started him on an I.V. drip, and he has a nasogastric tube so we can feed him while he’s under heavy medication.”
“Can we see him?” Dean asked.
Michael sighed.
“He’ll spend the night under my personal observation, you should probably go home and rest, you certainly had a busy day,” he said, looking at them, particularly at Dean’s bloody clothes. “But I suppose I could let family members see him briefly.”
“Bobby’s family,” Dean said quickly.
“That’s alright, kid. You and John go in today. I’ll see him soon,” Bobby soothed Dean.
“But guys,” the doctor spoke again. “It’s five minutes, and then I’ll need to ask you to leave. He needs all the rest he can get, and as soon as he’s a bit stronger I’ll let you spend the night.”
“Alright,” John agreed. Anything was better than not seeing Sam at all.
“I have to warn you, though, he’s heavily sedated for the pain. You won’t be able to talk to him and he won’t even know you are there.”
“No problem,” John said as Dean and him stepped forward to be taken to Sam.
“Alright,” the doctor sighed. “Follow me.”
Dean and John looked at Bobby, who nodded at them. “I’ll be waiting here,” he smiled. Then the two Winchesters followed the doctor down one of the hospital corridors.
“He has an oxygen mask on. Don’t be scared. It’s not mechanical ventilation. Sam is perfectly able to breathe on his own, we just want to make sure he has enough oxygen since his breathing is very shallow because of the injuries in his ribcage. He’s attached to the cardiac monitor and the I.V drip, and the feeding tube I told you before. Most of this is just temporary, until we can watch him and make sure he’s not at risk.”
Dean and John walked into Sam’s room slowly and tentatively. The sight of Sam, unconscious, lying on a hospital bed with tubes coming out or going into him was shocking, and it tugged at the strings of their hearts.
“I’ll give you two a moment,” doctor Michael said before turning around to leave.
They walked closer to Sam’s bed and studied him.
“They gave him a bath,” Dean smiled, already holding back tears. He let his fingers touch Sam’s forearm softly.
John didn’t say anything. He raked a hand through Sam’s hair and touched the back of his hand to his cheek.
“I’m proud of you,” John said, looking at Dean.
“What?”
“You said I could be proud of you later if the information you got led us to Sam. So, I am proud,” John said again.
And that was it for Dean. The sight of his brother lying so helplessly in a hospital bed after being brutalized for three painful months as they couldn’t possibly rescue him was more than he could handle and he felt the warm, stingy tears filling his eyes and running down his face.
“It’s alright now, Dean. We found him. We saved him,” John pulled Dean into a hug and the older Winchester boy let himself go. He buried his face into his father’s shoulder like he hadn’t done in so many years, and cried tears of sorrow and of relief.
“They tortured him, dad,” Dean choked. “What if he’s not alright? What if he’s never alright again?”
“Then we’ll be there for him, and we’ll make sure he gets back on his feet.”
Little did John know how difficult it would prove to be.
Right now it didn’t matter, though. Sam would sleep safely tonight, and for now they just clung to that.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
tbc....
Pairing: Dean/Sam
Rating: NC-17
Summary: It should have been just another birthday, but it wasn't. When Sam disappears mysteriously, John, Dean and Bobby team up to start a desperate search for him. Meanwhile, Sam wakes up in a strange, cold room, where no one talks to him, although he knows he's being watched. He's just a boy, and when things go terribly wrong, can Dean help him survive the darkness that creeps through his skin and nestles in his bones? This is a story of great darkness and pain, but also of great love and comfort.
Warnings and A/N: Top!Dean, bottom!Sam, not for the faint of heart, graphic violence/torture and maybe more. Read at your own risk. Wee!cest, pre-series. Hurt/Comfort, protective Dean.
Previous chapters
Chapter 18
“Let’s go, before the other demon comes back.” John said and they started moving.
Dean clutched Sam as tightly as he could to his own body to avoid hurting him any further, and then he followed his father and Bobby outside the building and into the Impala.
John sat behind the wheel and Bobby took the seat next to him. Dean laid Sam as gently as possible on the backseat. He took off his jacket and tried to improvise a pillow where Sam’s head could rest. He then sat and pulled Sam’s legs on top of his, all the while looking at his brother’s bruised and unconscious face.
“John, where will we take him?” Bobby asked urgently, as soon as the car started moving.
“To a hospital, of course!” Dean answered quickly.
“It’s not that simple, Dean,” Bobby frowned. “What will we say? That a demon hurt Sam? They will call social service and the police the minute they examine your brother,” Bobby explained, “and we won’t be able to see him.”
“Bobby’s right,” John said, causing Dean’s worry to grow. “But maybe there’s someone who can help.”
“Who are you calling?” Bobby asked when he saw John pick up his cell phone and dial.
“I know a doctor who works in a hospital in the city. His parents are hunters, and we worked together once. Michael hates hunting and everything related to it, but I believe he will help. I’ll see if he can send an ambulance to meet us on the way.”
“Good,” Bobby nodded and then stole a glance towards the backseat, where Sam breathed with difficulty and Dean stared at him with worry that was thick enough to fill the car.
“Yes, Michael? Listen, it’s John Winchester here. I need a favor.”
As his father talked to someone to try and get an ambulance to come their way, Dean studied his brother’s injuries as much as he could without actually touching him.
In the process of getting Sam in the backseat, his pajama shirt had lifted and exposed part of Sam’s naked torso. On it, Dean could see angry bruises in all stages of coloring. There was also a cut on Sam’s hip bone that had apparently bled a lot, and Dean couldn’t tell whether or not it was still bleeding because Sam’s clothing was a mess of fresh and dried blood.
“Hmmm!” Sam suddenly voiced a loud, disoriented moan and shuddered.
“Hang in there son, help’s on the way,” John ended the call with his heart aching with worry, and he tried looking through the rearview mirror, but he could not see his boy’s face. So, instead, he just stepped further into the accelerator and drove dangerously faster.
Bobby looked over his shoulder at Sam’s painful frown and Dean’s worried sick face. “How is he?” He asked, knowing the answer was bad, but unable to help his own concern.
“I don’t know…” Dean whispered, looking at Sam as he struggled with something invisible, his eyes squeezed shut and his broken face expressing all the hurting his body was drowning into. “We need to get help fast.”
Sam gasped and choked, and another intense shudder raked him before he lost consciousness once again.
During what felt like a long ride towards help, Sam drifted in and out of consciousness a few times, moaning and shaking on the occasions he felt more lucid.
Sometimes he could even open his eyes, but it was hard to tell whether he was actually seeing something.
“Sam?” Dean called, his hand covering his brother’s, his eyes desperately trying to give him strength.
There was no recognition in Sam’s eyes, there was only pain in there, pain that broke Dean’s heart, pain that came in loud, scared gasps and low, muffled moans, and that caused everyone in the car to get goosebumps.
When Sam’s lips quivered as if he might say something, Dean squeezed his hand and got closer.
“Shh, don’t try to speak. It’s alright, Sam. We’re going to a hospital,” he said, watching him intently.
Sam felt everything inside him hurt and tighten, and he turned his head the moment he could not control the urge to throw up.
Dean tried to help him as best he could, holding his hair as rippling waves of pain and nausea took control of Sam’s body. There was nothing in his stomach, so on the Impala’s floor Sam vomited bile until he blacked out again, out of sheer exhaustion.
“What’s going on?” John asked worriedly.
“Sam’s throwing up,” Bobby said, looking at Dean trying to help his brother. “He’s hanging in there. Will the ambulance meet us?”
“Michael said it’s on the way.”
“C’mon, Sam… just a bit more…” Dean whispered, and he looked at Sam as if the concern seeping from his eyes could wrap Sam with care and heal him.
~ * ~
It was roughly an hour of driving before they heard the sirens and spotted the ambulance heading towards the Impala.
John brought the car to a quick stop, and soon there was the hurried talking of the nurses pulling Sam out of the car and onto the stretcher.
Dean watched, somewhat paralyzed with shock, as an oxygen mask was immediately put over Sam’s face while they pushed the stretcher into the ambulance.
“Who’s coming with us? A family member can come inside,” one of the female nurses said.
John looked at Dean and they held the eye lock for a moment. They both wanted to be there, but Dean knew his father was desperate to look at Sam and spend some time with him. Dean had already felt Sam’s weak pulse against his body, and his father hadn’t even had a chance to look into his eyes, so Dean nodded towards him.
“You go, dad. Bobby and I will drive right behind you.”
John nodded. He knew how much Dean wanted to be with Sam - hell, being with Sam was the very thing Dean had been doing since he could remember - and he was glad for the chance to follow Sam in the ambulance.
John got inside the vehicle as Dean and Bobby went back into the Impala. Soon they were all heading towards the hospital, although the ambulance carrying Sam made it there much faster than the Impala could possibly without any sirens.
~ * ~
Inside the ambulance, John sat beside Sam and stared as the two nurses listened to the doctor and started first aid care. He saw as one of them got Sam’s vein in order to start him on an I.V. drip, according to the doctor’s commands.
“Where’s doctor Michael?” John asked. He had thought that maybe his friend would have come in the ambulance.
“He’s at the hospital, waiting for the patient,” the other doctor replied.
“Is my son going to be alright?” John asked as he looked at his boy and all the hospital gear being used on him. One of the other nurses put a probe on Sam’s finger and turned on the cardiac monitor so they could listen to the rhythm of Sam’s heartbeats.
“Sir, please… I must ask you to stay calm. He’s in good hands now. We’re doing everything we can to save him.”
John nodded. He didn’t want to be inconvenient, far from him to disturb the work of the medical staff, but every time he looked at Sam he seemed to find a new injury in his young body, and it broke his father’s heart that he was unable to prevent all those injuries from happening.
John took Sam’s hand in his and squeezed gently.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he thought, worrying his bottom lip. “Please be alright,” he whispered quietly.
Sam groaned weakly and tried to move.
“Take it easy, don’t move,” the female nurse said softly and put a hand on Sam’s chest.
John’s eyes looked worriedly from her face to Sam’s, and for a moment he could see Sam’s hazel eyes opening to look at them through the pain and confusion that consumed him.
John gasped at the sight and squeezed Sam’s hand tighter.
“Please sir,” the male nurse tugged at Sam’s hand and John let go, nodding quickly.
“Hmm,” Sam groaned and was taken by tremors, but it didn’t last long. There was a mild painkiller in the drip, and soon he drifted into unconsciousness once again.
“Hang in there kid, we’re almost there,” the female nurse spoke softly to him.
During every mile they covered on the way to the hospital, John’s heart beat steadily fast with worry.
~ * ~
When the ambulance arrived and the doors burst open, doctor Michael was there to receive Sam into the emergency room. He took one look at the boy’s injuries and started talking to the other doctor on his team.
“I’m gonna need five milligrams of morphine, now!” He lifted Sam’s pajamas and checked out his bruised ribcage. There was something obviously broken there, and he needed to make sure it was not about to pierce into his lungs. “Prepare the X-ray room. I need to know just how bad he is on the inside.”
John listened to all that, his eyes wide and his heart swollen in his chest.
“Micheal… please,” he began. "My boy...how bad is it? He's gonna make it, isn't he?"
Doctor Michael looked at John Winchester briefly. "I can’t tell you anything right now, John. But hang in there, let me do my job, and I’ll be back to talk to you as soon as I can.”
“Okay. Thank you.” John swallowed hard and nodded a last time at the doctor before he disappeared with Sam on a stretcher inside another room, followed by more people in white lab coats.
~ * ~
In the exam room, the doctor stripped Sam naked in order to assess all of his injuries. Doctor Camille, a member of his staff, gasped at the extent of the boy’s wounds.
“Dear God, Mike… what has happened to this boy?” She frowned.
Michael thought of the kind of life John led - hunting monsters, saving people - the kind of life he had desperately run away from. He supposed something had gone terribly wrong for John to come looking for his help.
“I have no idea…”
“Hmm!” Sam groaned and started to grow restless. The doctor hadn’t injected the morphine yet, and the pain was buzzing loud in Sam’s ears. “Hmm!” He groaned again and tried to move.
“Shh, take it easy. You’re in a hospital. Can you hear me?”
Sam had one of those flashes of lucidity. He looked at the doctor and focused on his face, and he tried to understand his words.
“What happened to you, son?” The doctor tried to talk to him.
“I…” Sam tried, but speaking hurt so much with his dry throat. “…he tortured me,” Sam managed to voice.
“He? Who?” The doctor leaned over him.
“Ahh!” Sam screamed with pain and his whole body started to shake uncontrollably.
“Hand me the morphine, Camille.”
“Here you go.”
Doctor Michael injected Sam with the powerful drug and soon the boy was drifting into peaceful, pain free sleep.
“Mike… Did you hear what he just said? ‘He tortured me’. Shouldn’t we be calling social work? The police? I mean, who did that to him?”
“Not his father, Camille, this much I can assure you. My family knows him. John would kill for any of his kids. Something else must have happened. And we’re not reporting this to anyone. Tell the nurses this case should not be discussed with anyone outside the staff. We’re not bringing the authorities into this,” Michael had seen his father worry about it way too many times to know by now how it worked in the hunting world.
The woman studied Sam’s bruises and the visible fractures. “Are you sure? You do know we are supposed to report it. What about our boss?”
“I’ll deal with him. And I’m sure.”
“Michael, this could get us in trouble. Is it worth lying for the boy’s father? I mean, he might not have hurt him, but he certainly didn’t take good care of him or else he wouldn’t be here in such a state.”
“Camille, you don’t know the kind of life John Winchester leads. I’m sure he tried everything he could to prevent this. And yes, it is worth it. I owe it to him.”
“Why?” She insisted, the sight of the boy so broken was extremely unsettling.
“Because,” Michael took a deep breath. “If it weren’t for John Winchester I would have grown up an orphan. So yes, Camille. I owe him big time. That’s why we’re gonna take care of his son without asking questions he can’t answer, and that’s why you’ll help me make sure the nurses obey.”
“I, I didn’t know, Mike…”
“Right. Now please help me move him.”
Camille fell shut and helped him. As they placed Sam on a table to perform several X-rays, the doctor studied a cut on the boy’s hipbone. It wasn’t deep, but it was in a very bad place, one that would never allow it to close if he didn’t do some stitches.
There were so many things to do that it was hard deciding where to start, but the doctor settled for the X-ray of his ribs. The most life threatening injury seemed to be the possibility of a broken rib perforating a lung.
Luckily for his patient, that was not the case. Although Sam had two broken ribs and a third one that was just cracked, his lungs were fine.
The doctor then stitched the cut on his hipbone and studied his other injuries. There were broken toes and a broken wrist too. But other than those he didn’t think there was anything else that was broken. There might be a lot of damage to soft tissue, as he confirmed later with the ultrasound . There was a torn ligament in his left thigh, and if he didn’t rest and wasn’t careful enough, then surgery would be necessary to fix it. His shoulder had a recent lesion, but it seemed okay now.
Clinically, though, the boy was still at risk. He was obviously underweight and dehydrated, and the doctor soon started him on antibiotics to fight any ongoing infection.
“Please,” he called two of the nurses about two hours later.
“Yes, doctor?” One of them asked.
“Give him a bath. I’m sure he’s going to feel better. Just be very careful with him, he’s extremely injured, specially in his ribcage.”
“Sure, doctor.”
The nurses took Sam away and a moment later they were letting his body under warm, cleaning water from one of the hospital’s bathtubs. They scrubbed Sam’s skin clean of blood, urine and vomit, and they washed his greasy hair with shampoo until it smelled good and felt soft again.
Sam slept through everything. After the doctor injected him with the drug he was completely unaware of what was being done to him, and he would be like that, in that sort of drug induced coma, for at least a few more hours.
~ * ~
When Dean and Bobby arrived at the hospital, John had been in the waiting area for about half an hour.
“Where is he?” Dean asked.
“Inside, with the doctors,” John pointed towards a set of double doors.
“And how is he?” Bobby asked.
“I don’t know. No one has come here to tell me anything yet. The doctor just told me to wait.”
So that was exactly what the three of them did. For the next few hours they waited without any piece of information, biting nails and checking clocks, exchanging a few worried words every now and then and looking desperately at each person who exited through those doors dressed in white.
They tried talking to some of them, but they would just shake their heads and say they didn’t have any information on the boy admitted a few hours earlier.
Dean still had Sam’s dried blood on his own clothes, but he refused to leave until they heard anything from Sam.
It was the end of the day, the sun was setting and it was getting dark outside, when doctor Michael came back to talk to them in the waiting area.
The three men rose to meet the doctor.
“How is he?” They asked, practically in unison.
Doctor Michael sighed and seemed to ponder for a moment.
“Sam is alive,” he said, seeing the impact those words had on the worried expressions of the three men listening carefully to him. “We believe he’s not in imminent danger, but the next forty eight hours will be crucial to tell that. Until then, unfortunately, anything could happen, and we just need to keep watch.”
John nodded.
“Do you have any idea of what happened to him?” Michael asked, looking at Sam’s medical file and frowning.
Dean swallowed hard as his father answered. “We don’t know, Mike. We are still very much in the dark.”
“Before we gave him something for the pain, he spoke to us.”
“What did he say?” John asked.
“He said, ‘he tortured me’.”
Dean flinched at that, and he saw that Bobby did too. It felt as if someone had grabbed his heart and squeezed it until it hurt.
“We don’t know who had him, or why. He was gone for three months, and when we found him this morning I called you immediately,” John explained.
“Well,” the doctor said, "you might want to sit, because the list of injuries is long.”
Neither men sat.
“Sam’s got two broken ribs, another cracked one, a cut on his hipbone that required stitches. There’s a ligament in his thigh that requires absolute rest for a few days if we want to avoid surgery. He has three broken toes, a broken wrist, a sprained ankle and a black eye.”
Every word felt like it punished them physically.
“He’s severely dehydrated and malnourished. We started him on an I.V. drip, and he has a nasogastric tube so we can feed him while he’s under heavy medication.”
“Can we see him?” Dean asked.
Michael sighed.
“He’ll spend the night under my personal observation, you should probably go home and rest, you certainly had a busy day,” he said, looking at them, particularly at Dean’s bloody clothes. “But I suppose I could let family members see him briefly.”
“Bobby’s family,” Dean said quickly.
“That’s alright, kid. You and John go in today. I’ll see him soon,” Bobby soothed Dean.
“But guys,” the doctor spoke again. “It’s five minutes, and then I’ll need to ask you to leave. He needs all the rest he can get, and as soon as he’s a bit stronger I’ll let you spend the night.”
“Alright,” John agreed. Anything was better than not seeing Sam at all.
“I have to warn you, though, he’s heavily sedated for the pain. You won’t be able to talk to him and he won’t even know you are there.”
“No problem,” John said as Dean and him stepped forward to be taken to Sam.
“Alright,” the doctor sighed. “Follow me.”
Dean and John looked at Bobby, who nodded at them. “I’ll be waiting here,” he smiled. Then the two Winchesters followed the doctor down one of the hospital corridors.
“He has an oxygen mask on. Don’t be scared. It’s not mechanical ventilation. Sam is perfectly able to breathe on his own, we just want to make sure he has enough oxygen since his breathing is very shallow because of the injuries in his ribcage. He’s attached to the cardiac monitor and the I.V drip, and the feeding tube I told you before. Most of this is just temporary, until we can watch him and make sure he’s not at risk.”
Dean and John walked into Sam’s room slowly and tentatively. The sight of Sam, unconscious, lying on a hospital bed with tubes coming out or going into him was shocking, and it tugged at the strings of their hearts.
“I’ll give you two a moment,” doctor Michael said before turning around to leave.
They walked closer to Sam’s bed and studied him.
“They gave him a bath,” Dean smiled, already holding back tears. He let his fingers touch Sam’s forearm softly.
John didn’t say anything. He raked a hand through Sam’s hair and touched the back of his hand to his cheek.
“I’m proud of you,” John said, looking at Dean.
“What?”
“You said I could be proud of you later if the information you got led us to Sam. So, I am proud,” John said again.
And that was it for Dean. The sight of his brother lying so helplessly in a hospital bed after being brutalized for three painful months as they couldn’t possibly rescue him was more than he could handle and he felt the warm, stingy tears filling his eyes and running down his face.
“It’s alright now, Dean. We found him. We saved him,” John pulled Dean into a hug and the older Winchester boy let himself go. He buried his face into his father’s shoulder like he hadn’t done in so many years, and cried tears of sorrow and of relief.
“They tortured him, dad,” Dean choked. “What if he’s not alright? What if he’s never alright again?”
“Then we’ll be there for him, and we’ll make sure he gets back on his feet.”
Little did John know how difficult it would prove to be.
Right now it didn’t matter, though. Sam would sleep safely tonight, and for now they just clung to that.
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