Residual Limbs: R, Dean, Sam, OC
Title: Residual Limbs
Author: Pkwench
Rating: R for language, boobs, drug use, and loss of limb(s)
Genre and/or Pairing: hurt/comfort, Sam/OFC
Characters: Dean, Sam, OC
Spoilers: Everything
Warnings: Dean has no hands. He swears. He smokes. There are things he cannot do. Please do not read if this disturbs you.
Word Count: 9,709
Disclaimer: Kripke would blow my hands off before he’d let me do this to his boy.
Summary: Ah, another comment fic meme. I love those things! This one from the lovely roque_clasique who prompted: Both Dean's hands get cut off in a hunting accident. Fast-forward a year later. Where are he and Sam living? What is Dean doing for a job? How is he adjusting to everyday life?
Author's Note: I find that I’m horribly nervous about posting this. I generally just hide in comment fic memes and haven’t reposted anything that I’ve written for them. This is an out of sequence series of one shots centered on the above prompt. It hasn’t been beta read and any gross errors that you find are all on me. Also, the title, lame to the point of painful, I know. But, I couldn’t think of anything else. Erm, no hands. I mentioned that, right? With all of the challenges and indignities, no hands. I don’t know why I feel like warning everyone about that incessantly, but there you are. No hands!
-
As he had so many times in his life, Dean Winchester put his foot down on the gas pedal of his car and grinned fiercely as she leapt forward into the gloaming as if trying to catch the fleeting sun. The rumble and purr of the engine thrummed up through his boots. It had been so long since he’d been behind the wheel that the sensation set him tingling and he thought: ‘oh, Christ, I’m still alive.’
Worry could not temper the joy, the sense of finally being unfettered and set free. In the back seat, his brother lay with his long limbs drawn in, head on his jacket. Dean flicked a glance to him and the car’s other occupant. Caught the whiteness of the scar that ruined her face.
“Lou?” he asked.
“I think he’s just sleeping now.” She looked up at him in the mirror with eyes so blue that it hurt him to look at them. “Drive faster anyway.”
He did. As the car crested ninety and the rational part of his mind started to whisper concern, he laughed. He couldn’t help it. It just felt so God damned good.
**
“Whaddya got?”
”White mile, early thirties. Bilateral amputation the hard way, multiple lacerations, third degree burns both arms and upper torso …”
“Wait, back up. Amputation?”
“Kinda. Heard there was a big explosion at the iron works, yeah?”
“Oh, man…”
“Yeah. Both hands blown off.”
“We heard there weren’t any survivors.”
“Two of them, one’s got nothing other than a couple scratches. Mine’s coming in with uncontrolled bleeding. BP one-eighty over one hundred. Tachy in the one-sixties. Sats ninety-seven. Wired out of his mind. He’s got to be. Nothing will keep him down. BP and heart rate keep climbing. I … Jesus, Annie. I have him restrained back here. God damned hands are blown all to hell and he keeps trying to get up. He’s fucking inhuman.”
**
“You’re screwing my nurse.”
Sam nodded. Just like that, without any argument or excuses, he folded and agreed. He was leaning against the doorframe between the dining room and the kitchen as if he needed the extra support to stand. He looked tired. Dean thought he always looked tired. He was a roadmap of exhaustion. Pale skin. Bruised eyes. A stark, leanness to the lines of his face. And that constant, whipped and lackluster expression that said “I just don’t know how much more I can take.”
It was the expression that did it. The expression and the truth behind it. Sam was running himself into the ground. If the last six years hadn’t wrung the life out of the kid, the next six surely would - if he could even make it that long. He was hanging on by a thread.
So, Sam was screwing his nurse. Big deal. Most of Dean felt like dropping to his knees and offering up a couple of hallelujahs because fuck if Sam didn’t need it. He didn’t care. That was the weirdest thing. Dean had no real objection to the fact that Sam and Lou had started sleeping together. It was just that he was so tired, so drunk, and in a state that his father might have recognized - really God damned angry about life in general. Just as John couldn’t sit down and rationally talk to his children about how much the loss of his wife was killing him, so Dean couldn’t talk to Sam about his hands.
He finally understood that sometimes there weren’t words big enough or deep enough. He couldn’t open his mouth and even attempt to explain the unhinged hopelessness, uselessness, or anger. He didn’t know how to explain that Sam thoughtfully replacing every last doorknob in the house with a latch had filled him with such a combination of rage and gratefulness that he felt like he was losing his mind. He didn’t know if it was pain or loss or despair he felt when Lou washed his hair, zipped his pants, or opened his beer. He didn’t know how he even got out of bed or how to explain to Sam the monumental effort - physical and mental - that doing so took.
He was consumed by the need to let loose, to let everything he couldn’t express just explode, consequences be damned. But, he still didn’t know how to say any of it. So, he latched on to Sam screwing Lou - much as he really didn’t give a shit - and tore into him.
And Sam took it. Head down. Floppy God damned hair hiding his eyes. Big, strong hands in his pockets as if he knew instinctively that Dean would look at them, that he would follow each motion of wrists and fingers with obsessive longing.
“She wipes my fucking ass, Sam. And you’re sleeping with her.”
Sam looked at him. Tired and defeated. As if he’d been undergoing months of chemotherapy and was waiting for inevitable death from either the disease or the cure.
“Do you want me to stop?”
Dean’s phantom fingers curled into his phantom palms as he made two fists. He could actually feel the action of flesh that wasn’t there. It was so real that he swung with his right hand, aiming for Sam’s jaw. They both swore as Dean’s stump connected. The pain to the abused limb tightened his focus and reality came back in that sickening crunch.
“Jesus, Sammy. I don’t know what I’m doing any more.”
**
After the third code, Sam told the nurses that it was enough. He signed papers to change Dean’s status and another to put him on comfort care. The blood was stopped. The ventilator taken away. The drip that was meant to stabilize Dean’s skyrocketing blood pressure was taken down and thrown away. Morphine was brought in as the ventilator was disconnected. It wouldn’t be long, but Sam was told to prepare himself. Sometimes, it was quick. Sometimes not. With the level of trauma, the blood loss, peculiarities of Dean’s speeding heart rate and dangerously high pressure, no one expected it to take very long.
Sam was given a box of Kleenex and instructions to call if he needed anything.
He sat, the box of tissues unopened, as tears and snot ran down his face. He watched Dean, focused solely on the rise and fall of his chest. Sam could not bear to look at the thick, mitten bandages covering the stumps where Dean’s hands used to be. Before his first code, he’d been cauterized and stitched. There’d been talk of grafts, limb specialists, and counseling right up until the moment that Dean’s heart, cruising at that moment at a rate of something upwards of one-hundred-eighty beats per minute, despite the drugs, skittered to a bump and then a stop.
Twenty-three minutes, three-hundred-fifty joules, and two cracked ribs later, Dean had bought himself a ventilator and another team of doctors who left the limbs alone and concentrated on the peculiarities of his speeding heart and abnormal blood pressure. The white coats had clustered around Sam, tapping pens against jaws, playing with stethoscopes, and looking at Dean as if he was the strangest thing to have rolled into their ICU. A man in Dean’s excellent physical condition should not have such pressure, Sam was told. In fact, one expected someone who’d suffered such severe trauma and surgery to be undergoing treatment for low blood pressure. It was all very strange and tests should be done. It didn’t escape Sam’s attention that he was given a release for a second, more detailed toxicology screen. He signed it and allowed the labs to be drawn, knowing that it was going to come back negative or unexplainable.
After the second code, only one doctor remained. Sam never knew if the others had given up or been driven away. The remaining one could only stare at Dean with the sort of wide-eyed awe of a child. He stayed, staring and saying nothing for so long that Sam, aching, grief-stricken, and tired as hell, finally snapped. The doctor apologized profusely and fell into the sort of stammer that suggested that he’d had a severe stutter as a child. Out of answers, he’d started fishing around in the dark, running the sorts of tests that had the laboratory calling the nurses who in turned called him back repeatedly for clarification. In his broken stammer, he finally explained to Sam that Dean’s blood had come back as radioactive, but that, for reasons no one could explain, he didn’t appear to have been in any way exposed to radioactive material.
“Th-th-th-thought w-with the iron wuh-wuh-wuh …” The good doctor was stuck on the w for what Sam determined to be roughly five minutes. When he choked past it, the words came out in one, clean and unbroken rush. “…works that the chances of your brother encountering radioactive material wasn’t too unlikely. It’s just, we don’t get any readings off of him. I swear, I grabbed a Geiger counter from the emergency preparedness kit in the ER. Nothing. He’s clean. But, every test we run on his blood comes back saying the same thing and it’s just so weird. His blood shows the same radioactive properties as sunlight.”
Sam thought it was weird, too. He thought it was weird that angels could be trying so hard to save his brother and failing at it so spectacularly.
Then came the third code and possibly the longest forty-seven minutes of Sam’s life. Dean’s strange blood work had convinced Sam that angels were on board and working diligently to save his life. He stood, waiting for the angels to succeed. He was shoved back in the corner and towered over everyone as the code team ran into the room for the third time that day. The first nurse to hit the room was so small that she had to stand on a stool do compressions. She was merciless and fierce, despite her lack of size, and Sam heard another of Dean’s ribs snap as she pushed on him. They shocked him again. The ventilator was set and reset. Sam lost count of the number of drugs to come out of the crash cart. Syringes were ripped out of sterile wrappings and pushed with choreographed ease.
Dean came back again, but his heart, climbing again to unexplainable rates once it restarted, would not last. His nurse gently explained to Sam that there was no longer any constancy to the rhythm of his heart. It was wild and out of control.
“You’re wrong. His heart is the one thing that’s always been constant,” Sam told the nurse. “Bring me the papers. I can’t do this to him any more.”
Dean died two hours later.
**
Dean had never worked so hard for a cigarette in his life. Two prosthetic limbs lay on the old Formica kitchen table, cables and straps limp and still somehow suggesting something insidious to him. They’d been there since this morning when Sam had tried, for maybe the thousandth time, to get Dean to just try them. Honestly, he didn’t know why he continued to resist it. He hated relying on Sam and Lou. Couldn’t fucking stand it, but something about slipping them on, about moving gears and straps and wires so that he could open and close the metal and plastic limb just set his spine out of place. Adapting meant accepting and he wasn’t sure that he’d been off of the drugs long enough to accept much of anything.
Still. The fucking prostheses seemed to mock Dean as he held down the pack of cigarettes with his left arm - he couldn’t quite say stump and utterly refused to ever adopt the phrase ‘residual limb’. He’d tried flipping down the box top with his right arm, but it wasn’t happening.
“Fuck, Lou. Can’t you buy a soft pack like a normal person?”
Incensed and determined, Dean bent down and grabbed the top with his teeth. He pushed down with his left arm on the box and pulled. The top didn’t tear off completely, but the cigarettes were dislodged. They rolled across the table top, some of them going off completely and dropping to the floor.
He stopped one with his left arm and bent to the table again. Dean lipped at the cigarette and picked it up, trying his damnedest not to drool on it and get the filter wet.
“Light, light, light,” he said. “Ah. That’ll do nicely.”
Across the kitchen was the stove. He preferred gas. Had always found it a better heat source when he cooked, not that it mattered since his cooking days were long behind him. Sam, unfortunately, had found them a place with an electric range. Cheap. Easy. Not so convenient to light a smoke off of, but it would work.
It took five minutes and the patience of a monk for Dean to get the dial for the range to turn. He batted at it with the warped flesh of his left arm which had become dominate by dumb luck - there was still something of his hand there. A nub where his thumb had been and then a wrinkled, misshapen disaster that used to be his palm. He could usually push things with the thumb, but the knob on the range was nearly too much. Sweat had worked down his face by the time he’d managed it and he’d clenched his teeth so tightly that he’d snapped the filter on the smoke.
When he turned back to the table to get another, the prosthetic limbs where there, mocking. He could hear Lou and Sam both telling him how he could have turned that damned knob with ease. Well, maybe not ease, but certainly without such intense labor. He held up his right hand to the prostheses and imagined his middle finger snapping up in salute.
By the time he got another cigarette between his lips, the burner was glowing red hot. Dean leaned over it carefully and gingerly put the cigarette to the burner, hoping like hell that it wouldn’t catch fire. He sucked in a breath as the tip glowed and smoke curled up. After a few puffs, it was going.
Dean stood and pulled a long drag into his lungs. When he blew it out, his head buzzed almost instantly. He could almost imagine the nicotine patting him on the knee and asking him where the heck he’d been, so welcome and so familiar was the sensation. The tingle worked down to his limbs and he found himself relaxing almost instantly.
”God damned Marlboros,” he sighed, “where have you been all of my life?”
It wasn’t until the burner started smoking and he realized that he had no way to flick his cigarette that Dean realized he needed assistance. That he needed, oh ha-ha, a hand.
He walked to Sam’s room. The ash dropped from the tip on his way and the smoke blew back into Dean’s eyes. He hadn’t realized what a hand to mouth thing smoking was until he’d taken the hands out of the equation. Much as he wanted to keep puffing on the damned thing, in fact as much as he wanted to bitch light another right off of it, he also wanted to take it out of his mouth. He wanted to roll it around fingers that he didn’t have and to flick it with the thumbs that were, for the most part, long gone.
Sam, Dean remembered, hated smoking. He supposed it all tied back to Dad. When they’d been young, when a hunt had gone all right or John Winchester had accidentally found his way into a good mood in spite of himself, sometimes he’d swoop them up. One boy in each arm. His coat had smelled of spicy aftershave, gun oil, and cigarette smoke. Dean thought it was safest, most comforting smell on the planet. He suspected that Sam did too and that it was the happy memories, not the bad ones, that disagreed with him so much.
When Dean experimented with smoking at sixteen, Sam had bitched himself nearly blue. When he’d decided that he and the Marlboro Man might be full time pals at nineteen, Sam had been so annoyed that he’d actually ratted Dean out to Dad - which had resulted in a fan-fucking-tastic screaming match that had come down to the classic morale “do as I say, Dean, not as I fucking do.”
He’d smoked anyway; happily, merrily, right up until New Orleans, that damned job, and that damned hurricane.
Dean hesitated outside of Sam’s door. It was cracked and he could see his brother in his bed. He hadn’t even undressed and had gotten only so far as to get one boot off. Sam had managed hunting, demonic ability, possession, and a three-year flirtation with the devil, but Dean was pretty sure that logging and part-time security work was going to kill him.
He let his brother sleep and went down hall to the back bedroom. It wasn’t open. Dean kicked lightly at the door, even has he pushed down on the door handle with his arm.
“Lou, c’mon. Little help here.”
She didn’t complain about being woken up at three in the morning. Despite the fact that Lou had no medical training what-so-ever, she was still his nurse and it wasn’t unusual for her to have to get up in the middle of the night to help him with things no man should have to endure needing help with.
Lou stumbled to the door. She was wearing penguin pajama bottoms and a Pink Floyd T-shirt that Dean was pretty sure she had to have swiped from his laundry pile. With her eyes barely open, it was hard to tell that her scar pulled down on her right eye.
“Are you kidding me?” she said eyeing the cigarette.
“Nope,” Dean told her. “And I think the kitchen might catch on fire in a few minutes.”
She pulled the cigarette from his mouth and tapped it in the plant by her door. Lou took a drag and then put it back between his lips. She brushed by him then and motioned for him to follow.
“I liked you better when you were stoned all of the time,” she said.
“I liked me better when I had fucking hands, sweetheart,” Dean replied.
**
“Where’ve you been, Cas?”
Dean sat in the back seat of the impala, head tilted back so the he could see the faint points of light that marked the far away stars. His breath fogged the glass and he had to hold it every few minutes so that he could see again. The morphine was kicking in finally and he suspected that Sam had it timed, that Sam would be back out to fetch him from the car when he was too high to be anything other than compliant.
“They wouldn’t let me go,” Cas said. His voice was quiet. Dean didn’t have to look at him to know that he was staring at the thick bandages that had taken the place of his hands. He didn’t know why he’d had Sam rewrap them. The wounds he’d received just a week ago now looked as though he’d had them for a lifetime. Fucking Zachariah.
“Do you need to see them?” Dean asked, feeling almost dreamy.
“Will it upset you?”
“Probably,” Dean answered. “Do it anyway. I’m always upset and right now almost, almost high as a kite. Damn, Sam steals the best shit. Roxanol, I think. Concentrated, liquid morphine. They give it to dying people. Funny, huh?”
“No.”
His breath fogged the glass again as the car was filled with the sound of wings beating the air. Cas was next to him in the time it took for the sound to reach Dean’s ears. He smiled, feeling a little warmer, a little happier as the drugs pulled on him. He thought it felt a lot like a boat going out to sea. His being rocked back and forth on the prow of the good ship morphine. It was really hard to be disturbed by anything, though he found he still had to turn his head away when Castiel unwound the bandage from first his right arm and then the left.
Dean felt Castiel’s fingers tremble as he touched the ruined skin.
“I wove this flesh together,” he said quietly. “I took something that was dead and made it whole again. Strong and beautiful so that your soul would have a home to come back to. And look what they did to you. Look what they did, Dean.”
“I can’t,” Dean said honestly. “Not enough drugs in the world and, wow. I’m fucking baked as it is. Time to see Bobby, I s’pose. He’s pissed that I won’t get out of the car and Sam thinks I don’t know that he loaded me up on the drugs so that he could make me get out, but I know he did. Put the dropper right in my mouth.”
Dean held up both of his stumps to Castiel. “Because I can’t do it myself, you see.”
Castiel didn’t turn away. He took hold of Dean’s arms at the elbows. “Do you want me to take you inside?”
“That would be awesome,” Dean replied sincerely. It would spare him waiting for someone to open the door of both the car and Bobby’s house.
Cas held onto him tightly and Dean closed his eyes. The drugs slowed time down for him and he was sure that he could feel the breeze from Castiel’s wings as they beat the air. He wondered what they felt like. He wondered what it would be like to lean against his friend’s warm side and have one wing wrapped around him, hiding him from the world.
He was sitting one moment and standing the next. This was something that disoriented him on his best of days, but it was enough to send him pitching towards Bobby’s floor now. Castiel bore him up, catching him beneath the armpits before Dean could fall.
“I love you, man,” Dean said as he was righted.
“I’m sure,” Castiel said.
“No, I really do. Really. And I know you and I know you’re going in circles in that brain of yours, kicking your own ass up and down because you can’t fix me. It’s not your fault. So don’t, okay?”
“Dean …”
Dean held up his naked stumps for Cas. “Look, ma. No hands!” He giggled, not ignorant of the fact that it was a terrified and hysterical sound. “No hands! Get it?”
Castiel put an arm around his waist and led him from the back door where they’d rematerialized. There was a look of panic and discomfort in his eyes along with liberal doses of what Dean was sure was anger and heartache.
“No hands,” Dean whispered. He said it over and over and probably would have said it all night if he hadn’t heard the sound of Sam drawing in a hitching breath in the next room.
He stopped in his tracks and knocked his arm into Cas. A week ago, that action would have been him putting a hand on the angel’s shoulder. Now it was an awkward thump from misshapen flesh.
“Tell me what happened, boy.” Bobby. His voice in the low, comforting tone he adopted when soothing frightened animals and overwrought Winchester boys. Dean nudged Cas again, indicating that he wanted to wait.
They were in the shadows and neither Sam nor Bobby could see them.
“He died,” Sam whispered. “I told them … I had them … they took him off of everything. Ventilator and the blood and all of the bags and bags of shit. I asked them to let him go because … Jesus, Bobby. I don’t know what they were doing to him. I don’t know what the angels were up to, but it was like someone was pouring fire in his veins. Every time he’d wake up just a little, he’d scream and he’d scream. I don’t think he even knew for the longest time that his hands were gone. He just screamed like he was back in hell.”
‘Hell made of sunlight,’ Dean thought dreamily. ‘Sunlight that burned and burned and, oh fucking God …’
Cas’s arm tightened around him. Dean sucked in a couple of shallow breaths and listened, trying to hear Sam’s retelling of the things he’d missed out on.
“Easy,” Bobby said in that comforting, ‘good dog’ voice of his. “Take it easy and tell me.”
“An hour and a half after they took him off of everything, he started gasping. Nurse came in. Gave him enough morphine to put down Godzilla and said it wouldn’t be long. He was breathing like a guppy, eyes rolling in his head, and there was this rattle. This fucking rattle in his chest that … it’s death. It’s the sound of death. I’d have held his hand, but I couldn’t. So, I kept my hands on either side of his face …”
Dean could remember Sam’s big hands on his cheeks. The spread of his fingers had nearly covered his face and he’d tasted the salt of the tears that had dropped from his brother’s eyes.
“…and then he was gone. He was just fucking gone. I told myself that it was better, that it’s what Dean would have wanted. If given the choice? He’d never have chosen to lose his hands, to become dependent on everyone and useless to himself.”
“He’s not useless, Sam.”
Dean wavered as he felt a little sucker punch work its way past the morphine. Sam was right. He had a long life of dependency and uselessness to look forward to.
“I love the guy, Bobby. I’d die to take back what happened to him, but you know him as well as I do. That’s how he’s going to feel.”
“Is that how you feel?” Castiel whispered in Dean’s ear.
“I feel all orange at the moment,” he confided. “And maybe a little sleepy.”
“I’ll take you to bed.”
“Dirty whore,” Dean told him. “Wait. Wanna hear the rest of Sam’s story.”
“Dean was dead for an hour,” Sam was saying. “The nurse had told me that I could stay as long as I wanted, but she’d brought in the body bag. It was sitting on the counter with empty toe tags. I knew they wanted me gone and I was thinking that I should call you. Figure out where to have his body sent. Figure out … what we should do.”
“And then?” Bobby asked.
“Light,” Sam whispered. “Sunlight, white light, I don’t know what it was. The monitors in the room started hissing and screaming with feedback. The window shattered. And then the walls. You’ve seen the news. They’re calling it an earthquake. There’s a crack in the foundation from the front of the building right up to where Dean’s bed was. The power went out. It was dark everywhere but Dean’s room. And it was so bright that I couldn’t see. I couldn’t hear. I thought it was going to kill me.”
“Michael,” Castiel whispered.
“Fuck head,” Dean agreed.
“You think he said yes before he went,” Bobby asked Sam. “You think Michael was coming down to take Dean to the dance and changed his mind?”
”No,” Sam replied. “I think Dean was saying no the entire time he was dying and that Michael tried to force his way in. I think maybe they were fighting over Dean’s body the whole time and then Michael came to just fucking take it after Dean died. Only it didn’t work and Dean came back. The light left with a sound like a cannon and Dean woke up. I watched his burns and scars fade away. I watched the color come back into his face, Bobby, and I thought, thank God, he’s okay. It’s going to be okay. Only when I unwrapped his hands …”
Dean raised his hands to cover his ears and swore instead as he realized that they weren’t there. “Look, ma,” he whispered. “No fucking hands.”
**
Dean decided that God had created Sam’s hands with an extra amount of divine artistry. Before, they’d only seemed big to him. Capable of packing a punch with the intensity of a freight train. Paws. Dean thought maybe he’d called them paws a couple of times. It was as much thought as he’d ever put into his little brother’s hands.
Now, after months of watching Sam’s hands and after minutes of staring at them when he shouldn’t be, Dean realized that they were beautiful. Expressive when Sam wasn’t shoving them in his pockets. Deft with long, elegant fingers and solid knuckles. Dean watched those hands with longing and tried to remember what it had been like to feel a woman beneath his fingertips as Sam surely had to be feeling Lou now.
His voyeurism couldn’t be blamed on the drugs. Sam had cunningly weaned Dean off of them long ago and it had been a couple of weeks since Lou had shared a joint with him. He needed to go. It was tasteless and, given that it was his brother and his nurse, it was probably creepy besides.
But he didn’t go. Not for a long while. He stood in the laundry room by the window that looked out into the back yard. They had no nearby neighbors and the yard was little more than a couple of deck chairs on a slab of concrete fifteen feet from the forest. To the right was the garage. To the left a small clothesline and potted vegetables.
Sam and Lou were by the clothesline. A basket sat, forgotten, off to the side. Lou still had a clothespin in her hand. Sam’s hands, which Dean could not stop watching, were in motion. The movement of them mirrored the expression on his face. When he brought his hands down to either side of her hips and slid fingers beneath the waistband of her shorts, his smile was eager and a little wicked. Dean could see him take hold of her ass beneath her clothes and give a little squeeze as he drew her in for a kiss. And Lou, pretty Lou with her thousand freckles and terrible, ruining scar, wound her own hands into Sam’s hair and kissed him back. Her hands were good, too. Big for a girl, but she was tall. He liked the way that her hands met her wrists in a little protrusion of bone, a little knot on the outside aspect.
They seemed to use their hands more with each other than they did apart, more than they did when he was present. Sam’s hands did not stay still. He stroked her. He petted her. He slid his hands behind her back and curled his long fingers over the backs of her shoulders so that he could bend her slightly, exposing her neck for him to kiss. The beauty of it was making Dean’s head hurt as was the simplicity of their actions and the cosmic unfairness of it all.
How long had it been since Dean had been with a woman, let alone explored her with his fingertips? Had he marked that occasion? Had he made the most of it? The last intimate moment he’d ever spent with his hands and he couldn’t recall it. The memory was gone now as if it had been burned away from him, too.
He turned away, finally, when Sam pulled Lou down into the grass and slipped her shirt off. His big hands covered her breasts completely. Dean left the laundry room and the window, shaking slightly. Not one sexual thought crossed his mind. Just the image of Sam’s large hands sliding up Lou’s bare torso and covering her breasts. His long fingers. Her pale skin. It had been beautiful and something Dean would never do again.
**
“Dean, we can’t leave the hospital. This is way over both our heads. I’m sorry, man, I don’t know how to say it gently, but your hands are gone and we’re going to need help. We need to at least stay long enough to get you fitted for prosthetics and learn how the myoelectrics work.”
It was two in the morning and Dean’s fifth day without hands. For all of his trauma, he was essentially healed and the hospital’s newest miracle patient. He could feel the wrongness of it burning in the tips of where his fingers used to be. It wasn’t just the loss of his hands, which he did his level best not to think about, it was the entire situation. An earthquake. A power outage. And Dean the miracle man. Dead three times and now alive. Now awake without so much as a bruise or a scratch until he pulled his arms out from beneath the blankets where he hid them and found the twisted lumps of flesh.
Patient confidentiality apparently broke down in the presence of miracles. Dean figured he’d have maybe a day before local news cameras started piling up outside. Already cards and flowers from people he didn’t know had come trickling in. At first just from the amazed nursing staff, but then their families. And their friends. People who had never set foot in the hospital or met one Dean Alexander Wilkins. The story was getting around. Which meant his face might get around. Attach it with Sam’s and Sam’s fingerprints and it was a disaster waiting to happen. Having been declared legally dead twice did nothing to calm Dean’s certainty that they were running too big of a risk.
And Sam’s hopes for waiting around for prosthetics? Insane. Their insurance would never hold out that long, would not be able to take the scrutiny as it was entered into one database and another.
Besides, God knew how he planned on getting by without a nurse at his beck and call on a daily basis, but Dean had discovered that he was seriously opposed to artificial limbs. He’d had to call the nurse for pain meds the first time that Sam had come in with the brochures on transradial prosthetics.
“Sam,” Dean said as sternly as he could. The buzz was wearing thin and he could pretty much focus on his brother. “We’re criminals, man. Do you understand that? It’s literally going to come down prison or no prison here. We stay so that I can get rigged up like friggin’ Hookman and we go to jail. It’s that simple. We get out of here, we might be okay.”
“God dammit, Dean. We can’t just go pick this crap up at Wal-Mart. They don’t carry false arms and peg legs at the drug store. The measurements are specific and someone has to show you how it all works.”
“I am not going to prison without fucking hands,” Dean hissed. “Get that through your thick god damned skull right now, Sam. They’ll eat me alive. If that’s your plan, then you fucking kill me now because dying will be better than that shit.”
When Sam slumped, Dean knew that he’d won. Sam would get him out. Sign him out against medical advice or sneak him out in the dead of night. If Castiel would slip out from whatever rock he’d hidden under, it would be easier yet. Dean didn’t care. They were getting out.
With that fear taken care of, reality crept up his spine and Dean took a chill.
“However we go, Sam? Make sure it’s with drugs. Lots and lots of drugs. It’s going to take me a while here and … and I don’t want to know what’s going on or come down long enough to even care, all right?”
**
Dean glared at the straw in Bobby’s hand and nodded in disgust. Bobby dropped it. It bobbed in the bottle of beer on the table next to him and he felt a moment of absolute clarity as he leaned awkwardly over the arm of the couch to take a drink. This was life without hands - drinking beer through a straw. He started to wish he hadn’t let Bobby talk him out of putting a dropper full of the Roxanol in it.
“Beer through a fucking straw,” Dean muttered. He took a drink, wincing in displeasure despite the coldness of the beer. The straw made it taste funny. He swore that it did.
“Be happy you can drink a beer, boy,” Bobby said.
“I can’t open it.”
“I can’t stand up.”
“I can’t blow my nose,” Dean countered.
“Bullshit,” Bobby said. “I saw you do it yesterday.”
“Well, it was awkward as fuck.”
“Well, I guess that’s just tough shit.”
“Dammit, I can’t even scratch my balls!”
“Kid,” Bobby sighed, “I think I’d die happy if I could just feel my balls again.”
They glared at each other. Dean over the straw bobbing out of his beer and Bobby from his wheelchair. Without preamble, they both began to laugh. Bobby slapped the arm of his wheelchair and Dean waved a stump at him. When Bobby snorted a little, Dean laughed louder, slumping back against the couch as tears squeezed out of the corners of his eyes.
“Balls,” he sputtered.
Upstairs he could hear a thump and then another. They’d woken up Sam. Dean cringed in exaggeration at Bobby and tried to shush him. He had no finger to put in front of his lips and felt a little ridiculous as he blew on his stump.
“Okay,” Bobby said as he regained control. “Okay. I’m fine now. It wasn’t that damned funny.”
Dean bit back another whirlwind of laughter that was dying to make its way up and out of his throat. He leaned back to the beer and took another drink. It tasted better the second time around, but the straw, still bobbing on the foam, made its escape as he pulled back from the beer. It jumped for freedom and Dean watched it drop to the wooden floor.
“Shit. See what I mean?”
Bobby waved a hand at him. “You’ll just have to get used to that kind shit,” he said. “What you need in the meantime is a nurse. You might get yourself good and gorked every night and not give a crap about who has to do what for you, but Sam’s stone cold sober every time he zips your pants for you and cleans your ass. You need a little home health, son.”
“Unless you have some magic underground home health network for out of commission hunters, I think we’re screwed on that one, Bobby. Nurses mean insurance, lots of signatures, money, and staying in one place.”
“A licensed one, yeah. But, I think I have an idea. Ellen or your Daddy ever tell you about the demon old Bill Harvelle went up against seventeen or so years ago? No? Well, it was a nasty one. Took down an entire family in a day. Only one left alive when he got there was the daughter. She was maybe all of ten at the time. Demon was in her mother and had been keeping her around for sport. Mauled her. Kid’s face still has a scar from her scalp to her chin. Shame, really. She’s got a pretty sweet smile.”
“I don’t know if I like where this is going, Bobby,” Dean cautioned. “If you have some idea about pairing up the handless cripple with the nice, quiet girl without a face, this isn’t going to go so well. You shouldn’t try to be all matchmaker with the freaks. Makes us nervous.”
“Boy, you’re about as dumb and as mean as junkyard dog, some days,” Bobby snapped. “First of all, this doesn’t have squat to do with matchmaking. Who do you think helped me bathe and take a crap when I first got home from the hospital? You boys weren’t around …”
“Bobby …”
“No, I’m not blaming you. I’m just saying. We’ve been moving this girl around for years, Dean. Local law pinned the death of her entire family on her and Bill, sorry sap that he was, couldn’t bring himself to leave some poor kid to go to nuthouse for life just because she’d had the bad luck to run into a demon. So, he took her home. She and Ellen didn’t like each other none, but it was all right - there was plenty of hunters that felt sorry for her. She bounced around from one family of hunters to another. Learned some useful skills. And, with hunters dropping like flies, she doesn’t have anywhere to go.”
“Then let her stay and help you out.”
“I don’t need help, you stubborn idjit. You do.”
“I don’t,” Dean lied.
“Really? Okay. When the morphine runs out and you’re nice, alert, and awake, how’s it going to work for you when Sam gives you your bath?”
Overdue for his drugs as he was, Dean didn’t have to think on it too long. He just didn’t like the idea of a stranger becoming so intimate to the kinds of things he barely paid attention to.
“I guess set it up.”
“You think so, genius? Hallelujah.”
Dean looked up as the thumping overhead became the sound of Sam’s footsteps down the stairs. Despite his size, Sam could be quiet as mouse when he wanted to be. Dean almost suspected him of stepping a little heavy to give them warning that he was coming down.
“Sammy,” he said in greeting. His brother, so surly and guarded of late, relaxed a little at the sound of his voice.
“Hey, guys, I’m going to go out for a while.”
“Where to?” Bobby asked.
Dean thought Sam’s answering grin seemed a little sneaky; more so when Castiel blinked into existence in the room.
“Wal-Mart,” Sam replied.
**
“I fucking hate you, Lou. I hate you. I hate the way you’re looking at me. I hate this fucking house and this fucking bathroom and this fucking life.”
An experienced nurse, a real nurse, would have talked him down. Gotten him to express his feelings and explain why he was reacting so badly to help that he couldn’t do without. A frightened girl might have looked at him in fear or run away. Lou, Louise Ann Catron and known as Lannie Cat to her grandmother and friends before a demon had ripped her apart, just stood and waited. She looked at him passively, almost like she’d chosen to detach her thoughts from her body and let them wander off into the Washington night.
She waited and Dean squirmed in absolute discomfort and despair. He had to crap and was standing in the bathroom, Lou at his side, as he cursed her, her entire family, God, and just about everything in the universe for the fact that he couldn’t hold it any longer.
“God damn son of a bitch!” Dean shouted.
Sam was knocking on the door within seconds of his outburst and wasn’t that just fucking great? Maybe they could drive a few miles down the road to the logging camp where Sam had gotten on for the spring and invite in the entire company for Dean’s Big Crap.
“Everything, uh, all right in there?” Sam asked.
To his surprise, Lou, who he hadn’t quite gotten a handle on yet, called back to Sam. “We’re fine. Be out in a bit, okay?”
Dean continued to glare at her, but relaxed slightly. “Let’s fucking do this already,” he snapped.
Lou leaned over and unbuttoned his jeans.
**
Sam walked between towering shelves full of artificial limbs. The storage facility was bigger than he’d anticipated and he was almost unsettled to see just how many arms and legs he was surrounded by.
The new, greener facility went with solar charged cells for night. Small, round lamps glowed dimly every third intersection as he and Castiel turned and made their way from legs to arms. Once among the arms, they had to sort through shelf after shelf. The number of arms was disturbing and a little upsetting.
‘How many people had to live like this’, Sam wondered. ‘How many of them woke up in hospitals and tried to cope with the reality of a missing arm, a missing hand, a missing leg?’
He and Castiel were stuck in a seemingly endless aisle of arms designed for stumps ending above the elbow. Which would not do. They needed transradial limbs. He pulled Cas to the next aisle of arms and kept looking.
As with any problem Sam Winchester faced, he had studied. Dean had no hands. Dean needed prosthetics. Dean was a criminal who could not get measured and fit for them. There had to be a way.
There was. Sam had found several facilities across the country that collected used prosthetic limbs from families of the deceased or from those who had gotten newer limbs. Most of the companies, despite their charitable face, actually broke the limbs down into parts. Scavenging and selling the myoelectric components and recycling plastic, cable, and metal. Others, however, sent limbs to developing nations. True enough, most of the limbs found here were of the simpler variety, but Sam figured it would be a start. Something to get Dean going. Something to give him a chance.
“Sam,” Castiel said. He held the company’s brochure in his hand. “It says that these limbs are for the underprivileged.”
“We are the underprivileged in this case,” Sam replied. “Nothing we’re going to find is going to fit him exactly - especially on the left, but, unless you can convince one of your brothers to give him his hands back …”
“They won’t,” Cas growled. “Zachariah said if Dean does not choose to help save the world that he doesn’t deserve to have hands.”
“Gabriel?”
“Vanished.”
“Then, like I said, we are the underprivileged.”
**
Dean clamped down on the cigarette in his mouth and scowled as he once again attempted the Herculean task of trying to light it. He twisted his right wrist just a bit, causing the limb to grasp the strike-anywhere-match more tightly. Then he leaned down and dragged the match across the concrete of the back patio. He cheered when it caught. He brought the arm up and held the match close to his face, lighting the cigarette.
“I’m a fucking genius!” Dean told Lou.
“Yeah, yeah. You’re letting the match burn down, genius,” she replied.
“So what? The hook …”
“…appendage?”
“…grabby part,” he decided. “The grabby part’s metal. It’s not like it’ll burn anything.” He let the match drop to the pavement and held his limb up to his mouth. He twisted his wrist, opened the appliance, and flicked it back the other way to close it on the cigarette. He took it from his lips with a flourish.
“Genius,” he repeated. “They should incorporate more smoking into limb rehabilitation.”
“My idea,” Lou told him. “I should market it and retire a millionaire.”
“Until you’re sued by all of the COPD and lung cancer patients,” Dean chuckled.
They both looked up as the house lights behind them flicked on. Dean winced, feeling genuinely bad. Sam worked his ass off and was generally up by five during the week. He and Lou took turns nagging him to bed most nights, but nothing helped. Sam was growing paler and more pinched by the day. Dean hated what taking care of him was doing to his brother and he hated himself both for it and for his inability to at least allow the guy a decent night’s sleep.
He felt both better and worse when Sam stepped outside in his T-shirt and sweats, rubbing his eyes sleepily like he’d done since he’d been two. He even wore the same little ‘why-the-hell-am-I-awake-now’ pout that he had as child when awakened in the night. But when he saw Dean with both prosthetic limbs on, kicked back and having a smoke like a mostly normal guy, his face lit up. Sam smiled like every rotten thing that had ever happened to them had just been taken back.
“Look at you!” Sam said.
“Yeah, well, I was motivated,” Dean replied, giving the cigarette a little wiggle.
“Shittiest motivator ever,” Sam said, giving Lou a sidelong look. He was still smiling though and Dean didn’t think Lou took him seriously at all. In fact, she just shrugged in reply and watched them with a pleased little smile.
“Still can’t figure out how to wipe my butt,” Dean told him
Sam just grinned. “Dude, I’ll save for a month and buy you one of those Japanese toilets that does it for you. I’m just, holy crap, Dean. I’m so …”
“Please don’t say you’re proud of me.”
“Proud of you,” Sam finished.
“Man,” Dean whined. “This is so undignified. It’s bad enough that I have to get my hands blown off, now I have to put up with this? You’re my kid brother, Sammy. Is there no limit to the amount of humiliation I have to endure?”
“Maybe just this,” Sam replied. He swooped down before Dean could protest and wrapped him in a hug.
“Kill me now,” Dean moaned from Sam’s embrace.
**
Dean woke to the sound of Lou screaming his name and Sam’s. It was the sort of scream a person made when they realized that everything they’d ever feared as a child was real and that it was coming for them. He was up and out of bed in a breath, body moving in swift sureness despite the loss of hands and the lack of prosthetics that he couldn’t put on by himself.
He knew what Lou was most afraid of. A scream like that meant one thing - demons.
Dean ran to Sam’s room, not at all surprised to find Lou there in her underwear. She slept in Sam’s bed more than half of the week. Though Dean was sure they didn’t even have sex most nights. He thought that Sam just needed the warmth of someone else with him to help him go to sleep.
Sam’s room was dark and Dean had to scrape along the wall with his stump to find the light switch. He caught it and flipped it up. Sam was on the floor next to the bed. His eyes were rolling and he banged his head repeatedly into the carpet. He breathed like he was in labor, six, quick heaving pants in and out and then he would make a sound that was lost somewhere between a growl, a moan, and plea. Cords stood out on his neck and his arms and his entire body contorted every few minutes as he jerked off of the floor in a random, eerie burst of movement.
Lou was in the corner of the bedroom by the closet with her knees drawn tight against her chest. She peered out between the hands that covered her face.
“Help me,” Dean said to her as he went down on his knees next to Sam. She didn’t move.
“Sammy.” Dean put his stump on his brother’s face, twitching slightly because it still looked surreal to him at that moment. “Sam.” He called out again.
Sam choked out his name between clenched teeth and then hissed. His head beat down against the carpet hard. One of his clenched hands rose. He was looking for Dean’s hand for support. For acknowledgement. For comfort. Dean didn’t have one to give him.
“God dammit, Lou! Help me!” Dean shouted.
“Wh-what do you need,” she asked from across the room.
“My arms,” Dean told her. “Salt. And the jug of water by the back door.”
“H-holy water?”
“Yes.”
For a moment he wasn’t sure that she was going to be able to do it. But, as Bobby had told him from the start, she was made of fairly tough stuff. Lou glanced at him and Sam both, terror and worry and the sort of emotions that were too big and too unfathomable for Dean to contemplate right then. The she was up and running.
“Dammit, Sam,” Dean said. “Is this why you’ve been so tired? Have you been fighting this off every night? Jesus, didn’t I teach you anything?”
The rapid beat of footsteps along with the unique sound made by his plastic and metal arms alerted him to Lou’s return. She was smart enough to help him slide into the prosthetics before anything else. They forewent the small sleeves that he wore to protect his flesh from the hard plastic and Lou held up the left limb for him first. Dean slipped his arm into it, twisting it somewhat. It was the limb most in need of a custom fit and the one he had the most problems with. But, when Lou did the straps and he had control of it, he set it moving immediately, even has he held out his right arm for her.
He held the jug of holy water in his left. It was difficult. The pitcher was more than the appliance could comfortably hold and the jug shook terribly in his grasp. Dean held onto it as Lou slipped on the right prosthesis. He undid the cap of the jug with his teeth and poured.
Sam sputtered as the water got into his nose and his mouth, but there was no wild reaction. No hissing. No steaming. Just the sound of a man already struggling for his life who also happened to breathe in water. An unhappy suspicion crept into his mind as he let the jug fall to the floor and grabbed the salt. He dusted Sam with it liberally and was met with the same indifferent reaction.
“Stop,” he told Lou. Leave the right one off and bring me a knife.”
She was up and running again. Dean leaned closer to Sam, listening attentively now to the words he was trying to get out.
“I take it back,” Sam groaned. “No. No, it won’t work. Please, stop. Dean. Dean!”
“Sammy,” Dean whispered. “What did you do?”
Dean took the knife from Lou as soon as she brought it to him. It was hell to try to make the cut with his left hand and harder to try to paint the symbols in blood across Sam’s chest. But trying to explain designs that he just knew, that he couldn’t really describe, but just knew by heart would have been harder. So, he painted fat, crude symbols onto his brother’s chest with the metal appliance of his limb. When he was done, Dean held his breath, and put his naked right stump down in the middle of it.
The flash of light came out of Sam’s pores and from his open, screaming mouth. Lou shouted and retreated back to the other side of the room where she hid, once more, behind her hands. Dean tried to grab hold of Sam, but found it near impossible with the one limb and the stump. All he could do was sit next to him and wait.
His let out his breath in relief when Sam’s eyes flickered. His brother tried to sit up twice and failed, falling back to the carpet. On the third attempt, Dean caught him awkwardly. He held onto him, both arms wrapped tightly around him regardless of the lack of hands.
“Which one?” Dean asked as Sam shuddered heavily in his arms. “Which angel?”
“Michael,” Sam gasped. “Zachariah came. He thought … we thought … it was worth a try.”
“He thought?” Dean asked.
“I thought,” Sam amended. “Didn’t want to be made for the devil. Didn’t want to be unable to help you. They promised me. If it worked, if he could ride me, they were supposed to fix you. Supposed to give you your hands back.”
“God dammit, Sammy,” Dean snapped, weary and heartbroken. Sam curled into him and shook.
**
Dean leaned against the impala, smiling at the feel of the warm metal beneath his ass. He twisted his wrist in a quick flick, amazed at how easy it was getting to open and close the appliance. His cigarette dropped to the dirt and he stepped on it. Bobby’s look of proud astonishment made him grin even more widely.
“You drove?” Bobby asked. “All the way from Washington? With just that little knob on your wheel to steer with?”
“Yep,” Dean replied. “My baby and I had a long talk about it. We decided that it was a little embarrassing, but that tough times called for some sacrifices. Besides, Sam needed us.”
“You know, you coulda let Lou drive,” Bobby told him.
“Are you insane? That girl smokes pot. No way she’s getting behind the wheel of my car.”
“Idjit,” Bobby muttered. He inclined his head towards the house. “I see Sam’s been doing better, but how are you doing, kid? How are you doing really? You look good. Better than I’d have thought, but …”
“But, I’ve still got a ways to go,” Dean finished. He reached up to push his hands back through his hair and laughed at himself a little bitterly for the foolishness of the gesture. “I don’t know, Bobby. I don’t know what to do with myself most days. My nurse is screwing my brother and my brother, God love him, just about killed himself trying to trade his life for a new set of hands. How am I doing? Fuck, if I know. But, I’ll tell you one thing. Those sons of bitches are going to pay if it’s the last thing I do. They want to screw with me and try to bribe me with my hands, that’s one thing. But they attack Sam, they all but fucking rape him, no matter that it was his damned idea, and it’s all out war.”
Dean stopped at Bobby’s door and grabbed the handle with the metal appliance. He held the door open so that Bobby could get his wheelchair through.
“I don’t have hands,” Dean told Bobby, “But I’ve got Sam, I’ve got you and Cas, shit, Lou too. And I have one huge fucking score to settle. This has all gone on long enough.”
End
Author: Pkwench
Rating: R for language, boobs, drug use, and loss of limb(s)
Genre and/or Pairing: hurt/comfort, Sam/OFC
Characters: Dean, Sam, OC
Spoilers: Everything
Warnings: Dean has no hands. He swears. He smokes. There are things he cannot do. Please do not read if this disturbs you.
Word Count: 9,709
Disclaimer: Kripke would blow my hands off before he’d let me do this to his boy.
Summary: Ah, another comment fic meme. I love those things! This one from the lovely roque_clasique who prompted: Both Dean's hands get cut off in a hunting accident. Fast-forward a year later. Where are he and Sam living? What is Dean doing for a job? How is he adjusting to everyday life?
Author's Note: I find that I’m horribly nervous about posting this. I generally just hide in comment fic memes and haven’t reposted anything that I’ve written for them. This is an out of sequence series of one shots centered on the above prompt. It hasn’t been beta read and any gross errors that you find are all on me. Also, the title, lame to the point of painful, I know. But, I couldn’t think of anything else. Erm, no hands. I mentioned that, right? With all of the challenges and indignities, no hands. I don’t know why I feel like warning everyone about that incessantly, but there you are. No hands!
-
As he had so many times in his life, Dean Winchester put his foot down on the gas pedal of his car and grinned fiercely as she leapt forward into the gloaming as if trying to catch the fleeting sun. The rumble and purr of the engine thrummed up through his boots. It had been so long since he’d been behind the wheel that the sensation set him tingling and he thought: ‘oh, Christ, I’m still alive.’
Worry could not temper the joy, the sense of finally being unfettered and set free. In the back seat, his brother lay with his long limbs drawn in, head on his jacket. Dean flicked a glance to him and the car’s other occupant. Caught the whiteness of the scar that ruined her face.
“Lou?” he asked.
“I think he’s just sleeping now.” She looked up at him in the mirror with eyes so blue that it hurt him to look at them. “Drive faster anyway.”
He did. As the car crested ninety and the rational part of his mind started to whisper concern, he laughed. He couldn’t help it. It just felt so God damned good.
**
“Whaddya got?”
”White mile, early thirties. Bilateral amputation the hard way, multiple lacerations, third degree burns both arms and upper torso …”
“Wait, back up. Amputation?”
“Kinda. Heard there was a big explosion at the iron works, yeah?”
“Oh, man…”
“Yeah. Both hands blown off.”
“We heard there weren’t any survivors.”
“Two of them, one’s got nothing other than a couple scratches. Mine’s coming in with uncontrolled bleeding. BP one-eighty over one hundred. Tachy in the one-sixties. Sats ninety-seven. Wired out of his mind. He’s got to be. Nothing will keep him down. BP and heart rate keep climbing. I … Jesus, Annie. I have him restrained back here. God damned hands are blown all to hell and he keeps trying to get up. He’s fucking inhuman.”
**
“You’re screwing my nurse.”
Sam nodded. Just like that, without any argument or excuses, he folded and agreed. He was leaning against the doorframe between the dining room and the kitchen as if he needed the extra support to stand. He looked tired. Dean thought he always looked tired. He was a roadmap of exhaustion. Pale skin. Bruised eyes. A stark, leanness to the lines of his face. And that constant, whipped and lackluster expression that said “I just don’t know how much more I can take.”
It was the expression that did it. The expression and the truth behind it. Sam was running himself into the ground. If the last six years hadn’t wrung the life out of the kid, the next six surely would - if he could even make it that long. He was hanging on by a thread.
So, Sam was screwing his nurse. Big deal. Most of Dean felt like dropping to his knees and offering up a couple of hallelujahs because fuck if Sam didn’t need it. He didn’t care. That was the weirdest thing. Dean had no real objection to the fact that Sam and Lou had started sleeping together. It was just that he was so tired, so drunk, and in a state that his father might have recognized - really God damned angry about life in general. Just as John couldn’t sit down and rationally talk to his children about how much the loss of his wife was killing him, so Dean couldn’t talk to Sam about his hands.
He finally understood that sometimes there weren’t words big enough or deep enough. He couldn’t open his mouth and even attempt to explain the unhinged hopelessness, uselessness, or anger. He didn’t know how to explain that Sam thoughtfully replacing every last doorknob in the house with a latch had filled him with such a combination of rage and gratefulness that he felt like he was losing his mind. He didn’t know if it was pain or loss or despair he felt when Lou washed his hair, zipped his pants, or opened his beer. He didn’t know how he even got out of bed or how to explain to Sam the monumental effort - physical and mental - that doing so took.
He was consumed by the need to let loose, to let everything he couldn’t express just explode, consequences be damned. But, he still didn’t know how to say any of it. So, he latched on to Sam screwing Lou - much as he really didn’t give a shit - and tore into him.
And Sam took it. Head down. Floppy God damned hair hiding his eyes. Big, strong hands in his pockets as if he knew instinctively that Dean would look at them, that he would follow each motion of wrists and fingers with obsessive longing.
“She wipes my fucking ass, Sam. And you’re sleeping with her.”
Sam looked at him. Tired and defeated. As if he’d been undergoing months of chemotherapy and was waiting for inevitable death from either the disease or the cure.
“Do you want me to stop?”
Dean’s phantom fingers curled into his phantom palms as he made two fists. He could actually feel the action of flesh that wasn’t there. It was so real that he swung with his right hand, aiming for Sam’s jaw. They both swore as Dean’s stump connected. The pain to the abused limb tightened his focus and reality came back in that sickening crunch.
“Jesus, Sammy. I don’t know what I’m doing any more.”
**
After the third code, Sam told the nurses that it was enough. He signed papers to change Dean’s status and another to put him on comfort care. The blood was stopped. The ventilator taken away. The drip that was meant to stabilize Dean’s skyrocketing blood pressure was taken down and thrown away. Morphine was brought in as the ventilator was disconnected. It wouldn’t be long, but Sam was told to prepare himself. Sometimes, it was quick. Sometimes not. With the level of trauma, the blood loss, peculiarities of Dean’s speeding heart rate and dangerously high pressure, no one expected it to take very long.
Sam was given a box of Kleenex and instructions to call if he needed anything.
He sat, the box of tissues unopened, as tears and snot ran down his face. He watched Dean, focused solely on the rise and fall of his chest. Sam could not bear to look at the thick, mitten bandages covering the stumps where Dean’s hands used to be. Before his first code, he’d been cauterized and stitched. There’d been talk of grafts, limb specialists, and counseling right up until the moment that Dean’s heart, cruising at that moment at a rate of something upwards of one-hundred-eighty beats per minute, despite the drugs, skittered to a bump and then a stop.
Twenty-three minutes, three-hundred-fifty joules, and two cracked ribs later, Dean had bought himself a ventilator and another team of doctors who left the limbs alone and concentrated on the peculiarities of his speeding heart and abnormal blood pressure. The white coats had clustered around Sam, tapping pens against jaws, playing with stethoscopes, and looking at Dean as if he was the strangest thing to have rolled into their ICU. A man in Dean’s excellent physical condition should not have such pressure, Sam was told. In fact, one expected someone who’d suffered such severe trauma and surgery to be undergoing treatment for low blood pressure. It was all very strange and tests should be done. It didn’t escape Sam’s attention that he was given a release for a second, more detailed toxicology screen. He signed it and allowed the labs to be drawn, knowing that it was going to come back negative or unexplainable.
After the second code, only one doctor remained. Sam never knew if the others had given up or been driven away. The remaining one could only stare at Dean with the sort of wide-eyed awe of a child. He stayed, staring and saying nothing for so long that Sam, aching, grief-stricken, and tired as hell, finally snapped. The doctor apologized profusely and fell into the sort of stammer that suggested that he’d had a severe stutter as a child. Out of answers, he’d started fishing around in the dark, running the sorts of tests that had the laboratory calling the nurses who in turned called him back repeatedly for clarification. In his broken stammer, he finally explained to Sam that Dean’s blood had come back as radioactive, but that, for reasons no one could explain, he didn’t appear to have been in any way exposed to radioactive material.
“Th-th-th-thought w-with the iron wuh-wuh-wuh …” The good doctor was stuck on the w for what Sam determined to be roughly five minutes. When he choked past it, the words came out in one, clean and unbroken rush. “…works that the chances of your brother encountering radioactive material wasn’t too unlikely. It’s just, we don’t get any readings off of him. I swear, I grabbed a Geiger counter from the emergency preparedness kit in the ER. Nothing. He’s clean. But, every test we run on his blood comes back saying the same thing and it’s just so weird. His blood shows the same radioactive properties as sunlight.”
Sam thought it was weird, too. He thought it was weird that angels could be trying so hard to save his brother and failing at it so spectacularly.
Then came the third code and possibly the longest forty-seven minutes of Sam’s life. Dean’s strange blood work had convinced Sam that angels were on board and working diligently to save his life. He stood, waiting for the angels to succeed. He was shoved back in the corner and towered over everyone as the code team ran into the room for the third time that day. The first nurse to hit the room was so small that she had to stand on a stool do compressions. She was merciless and fierce, despite her lack of size, and Sam heard another of Dean’s ribs snap as she pushed on him. They shocked him again. The ventilator was set and reset. Sam lost count of the number of drugs to come out of the crash cart. Syringes were ripped out of sterile wrappings and pushed with choreographed ease.
Dean came back again, but his heart, climbing again to unexplainable rates once it restarted, would not last. His nurse gently explained to Sam that there was no longer any constancy to the rhythm of his heart. It was wild and out of control.
“You’re wrong. His heart is the one thing that’s always been constant,” Sam told the nurse. “Bring me the papers. I can’t do this to him any more.”
Dean died two hours later.
**
Dean had never worked so hard for a cigarette in his life. Two prosthetic limbs lay on the old Formica kitchen table, cables and straps limp and still somehow suggesting something insidious to him. They’d been there since this morning when Sam had tried, for maybe the thousandth time, to get Dean to just try them. Honestly, he didn’t know why he continued to resist it. He hated relying on Sam and Lou. Couldn’t fucking stand it, but something about slipping them on, about moving gears and straps and wires so that he could open and close the metal and plastic limb just set his spine out of place. Adapting meant accepting and he wasn’t sure that he’d been off of the drugs long enough to accept much of anything.
Still. The fucking prostheses seemed to mock Dean as he held down the pack of cigarettes with his left arm - he couldn’t quite say stump and utterly refused to ever adopt the phrase ‘residual limb’. He’d tried flipping down the box top with his right arm, but it wasn’t happening.
“Fuck, Lou. Can’t you buy a soft pack like a normal person?”
Incensed and determined, Dean bent down and grabbed the top with his teeth. He pushed down with his left arm on the box and pulled. The top didn’t tear off completely, but the cigarettes were dislodged. They rolled across the table top, some of them going off completely and dropping to the floor.
He stopped one with his left arm and bent to the table again. Dean lipped at the cigarette and picked it up, trying his damnedest not to drool on it and get the filter wet.
“Light, light, light,” he said. “Ah. That’ll do nicely.”
Across the kitchen was the stove. He preferred gas. Had always found it a better heat source when he cooked, not that it mattered since his cooking days were long behind him. Sam, unfortunately, had found them a place with an electric range. Cheap. Easy. Not so convenient to light a smoke off of, but it would work.
It took five minutes and the patience of a monk for Dean to get the dial for the range to turn. He batted at it with the warped flesh of his left arm which had become dominate by dumb luck - there was still something of his hand there. A nub where his thumb had been and then a wrinkled, misshapen disaster that used to be his palm. He could usually push things with the thumb, but the knob on the range was nearly too much. Sweat had worked down his face by the time he’d managed it and he’d clenched his teeth so tightly that he’d snapped the filter on the smoke.
When he turned back to the table to get another, the prosthetic limbs where there, mocking. He could hear Lou and Sam both telling him how he could have turned that damned knob with ease. Well, maybe not ease, but certainly without such intense labor. He held up his right hand to the prostheses and imagined his middle finger snapping up in salute.
By the time he got another cigarette between his lips, the burner was glowing red hot. Dean leaned over it carefully and gingerly put the cigarette to the burner, hoping like hell that it wouldn’t catch fire. He sucked in a breath as the tip glowed and smoke curled up. After a few puffs, it was going.
Dean stood and pulled a long drag into his lungs. When he blew it out, his head buzzed almost instantly. He could almost imagine the nicotine patting him on the knee and asking him where the heck he’d been, so welcome and so familiar was the sensation. The tingle worked down to his limbs and he found himself relaxing almost instantly.
”God damned Marlboros,” he sighed, “where have you been all of my life?”
It wasn’t until the burner started smoking and he realized that he had no way to flick his cigarette that Dean realized he needed assistance. That he needed, oh ha-ha, a hand.
He walked to Sam’s room. The ash dropped from the tip on his way and the smoke blew back into Dean’s eyes. He hadn’t realized what a hand to mouth thing smoking was until he’d taken the hands out of the equation. Much as he wanted to keep puffing on the damned thing, in fact as much as he wanted to bitch light another right off of it, he also wanted to take it out of his mouth. He wanted to roll it around fingers that he didn’t have and to flick it with the thumbs that were, for the most part, long gone.
Sam, Dean remembered, hated smoking. He supposed it all tied back to Dad. When they’d been young, when a hunt had gone all right or John Winchester had accidentally found his way into a good mood in spite of himself, sometimes he’d swoop them up. One boy in each arm. His coat had smelled of spicy aftershave, gun oil, and cigarette smoke. Dean thought it was safest, most comforting smell on the planet. He suspected that Sam did too and that it was the happy memories, not the bad ones, that disagreed with him so much.
When Dean experimented with smoking at sixteen, Sam had bitched himself nearly blue. When he’d decided that he and the Marlboro Man might be full time pals at nineteen, Sam had been so annoyed that he’d actually ratted Dean out to Dad - which had resulted in a fan-fucking-tastic screaming match that had come down to the classic morale “do as I say, Dean, not as I fucking do.”
He’d smoked anyway; happily, merrily, right up until New Orleans, that damned job, and that damned hurricane.
Dean hesitated outside of Sam’s door. It was cracked and he could see his brother in his bed. He hadn’t even undressed and had gotten only so far as to get one boot off. Sam had managed hunting, demonic ability, possession, and a three-year flirtation with the devil, but Dean was pretty sure that logging and part-time security work was going to kill him.
He let his brother sleep and went down hall to the back bedroom. It wasn’t open. Dean kicked lightly at the door, even has he pushed down on the door handle with his arm.
“Lou, c’mon. Little help here.”
She didn’t complain about being woken up at three in the morning. Despite the fact that Lou had no medical training what-so-ever, she was still his nurse and it wasn’t unusual for her to have to get up in the middle of the night to help him with things no man should have to endure needing help with.
Lou stumbled to the door. She was wearing penguin pajama bottoms and a Pink Floyd T-shirt that Dean was pretty sure she had to have swiped from his laundry pile. With her eyes barely open, it was hard to tell that her scar pulled down on her right eye.
“Are you kidding me?” she said eyeing the cigarette.
“Nope,” Dean told her. “And I think the kitchen might catch on fire in a few minutes.”
She pulled the cigarette from his mouth and tapped it in the plant by her door. Lou took a drag and then put it back between his lips. She brushed by him then and motioned for him to follow.
“I liked you better when you were stoned all of the time,” she said.
“I liked me better when I had fucking hands, sweetheart,” Dean replied.
**
“Where’ve you been, Cas?”
Dean sat in the back seat of the impala, head tilted back so the he could see the faint points of light that marked the far away stars. His breath fogged the glass and he had to hold it every few minutes so that he could see again. The morphine was kicking in finally and he suspected that Sam had it timed, that Sam would be back out to fetch him from the car when he was too high to be anything other than compliant.
“They wouldn’t let me go,” Cas said. His voice was quiet. Dean didn’t have to look at him to know that he was staring at the thick bandages that had taken the place of his hands. He didn’t know why he’d had Sam rewrap them. The wounds he’d received just a week ago now looked as though he’d had them for a lifetime. Fucking Zachariah.
“Do you need to see them?” Dean asked, feeling almost dreamy.
“Will it upset you?”
“Probably,” Dean answered. “Do it anyway. I’m always upset and right now almost, almost high as a kite. Damn, Sam steals the best shit. Roxanol, I think. Concentrated, liquid morphine. They give it to dying people. Funny, huh?”
“No.”
His breath fogged the glass again as the car was filled with the sound of wings beating the air. Cas was next to him in the time it took for the sound to reach Dean’s ears. He smiled, feeling a little warmer, a little happier as the drugs pulled on him. He thought it felt a lot like a boat going out to sea. His being rocked back and forth on the prow of the good ship morphine. It was really hard to be disturbed by anything, though he found he still had to turn his head away when Castiel unwound the bandage from first his right arm and then the left.
Dean felt Castiel’s fingers tremble as he touched the ruined skin.
“I wove this flesh together,” he said quietly. “I took something that was dead and made it whole again. Strong and beautiful so that your soul would have a home to come back to. And look what they did to you. Look what they did, Dean.”
“I can’t,” Dean said honestly. “Not enough drugs in the world and, wow. I’m fucking baked as it is. Time to see Bobby, I s’pose. He’s pissed that I won’t get out of the car and Sam thinks I don’t know that he loaded me up on the drugs so that he could make me get out, but I know he did. Put the dropper right in my mouth.”
Dean held up both of his stumps to Castiel. “Because I can’t do it myself, you see.”
Castiel didn’t turn away. He took hold of Dean’s arms at the elbows. “Do you want me to take you inside?”
“That would be awesome,” Dean replied sincerely. It would spare him waiting for someone to open the door of both the car and Bobby’s house.
Cas held onto him tightly and Dean closed his eyes. The drugs slowed time down for him and he was sure that he could feel the breeze from Castiel’s wings as they beat the air. He wondered what they felt like. He wondered what it would be like to lean against his friend’s warm side and have one wing wrapped around him, hiding him from the world.
He was sitting one moment and standing the next. This was something that disoriented him on his best of days, but it was enough to send him pitching towards Bobby’s floor now. Castiel bore him up, catching him beneath the armpits before Dean could fall.
“I love you, man,” Dean said as he was righted.
“I’m sure,” Castiel said.
“No, I really do. Really. And I know you and I know you’re going in circles in that brain of yours, kicking your own ass up and down because you can’t fix me. It’s not your fault. So don’t, okay?”
“Dean …”
Dean held up his naked stumps for Cas. “Look, ma. No hands!” He giggled, not ignorant of the fact that it was a terrified and hysterical sound. “No hands! Get it?”
Castiel put an arm around his waist and led him from the back door where they’d rematerialized. There was a look of panic and discomfort in his eyes along with liberal doses of what Dean was sure was anger and heartache.
“No hands,” Dean whispered. He said it over and over and probably would have said it all night if he hadn’t heard the sound of Sam drawing in a hitching breath in the next room.
He stopped in his tracks and knocked his arm into Cas. A week ago, that action would have been him putting a hand on the angel’s shoulder. Now it was an awkward thump from misshapen flesh.
“Tell me what happened, boy.” Bobby. His voice in the low, comforting tone he adopted when soothing frightened animals and overwrought Winchester boys. Dean nudged Cas again, indicating that he wanted to wait.
They were in the shadows and neither Sam nor Bobby could see them.
“He died,” Sam whispered. “I told them … I had them … they took him off of everything. Ventilator and the blood and all of the bags and bags of shit. I asked them to let him go because … Jesus, Bobby. I don’t know what they were doing to him. I don’t know what the angels were up to, but it was like someone was pouring fire in his veins. Every time he’d wake up just a little, he’d scream and he’d scream. I don’t think he even knew for the longest time that his hands were gone. He just screamed like he was back in hell.”
‘Hell made of sunlight,’ Dean thought dreamily. ‘Sunlight that burned and burned and, oh fucking God …’
Cas’s arm tightened around him. Dean sucked in a couple of shallow breaths and listened, trying to hear Sam’s retelling of the things he’d missed out on.
“Easy,” Bobby said in that comforting, ‘good dog’ voice of his. “Take it easy and tell me.”
“An hour and a half after they took him off of everything, he started gasping. Nurse came in. Gave him enough morphine to put down Godzilla and said it wouldn’t be long. He was breathing like a guppy, eyes rolling in his head, and there was this rattle. This fucking rattle in his chest that … it’s death. It’s the sound of death. I’d have held his hand, but I couldn’t. So, I kept my hands on either side of his face …”
Dean could remember Sam’s big hands on his cheeks. The spread of his fingers had nearly covered his face and he’d tasted the salt of the tears that had dropped from his brother’s eyes.
“…and then he was gone. He was just fucking gone. I told myself that it was better, that it’s what Dean would have wanted. If given the choice? He’d never have chosen to lose his hands, to become dependent on everyone and useless to himself.”
“He’s not useless, Sam.”
Dean wavered as he felt a little sucker punch work its way past the morphine. Sam was right. He had a long life of dependency and uselessness to look forward to.
“I love the guy, Bobby. I’d die to take back what happened to him, but you know him as well as I do. That’s how he’s going to feel.”
“Is that how you feel?” Castiel whispered in Dean’s ear.
“I feel all orange at the moment,” he confided. “And maybe a little sleepy.”
“I’ll take you to bed.”
“Dirty whore,” Dean told him. “Wait. Wanna hear the rest of Sam’s story.”
“Dean was dead for an hour,” Sam was saying. “The nurse had told me that I could stay as long as I wanted, but she’d brought in the body bag. It was sitting on the counter with empty toe tags. I knew they wanted me gone and I was thinking that I should call you. Figure out where to have his body sent. Figure out … what we should do.”
“And then?” Bobby asked.
“Light,” Sam whispered. “Sunlight, white light, I don’t know what it was. The monitors in the room started hissing and screaming with feedback. The window shattered. And then the walls. You’ve seen the news. They’re calling it an earthquake. There’s a crack in the foundation from the front of the building right up to where Dean’s bed was. The power went out. It was dark everywhere but Dean’s room. And it was so bright that I couldn’t see. I couldn’t hear. I thought it was going to kill me.”
“Michael,” Castiel whispered.
“Fuck head,” Dean agreed.
“You think he said yes before he went,” Bobby asked Sam. “You think Michael was coming down to take Dean to the dance and changed his mind?”
”No,” Sam replied. “I think Dean was saying no the entire time he was dying and that Michael tried to force his way in. I think maybe they were fighting over Dean’s body the whole time and then Michael came to just fucking take it after Dean died. Only it didn’t work and Dean came back. The light left with a sound like a cannon and Dean woke up. I watched his burns and scars fade away. I watched the color come back into his face, Bobby, and I thought, thank God, he’s okay. It’s going to be okay. Only when I unwrapped his hands …”
Dean raised his hands to cover his ears and swore instead as he realized that they weren’t there. “Look, ma,” he whispered. “No fucking hands.”
**
Dean decided that God had created Sam’s hands with an extra amount of divine artistry. Before, they’d only seemed big to him. Capable of packing a punch with the intensity of a freight train. Paws. Dean thought maybe he’d called them paws a couple of times. It was as much thought as he’d ever put into his little brother’s hands.
Now, after months of watching Sam’s hands and after minutes of staring at them when he shouldn’t be, Dean realized that they were beautiful. Expressive when Sam wasn’t shoving them in his pockets. Deft with long, elegant fingers and solid knuckles. Dean watched those hands with longing and tried to remember what it had been like to feel a woman beneath his fingertips as Sam surely had to be feeling Lou now.
His voyeurism couldn’t be blamed on the drugs. Sam had cunningly weaned Dean off of them long ago and it had been a couple of weeks since Lou had shared a joint with him. He needed to go. It was tasteless and, given that it was his brother and his nurse, it was probably creepy besides.
But he didn’t go. Not for a long while. He stood in the laundry room by the window that looked out into the back yard. They had no nearby neighbors and the yard was little more than a couple of deck chairs on a slab of concrete fifteen feet from the forest. To the right was the garage. To the left a small clothesline and potted vegetables.
Sam and Lou were by the clothesline. A basket sat, forgotten, off to the side. Lou still had a clothespin in her hand. Sam’s hands, which Dean could not stop watching, were in motion. The movement of them mirrored the expression on his face. When he brought his hands down to either side of her hips and slid fingers beneath the waistband of her shorts, his smile was eager and a little wicked. Dean could see him take hold of her ass beneath her clothes and give a little squeeze as he drew her in for a kiss. And Lou, pretty Lou with her thousand freckles and terrible, ruining scar, wound her own hands into Sam’s hair and kissed him back. Her hands were good, too. Big for a girl, but she was tall. He liked the way that her hands met her wrists in a little protrusion of bone, a little knot on the outside aspect.
They seemed to use their hands more with each other than they did apart, more than they did when he was present. Sam’s hands did not stay still. He stroked her. He petted her. He slid his hands behind her back and curled his long fingers over the backs of her shoulders so that he could bend her slightly, exposing her neck for him to kiss. The beauty of it was making Dean’s head hurt as was the simplicity of their actions and the cosmic unfairness of it all.
How long had it been since Dean had been with a woman, let alone explored her with his fingertips? Had he marked that occasion? Had he made the most of it? The last intimate moment he’d ever spent with his hands and he couldn’t recall it. The memory was gone now as if it had been burned away from him, too.
He turned away, finally, when Sam pulled Lou down into the grass and slipped her shirt off. His big hands covered her breasts completely. Dean left the laundry room and the window, shaking slightly. Not one sexual thought crossed his mind. Just the image of Sam’s large hands sliding up Lou’s bare torso and covering her breasts. His long fingers. Her pale skin. It had been beautiful and something Dean would never do again.
**
“Dean, we can’t leave the hospital. This is way over both our heads. I’m sorry, man, I don’t know how to say it gently, but your hands are gone and we’re going to need help. We need to at least stay long enough to get you fitted for prosthetics and learn how the myoelectrics work.”
It was two in the morning and Dean’s fifth day without hands. For all of his trauma, he was essentially healed and the hospital’s newest miracle patient. He could feel the wrongness of it burning in the tips of where his fingers used to be. It wasn’t just the loss of his hands, which he did his level best not to think about, it was the entire situation. An earthquake. A power outage. And Dean the miracle man. Dead three times and now alive. Now awake without so much as a bruise or a scratch until he pulled his arms out from beneath the blankets where he hid them and found the twisted lumps of flesh.
Patient confidentiality apparently broke down in the presence of miracles. Dean figured he’d have maybe a day before local news cameras started piling up outside. Already cards and flowers from people he didn’t know had come trickling in. At first just from the amazed nursing staff, but then their families. And their friends. People who had never set foot in the hospital or met one Dean Alexander Wilkins. The story was getting around. Which meant his face might get around. Attach it with Sam’s and Sam’s fingerprints and it was a disaster waiting to happen. Having been declared legally dead twice did nothing to calm Dean’s certainty that they were running too big of a risk.
And Sam’s hopes for waiting around for prosthetics? Insane. Their insurance would never hold out that long, would not be able to take the scrutiny as it was entered into one database and another.
Besides, God knew how he planned on getting by without a nurse at his beck and call on a daily basis, but Dean had discovered that he was seriously opposed to artificial limbs. He’d had to call the nurse for pain meds the first time that Sam had come in with the brochures on transradial prosthetics.
“Sam,” Dean said as sternly as he could. The buzz was wearing thin and he could pretty much focus on his brother. “We’re criminals, man. Do you understand that? It’s literally going to come down prison or no prison here. We stay so that I can get rigged up like friggin’ Hookman and we go to jail. It’s that simple. We get out of here, we might be okay.”
“God dammit, Dean. We can’t just go pick this crap up at Wal-Mart. They don’t carry false arms and peg legs at the drug store. The measurements are specific and someone has to show you how it all works.”
“I am not going to prison without fucking hands,” Dean hissed. “Get that through your thick god damned skull right now, Sam. They’ll eat me alive. If that’s your plan, then you fucking kill me now because dying will be better than that shit.”
When Sam slumped, Dean knew that he’d won. Sam would get him out. Sign him out against medical advice or sneak him out in the dead of night. If Castiel would slip out from whatever rock he’d hidden under, it would be easier yet. Dean didn’t care. They were getting out.
With that fear taken care of, reality crept up his spine and Dean took a chill.
“However we go, Sam? Make sure it’s with drugs. Lots and lots of drugs. It’s going to take me a while here and … and I don’t want to know what’s going on or come down long enough to even care, all right?”
**
Dean glared at the straw in Bobby’s hand and nodded in disgust. Bobby dropped it. It bobbed in the bottle of beer on the table next to him and he felt a moment of absolute clarity as he leaned awkwardly over the arm of the couch to take a drink. This was life without hands - drinking beer through a straw. He started to wish he hadn’t let Bobby talk him out of putting a dropper full of the Roxanol in it.
“Beer through a fucking straw,” Dean muttered. He took a drink, wincing in displeasure despite the coldness of the beer. The straw made it taste funny. He swore that it did.
“Be happy you can drink a beer, boy,” Bobby said.
“I can’t open it.”
“I can’t stand up.”
“I can’t blow my nose,” Dean countered.
“Bullshit,” Bobby said. “I saw you do it yesterday.”
“Well, it was awkward as fuck.”
“Well, I guess that’s just tough shit.”
“Dammit, I can’t even scratch my balls!”
“Kid,” Bobby sighed, “I think I’d die happy if I could just feel my balls again.”
They glared at each other. Dean over the straw bobbing out of his beer and Bobby from his wheelchair. Without preamble, they both began to laugh. Bobby slapped the arm of his wheelchair and Dean waved a stump at him. When Bobby snorted a little, Dean laughed louder, slumping back against the couch as tears squeezed out of the corners of his eyes.
“Balls,” he sputtered.
Upstairs he could hear a thump and then another. They’d woken up Sam. Dean cringed in exaggeration at Bobby and tried to shush him. He had no finger to put in front of his lips and felt a little ridiculous as he blew on his stump.
“Okay,” Bobby said as he regained control. “Okay. I’m fine now. It wasn’t that damned funny.”
Dean bit back another whirlwind of laughter that was dying to make its way up and out of his throat. He leaned back to the beer and took another drink. It tasted better the second time around, but the straw, still bobbing on the foam, made its escape as he pulled back from the beer. It jumped for freedom and Dean watched it drop to the wooden floor.
“Shit. See what I mean?”
Bobby waved a hand at him. “You’ll just have to get used to that kind shit,” he said. “What you need in the meantime is a nurse. You might get yourself good and gorked every night and not give a crap about who has to do what for you, but Sam’s stone cold sober every time he zips your pants for you and cleans your ass. You need a little home health, son.”
“Unless you have some magic underground home health network for out of commission hunters, I think we’re screwed on that one, Bobby. Nurses mean insurance, lots of signatures, money, and staying in one place.”
“A licensed one, yeah. But, I think I have an idea. Ellen or your Daddy ever tell you about the demon old Bill Harvelle went up against seventeen or so years ago? No? Well, it was a nasty one. Took down an entire family in a day. Only one left alive when he got there was the daughter. She was maybe all of ten at the time. Demon was in her mother and had been keeping her around for sport. Mauled her. Kid’s face still has a scar from her scalp to her chin. Shame, really. She’s got a pretty sweet smile.”
“I don’t know if I like where this is going, Bobby,” Dean cautioned. “If you have some idea about pairing up the handless cripple with the nice, quiet girl without a face, this isn’t going to go so well. You shouldn’t try to be all matchmaker with the freaks. Makes us nervous.”
“Boy, you’re about as dumb and as mean as junkyard dog, some days,” Bobby snapped. “First of all, this doesn’t have squat to do with matchmaking. Who do you think helped me bathe and take a crap when I first got home from the hospital? You boys weren’t around …”
“Bobby …”
“No, I’m not blaming you. I’m just saying. We’ve been moving this girl around for years, Dean. Local law pinned the death of her entire family on her and Bill, sorry sap that he was, couldn’t bring himself to leave some poor kid to go to nuthouse for life just because she’d had the bad luck to run into a demon. So, he took her home. She and Ellen didn’t like each other none, but it was all right - there was plenty of hunters that felt sorry for her. She bounced around from one family of hunters to another. Learned some useful skills. And, with hunters dropping like flies, she doesn’t have anywhere to go.”
“Then let her stay and help you out.”
“I don’t need help, you stubborn idjit. You do.”
“I don’t,” Dean lied.
“Really? Okay. When the morphine runs out and you’re nice, alert, and awake, how’s it going to work for you when Sam gives you your bath?”
Overdue for his drugs as he was, Dean didn’t have to think on it too long. He just didn’t like the idea of a stranger becoming so intimate to the kinds of things he barely paid attention to.
“I guess set it up.”
“You think so, genius? Hallelujah.”
Dean looked up as the thumping overhead became the sound of Sam’s footsteps down the stairs. Despite his size, Sam could be quiet as mouse when he wanted to be. Dean almost suspected him of stepping a little heavy to give them warning that he was coming down.
“Sammy,” he said in greeting. His brother, so surly and guarded of late, relaxed a little at the sound of his voice.
“Hey, guys, I’m going to go out for a while.”
“Where to?” Bobby asked.
Dean thought Sam’s answering grin seemed a little sneaky; more so when Castiel blinked into existence in the room.
“Wal-Mart,” Sam replied.
**
“I fucking hate you, Lou. I hate you. I hate the way you’re looking at me. I hate this fucking house and this fucking bathroom and this fucking life.”
An experienced nurse, a real nurse, would have talked him down. Gotten him to express his feelings and explain why he was reacting so badly to help that he couldn’t do without. A frightened girl might have looked at him in fear or run away. Lou, Louise Ann Catron and known as Lannie Cat to her grandmother and friends before a demon had ripped her apart, just stood and waited. She looked at him passively, almost like she’d chosen to detach her thoughts from her body and let them wander off into the Washington night.
She waited and Dean squirmed in absolute discomfort and despair. He had to crap and was standing in the bathroom, Lou at his side, as he cursed her, her entire family, God, and just about everything in the universe for the fact that he couldn’t hold it any longer.
“God damn son of a bitch!” Dean shouted.
Sam was knocking on the door within seconds of his outburst and wasn’t that just fucking great? Maybe they could drive a few miles down the road to the logging camp where Sam had gotten on for the spring and invite in the entire company for Dean’s Big Crap.
“Everything, uh, all right in there?” Sam asked.
To his surprise, Lou, who he hadn’t quite gotten a handle on yet, called back to Sam. “We’re fine. Be out in a bit, okay?”
Dean continued to glare at her, but relaxed slightly. “Let’s fucking do this already,” he snapped.
Lou leaned over and unbuttoned his jeans.
**
Sam walked between towering shelves full of artificial limbs. The storage facility was bigger than he’d anticipated and he was almost unsettled to see just how many arms and legs he was surrounded by.
The new, greener facility went with solar charged cells for night. Small, round lamps glowed dimly every third intersection as he and Castiel turned and made their way from legs to arms. Once among the arms, they had to sort through shelf after shelf. The number of arms was disturbing and a little upsetting.
‘How many people had to live like this’, Sam wondered. ‘How many of them woke up in hospitals and tried to cope with the reality of a missing arm, a missing hand, a missing leg?’
He and Castiel were stuck in a seemingly endless aisle of arms designed for stumps ending above the elbow. Which would not do. They needed transradial limbs. He pulled Cas to the next aisle of arms and kept looking.
As with any problem Sam Winchester faced, he had studied. Dean had no hands. Dean needed prosthetics. Dean was a criminal who could not get measured and fit for them. There had to be a way.
There was. Sam had found several facilities across the country that collected used prosthetic limbs from families of the deceased or from those who had gotten newer limbs. Most of the companies, despite their charitable face, actually broke the limbs down into parts. Scavenging and selling the myoelectric components and recycling plastic, cable, and metal. Others, however, sent limbs to developing nations. True enough, most of the limbs found here were of the simpler variety, but Sam figured it would be a start. Something to get Dean going. Something to give him a chance.
“Sam,” Castiel said. He held the company’s brochure in his hand. “It says that these limbs are for the underprivileged.”
“We are the underprivileged in this case,” Sam replied. “Nothing we’re going to find is going to fit him exactly - especially on the left, but, unless you can convince one of your brothers to give him his hands back …”
“They won’t,” Cas growled. “Zachariah said if Dean does not choose to help save the world that he doesn’t deserve to have hands.”
“Gabriel?”
“Vanished.”
“Then, like I said, we are the underprivileged.”
**
Dean clamped down on the cigarette in his mouth and scowled as he once again attempted the Herculean task of trying to light it. He twisted his right wrist just a bit, causing the limb to grasp the strike-anywhere-match more tightly. Then he leaned down and dragged the match across the concrete of the back patio. He cheered when it caught. He brought the arm up and held the match close to his face, lighting the cigarette.
“I’m a fucking genius!” Dean told Lou.
“Yeah, yeah. You’re letting the match burn down, genius,” she replied.
“So what? The hook …”
“…appendage?”
“…grabby part,” he decided. “The grabby part’s metal. It’s not like it’ll burn anything.” He let the match drop to the pavement and held his limb up to his mouth. He twisted his wrist, opened the appliance, and flicked it back the other way to close it on the cigarette. He took it from his lips with a flourish.
“Genius,” he repeated. “They should incorporate more smoking into limb rehabilitation.”
“My idea,” Lou told him. “I should market it and retire a millionaire.”
“Until you’re sued by all of the COPD and lung cancer patients,” Dean chuckled.
They both looked up as the house lights behind them flicked on. Dean winced, feeling genuinely bad. Sam worked his ass off and was generally up by five during the week. He and Lou took turns nagging him to bed most nights, but nothing helped. Sam was growing paler and more pinched by the day. Dean hated what taking care of him was doing to his brother and he hated himself both for it and for his inability to at least allow the guy a decent night’s sleep.
He felt both better and worse when Sam stepped outside in his T-shirt and sweats, rubbing his eyes sleepily like he’d done since he’d been two. He even wore the same little ‘why-the-hell-am-I-awake-now’ pout that he had as child when awakened in the night. But when he saw Dean with both prosthetic limbs on, kicked back and having a smoke like a mostly normal guy, his face lit up. Sam smiled like every rotten thing that had ever happened to them had just been taken back.
“Look at you!” Sam said.
“Yeah, well, I was motivated,” Dean replied, giving the cigarette a little wiggle.
“Shittiest motivator ever,” Sam said, giving Lou a sidelong look. He was still smiling though and Dean didn’t think Lou took him seriously at all. In fact, she just shrugged in reply and watched them with a pleased little smile.
“Still can’t figure out how to wipe my butt,” Dean told him
Sam just grinned. “Dude, I’ll save for a month and buy you one of those Japanese toilets that does it for you. I’m just, holy crap, Dean. I’m so …”
“Please don’t say you’re proud of me.”
“Proud of you,” Sam finished.
“Man,” Dean whined. “This is so undignified. It’s bad enough that I have to get my hands blown off, now I have to put up with this? You’re my kid brother, Sammy. Is there no limit to the amount of humiliation I have to endure?”
“Maybe just this,” Sam replied. He swooped down before Dean could protest and wrapped him in a hug.
“Kill me now,” Dean moaned from Sam’s embrace.
**
Dean woke to the sound of Lou screaming his name and Sam’s. It was the sort of scream a person made when they realized that everything they’d ever feared as a child was real and that it was coming for them. He was up and out of bed in a breath, body moving in swift sureness despite the loss of hands and the lack of prosthetics that he couldn’t put on by himself.
He knew what Lou was most afraid of. A scream like that meant one thing - demons.
Dean ran to Sam’s room, not at all surprised to find Lou there in her underwear. She slept in Sam’s bed more than half of the week. Though Dean was sure they didn’t even have sex most nights. He thought that Sam just needed the warmth of someone else with him to help him go to sleep.
Sam’s room was dark and Dean had to scrape along the wall with his stump to find the light switch. He caught it and flipped it up. Sam was on the floor next to the bed. His eyes were rolling and he banged his head repeatedly into the carpet. He breathed like he was in labor, six, quick heaving pants in and out and then he would make a sound that was lost somewhere between a growl, a moan, and plea. Cords stood out on his neck and his arms and his entire body contorted every few minutes as he jerked off of the floor in a random, eerie burst of movement.
Lou was in the corner of the bedroom by the closet with her knees drawn tight against her chest. She peered out between the hands that covered her face.
“Help me,” Dean said to her as he went down on his knees next to Sam. She didn’t move.
“Sammy.” Dean put his stump on his brother’s face, twitching slightly because it still looked surreal to him at that moment. “Sam.” He called out again.
Sam choked out his name between clenched teeth and then hissed. His head beat down against the carpet hard. One of his clenched hands rose. He was looking for Dean’s hand for support. For acknowledgement. For comfort. Dean didn’t have one to give him.
“God dammit, Lou! Help me!” Dean shouted.
“Wh-what do you need,” she asked from across the room.
“My arms,” Dean told her. “Salt. And the jug of water by the back door.”
“H-holy water?”
“Yes.”
For a moment he wasn’t sure that she was going to be able to do it. But, as Bobby had told him from the start, she was made of fairly tough stuff. Lou glanced at him and Sam both, terror and worry and the sort of emotions that were too big and too unfathomable for Dean to contemplate right then. The she was up and running.
“Dammit, Sam,” Dean said. “Is this why you’ve been so tired? Have you been fighting this off every night? Jesus, didn’t I teach you anything?”
The rapid beat of footsteps along with the unique sound made by his plastic and metal arms alerted him to Lou’s return. She was smart enough to help him slide into the prosthetics before anything else. They forewent the small sleeves that he wore to protect his flesh from the hard plastic and Lou held up the left limb for him first. Dean slipped his arm into it, twisting it somewhat. It was the limb most in need of a custom fit and the one he had the most problems with. But, when Lou did the straps and he had control of it, he set it moving immediately, even has he held out his right arm for her.
He held the jug of holy water in his left. It was difficult. The pitcher was more than the appliance could comfortably hold and the jug shook terribly in his grasp. Dean held onto it as Lou slipped on the right prosthesis. He undid the cap of the jug with his teeth and poured.
Sam sputtered as the water got into his nose and his mouth, but there was no wild reaction. No hissing. No steaming. Just the sound of a man already struggling for his life who also happened to breathe in water. An unhappy suspicion crept into his mind as he let the jug fall to the floor and grabbed the salt. He dusted Sam with it liberally and was met with the same indifferent reaction.
“Stop,” he told Lou. Leave the right one off and bring me a knife.”
She was up and running again. Dean leaned closer to Sam, listening attentively now to the words he was trying to get out.
“I take it back,” Sam groaned. “No. No, it won’t work. Please, stop. Dean. Dean!”
“Sammy,” Dean whispered. “What did you do?”
Dean took the knife from Lou as soon as she brought it to him. It was hell to try to make the cut with his left hand and harder to try to paint the symbols in blood across Sam’s chest. But trying to explain designs that he just knew, that he couldn’t really describe, but just knew by heart would have been harder. So, he painted fat, crude symbols onto his brother’s chest with the metal appliance of his limb. When he was done, Dean held his breath, and put his naked right stump down in the middle of it.
The flash of light came out of Sam’s pores and from his open, screaming mouth. Lou shouted and retreated back to the other side of the room where she hid, once more, behind her hands. Dean tried to grab hold of Sam, but found it near impossible with the one limb and the stump. All he could do was sit next to him and wait.
His let out his breath in relief when Sam’s eyes flickered. His brother tried to sit up twice and failed, falling back to the carpet. On the third attempt, Dean caught him awkwardly. He held onto him, both arms wrapped tightly around him regardless of the lack of hands.
“Which one?” Dean asked as Sam shuddered heavily in his arms. “Which angel?”
“Michael,” Sam gasped. “Zachariah came. He thought … we thought … it was worth a try.”
“He thought?” Dean asked.
“I thought,” Sam amended. “Didn’t want to be made for the devil. Didn’t want to be unable to help you. They promised me. If it worked, if he could ride me, they were supposed to fix you. Supposed to give you your hands back.”
“God dammit, Sammy,” Dean snapped, weary and heartbroken. Sam curled into him and shook.
**
Dean leaned against the impala, smiling at the feel of the warm metal beneath his ass. He twisted his wrist in a quick flick, amazed at how easy it was getting to open and close the appliance. His cigarette dropped to the dirt and he stepped on it. Bobby’s look of proud astonishment made him grin even more widely.
“You drove?” Bobby asked. “All the way from Washington? With just that little knob on your wheel to steer with?”
“Yep,” Dean replied. “My baby and I had a long talk about it. We decided that it was a little embarrassing, but that tough times called for some sacrifices. Besides, Sam needed us.”
“You know, you coulda let Lou drive,” Bobby told him.
“Are you insane? That girl smokes pot. No way she’s getting behind the wheel of my car.”
“Idjit,” Bobby muttered. He inclined his head towards the house. “I see Sam’s been doing better, but how are you doing, kid? How are you doing really? You look good. Better than I’d have thought, but …”
“But, I’ve still got a ways to go,” Dean finished. He reached up to push his hands back through his hair and laughed at himself a little bitterly for the foolishness of the gesture. “I don’t know, Bobby. I don’t know what to do with myself most days. My nurse is screwing my brother and my brother, God love him, just about killed himself trying to trade his life for a new set of hands. How am I doing? Fuck, if I know. But, I’ll tell you one thing. Those sons of bitches are going to pay if it’s the last thing I do. They want to screw with me and try to bribe me with my hands, that’s one thing. But they attack Sam, they all but fucking rape him, no matter that it was his damned idea, and it’s all out war.”
Dean stopped at Bobby’s door and grabbed the handle with the metal appliance. He held the door open so that Bobby could get his wheelchair through.
“I don’t have hands,” Dean told Bobby, “But I’ve got Sam, I’ve got you and Cas, shit, Lou too. And I have one huge fucking score to settle. This has all gone on long enough.”
End