FIC - This Headache Is Giving Me A Headache
title: This headache is giving me a headache.
pairing: Sam/Dean
rating: R for language
a/n: I wrote this for si_star_x over on the OhSam comment fic meme
summary: Sam has headaches. Dean, as always, wants to fix it.
The beginning was just…well, like the beginning always was. Dean asked me if something was wrong, to which I automatically replied “no”, like there was an inherent weakness in saying “yes”.
And ok, fine, it’s not like that reaction just magically fell from the sky. But after all this time, I could tell Dean was hoping at least once I’d tell him the truth. I had my eyes closed tight even under sunglasses, and my fists were clenched against my thighs. Dean made it clear that if I thought he didn’t know, I was dumber than my LSAT score indicated. This was the beginning of one of my uncontrollable headaches, the ones that Dean referred to as “episodes”, which pissed me off on account of it sounded like “getting the vapors” or some girly shit that happened to Melanie Wilkes in Gone With The Wind.
I just called them headaches. Which was fair, because it was true that my head hurt like a motherfucker, it was obvious, it hurt so much that sweat poured down my face and I could hardly keep from crying, but at the same time, I got anxious, couldn’t stand light or sound, was barely able to lift my head, and sometimes vomited for an hour or more.
This was it, though. Dean had held me and protected me through these things more times than I could count. They’d started when I was 14 or so and only gotten worse as I’d gotten older. It was hard to travel in the car with symptoms this severe, but Dean hadn’t given me any choice and I’d been in no condition to argue, considering that no words came out of my mouth when I tried to talk. He cut up an old t-shirt and tied it around my head, covering my eyes and at the same time relieving a bit of the pressure, about an hour after he recognized the signs that I tried so hard to hide. He turned the Impala around and headed toward Sioux Falls where Bobby assured us there would be a friend of his there, a medical doctor who “owed him a favor” (seriously, who DIDN’T owe Bobby a favor?). We were done looking for the things we always looked for - psychic phenomena, curses, residual traces of demon blood infection, you know, the usual. We were taking a bold step into the unknown and involving a medical doctor.
As much as I tried to hold them back, the tears started a little outside of Pierre. I shook with the effort of holding them in but it made the pain in my head worse, so I just let go. About a hundred miles from the salvage yard, I broke down and asked Dean to pull over so I could puke on the side of the road. I knew it hurt Dean almost as much as it hurt me when this happened, having to watch me suffer through this. He never hesitated for a second before he knelt down beside me in the roadside dirt and traced circles on my back with his hand as I retched and dry heaved toward the ground.
Once I got kind of sorta recovered, and Dean had gently maneuvered me back into the car, handing me a cool but not cold bottle of water (too cold was bad), he got back in the driver’s seat and hauled ass, getting me to Bobby’s in record time. And yes, it was record time, I knew, because Dean actually kept a record in his brain of how fast he could cross any given stretch of highway. (I would have rolled my eyes at his comment about “making good time” had I been capable of doing so, and I wasn’t unaware that me not being able to roll my eyes at my brother was a serious problem).
I laid down on the sofa and whispered my answers to the doctor’s questions the best that I could.
And seriously? In our life? Everything that happened to us? The diagnosis could not have come as more of a shock. My responses to the doc’s questions about what my symptoms were, how long they lasted, what I had done, seen, eaten and drunk in the hours before these headaches occurred gave us an honest-to-God medical diagnosis.
They were migraines. And they were triggered by sugar. FUCKING SUGAR.
Jesus Christ. No more caramel frappuccinos. No more half-a-bag of Twizzlers as an afternoon snack. No more giant Styrofoam cups of sweet tea when we were hitting a drive-thru in the southern states.
The doctor gave me a sympathetic look as she handed me a giant bag of sample nose-spray Imitrex and told me to keep my intake of sweets to an absolute minimum.
Good news: the Imitrex made every single symptom disappear in less than half an hour. Bad news: I was kind of hoping maybe it was a curse. I was really going to miss those caramel frappuccinos.
pairing: Sam/Dean
rating: R for language
a/n: I wrote this for si_star_x over on the OhSam comment fic meme
summary: Sam has headaches. Dean, as always, wants to fix it.
The beginning was just…well, like the beginning always was. Dean asked me if something was wrong, to which I automatically replied “no”, like there was an inherent weakness in saying “yes”.
And ok, fine, it’s not like that reaction just magically fell from the sky. But after all this time, I could tell Dean was hoping at least once I’d tell him the truth. I had my eyes closed tight even under sunglasses, and my fists were clenched against my thighs. Dean made it clear that if I thought he didn’t know, I was dumber than my LSAT score indicated. This was the beginning of one of my uncontrollable headaches, the ones that Dean referred to as “episodes”, which pissed me off on account of it sounded like “getting the vapors” or some girly shit that happened to Melanie Wilkes in Gone With The Wind.
I just called them headaches. Which was fair, because it was true that my head hurt like a motherfucker, it was obvious, it hurt so much that sweat poured down my face and I could hardly keep from crying, but at the same time, I got anxious, couldn’t stand light or sound, was barely able to lift my head, and sometimes vomited for an hour or more.
This was it, though. Dean had held me and protected me through these things more times than I could count. They’d started when I was 14 or so and only gotten worse as I’d gotten older. It was hard to travel in the car with symptoms this severe, but Dean hadn’t given me any choice and I’d been in no condition to argue, considering that no words came out of my mouth when I tried to talk. He cut up an old t-shirt and tied it around my head, covering my eyes and at the same time relieving a bit of the pressure, about an hour after he recognized the signs that I tried so hard to hide. He turned the Impala around and headed toward Sioux Falls where Bobby assured us there would be a friend of his there, a medical doctor who “owed him a favor” (seriously, who DIDN’T owe Bobby a favor?). We were done looking for the things we always looked for - psychic phenomena, curses, residual traces of demon blood infection, you know, the usual. We were taking a bold step into the unknown and involving a medical doctor.
As much as I tried to hold them back, the tears started a little outside of Pierre. I shook with the effort of holding them in but it made the pain in my head worse, so I just let go. About a hundred miles from the salvage yard, I broke down and asked Dean to pull over so I could puke on the side of the road. I knew it hurt Dean almost as much as it hurt me when this happened, having to watch me suffer through this. He never hesitated for a second before he knelt down beside me in the roadside dirt and traced circles on my back with his hand as I retched and dry heaved toward the ground.
Once I got kind of sorta recovered, and Dean had gently maneuvered me back into the car, handing me a cool but not cold bottle of water (too cold was bad), he got back in the driver’s seat and hauled ass, getting me to Bobby’s in record time. And yes, it was record time, I knew, because Dean actually kept a record in his brain of how fast he could cross any given stretch of highway. (I would have rolled my eyes at his comment about “making good time” had I been capable of doing so, and I wasn’t unaware that me not being able to roll my eyes at my brother was a serious problem).
I laid down on the sofa and whispered my answers to the doctor’s questions the best that I could.
And seriously? In our life? Everything that happened to us? The diagnosis could not have come as more of a shock. My responses to the doc’s questions about what my symptoms were, how long they lasted, what I had done, seen, eaten and drunk in the hours before these headaches occurred gave us an honest-to-God medical diagnosis.
They were migraines. And they were triggered by sugar. FUCKING SUGAR.
Jesus Christ. No more caramel frappuccinos. No more half-a-bag of Twizzlers as an afternoon snack. No more giant Styrofoam cups of sweet tea when we were hitting a drive-thru in the southern states.
The doctor gave me a sympathetic look as she handed me a giant bag of sample nose-spray Imitrex and told me to keep my intake of sweets to an absolute minimum.
Good news: the Imitrex made every single symptom disappear in less than half an hour. Bad news: I was kind of hoping maybe it was a curse. I was really going to miss those caramel frappuccinos.