Aerosmith and the Stethoscope (Gen, PG-13)
Title: Aerosmith and the Stethoscope
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Dean, Sam, and small portions of OCs
Category: Gen fic
Spoilers: “Pilot”
Word Count: 3472
Summary: Dean and Sam, once again, go undercover, and Dean learns that his brother is both a pain and a necessity in his life.
Author’s Notes: Written for "Prompt 1: Transference" for
psych_30 challenge. I also stole a line from the old TV show “Boy Meets World,” changed it a bit and put it in here. I will admit those writers own the original line. But, bonus cookies to anybody who can even find the changed line.
Disclaimer: The following characters and situations are used without permission of the creators, owners, and further affiliates of the Warner Bros television show, Supernatural, to whom they rightly belong. I claim only what is mine, and I make no money off what is theirs.
Transference-in psychoanalysis, the patient’s transfer to the analyst of emotions linked with other relationships (such as love or hatred for a parent) (Taken from Exploring Psychology, Sixth Edition, David G. Myers 2005.)
Barely a half an hour into the most recent case, Dean decided that Sam had an unhealthy attachment with his stethoscope. But reminding Sam of this would be useless at that point, as they were already in full costume and had successfully wormed their way through the hardest security clearances of the hospital. Dean figured that later, perhaps back at the motel, he would find some way to mercilessly tease Sam about his newfound stethoscope love. Perhaps there was some embarrassing sexual fetish behind the stethoscope.
Dean could only hope.
They were sitting in a private doctor’s office, and Sam was dressed in a white lab coat over black slacks and a nice shirt that Dean didn’t know his younger brother owned. Playing an out-of-town psychiatrist, Sam was doing a rather qualitative job of convincing the various secretaries that he must speak with the chief of psychiatric staff because his “patient” needed to be admitted to the fifth floor psychiatric ward. When Dean complimented Sam on the good acting ability, Sam laughed, picking at the edge of his nail, and said it was because Dean was such a believable patient.
“Are you calling me crazy?”
“‘Crazy’?” Sam echoed, looking up with a playful glint in his eyes. He struggled to fight back the smirk tugging at the corners of his lips. “Try to have a little bit more tact next time, dude. You’re the one who has to stay with these people overnight, remember.”
“You owe me.”
“You drew the short straw. We agreed. Long straw, doctor and researcher at the library. Short straw, patient and the one who gets the job done from the inside,” Sam clarified, as if Dean really needed to be reminded as how their latest hunting job-a poltergeist within the walls of the city’s most prominent psychiatric ward-was going to be for him.
“You still owe me,” Dean grumbled, crossing his arms across his chest. He was wearing a hospital gown over a pair of sweatpants after his initial physical examination, which he had begrudgingly glared at Sam throughout. When the nurses had asked him to move to the next room, wearing just the hospital gown that flapped open ever occasionally, he threatened to remove Sam’s most important organ below the waist unless he got pants.
The pants had arrived quickly.
“I’ll wash the car,” Sam responded, fiddling with the head of the stethoscope again.
“More.”
“Fine, I’ll wash and wax the car. Happy? Quit bitchin’.”
“Bitching finished. Jerk.”
Before Sam could retaliate, the chief of psychiatric staff entered the room, and Sam quickly dropped the stethoscope back to a resting position around his neck. The two men shook hands politely, then returned to their seated positions while discussing the “seriousness” of the patient-Mr. Mick Tyler-at hand. Sam-as Dr.-Whatever-Boring-Name-He-Picked-said that Mr. Tyler would not be required to stay long, just until his brother returned from California and could take care of him. Dean resisted the urge to kick Sam out the third-story window for even joking about his little “self-discovery journey” across the country.
After Sam-Dr. Plays with Stethoscopes, Dean decided-mentioned the names of several famous area psychiatrists who he had supposedly studied under, the chief of staff was more than willing to admit “Mr. Tyler” for a few days. While Sam finished up some necessary paperwork that he was more than likely bullshitting his way through, a female and male psychiatric nurse came to escort Mr. Tyler to his room.
As Dean left the office, he shot a frustrated glance back at Sam and before the door closed behind him, he made a quick “wax on, wax off” gesture, and Sam gave a forced smile back to the psychiatrist. The door was closed before Dean could hear Sam’s placating excuse of how “imbalanced poor Mr. Tyler was.”
Dean’s room on the fifth floor was more than half smaller than the worst motel rooms he had stayed in. For a long moment, he stood in the doorway with the two nurses behind him, one holding the duffel bag of clothing he had packed before Sam’s brilliant scheme for them to go undercover. There was a small rectangular window on the opposite side of the room with closed blinds that filtered crisp afternoon light across the thin, faded bed and the child-sized dresser that he would put his belongings. He had left the majority of his “questionable” content back in the Impala, depending on Sam to sneak him an EMF meter along with some guns after the nurses had thoroughly searched his room for “safety reasons.”
As the nurse set his duffel bag on the bed and began talking to him in a slow, patient voice, he interrupted her and asked where the toilet and showers were. At this question, she looked up at him and smiled sweetly.
“Well, honey, the bathroom facilities are public. They’re shared between the male patients on this floor.”
Oh, Sam was definitely going to owe him for this one.
- - - - -
Not long after Dean had been sitting in the room by himself, there was a knock at the door, and the nurse asked him if he felt like going to group therapy. Perhaps he would like to meet the other patients? Truthfully, Dean couldn’t have given a damn about the other patients and their problems, but he gave an overzealous smile and said he would be there. If nothing else, he might be able to learn more about the poltergeist that was supposedly haunting the ward after darkness fell.
In a friendly room of peeling “Life is Great!” posters and dusty, waxy-leafed plants, an assortment of sofas and chairs were arranged in a circle, where some of the patients already waited. Hesitantly, Dean sat down in a faded recliner, giving a forced smile to the man in a baggy flannel shirt and blue jeans next to him. A few minutes later, one of the therapists entered the room and sat down in one of the chairs, pulling out a fat, dog-eared notebook paper-clipped with charts and records. The people went around the circle, introducing themselves one by one, and for a stupefied moment, Dean forgot what his supposed name was, then quickly remember his clever “Mick Tyler.” At least, he had thought it was clever. Sam had argued that “Steven Tyler” was obvious, and even if Dean did substitute the first name for a different singer, it still didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out who Dean was trying to play.
“Can’t you just go with a simple name for once?” Sam had asked. “Or at least a less obvious one?”
“Like who? Justin Timberlake? Michael Jackson?” At that point, Dean had grabbed his crotch and made a poor hip thrusting gesture that had caused Sam to slap his hand over his face. “C’mon, Sammy, you know you like listening to that.”
“Fine, you can keep your name. Just stop…” He had pointed to Dean’s crude impersonations. “Just stop that already!”
In the group therapy, after they had all introduced themselves, the therapist asked them if there was anything to talk about. When no one started talking, she picked the man sitting next to Dean, and the man immediately looked down and played with a stray thread on the edge of his flannel shirt.
“I got a phone call from my mom yesterday,” the man said.
“And how did that go?” the therapist asked, crossing her heels underneath the chair and leaning forward.
“She wants me to come home. She says she misses me.”
“You don’t sound like you believe her.”
“No.”
“No?”
“No, I don’t believe her,” the man answered. He glanced up at the therapist, then over to Dean before turning his attention downward again. “She still misses him. It’s always been him.”
“But she still called you,” the therapist pointed out, desperately searching for a positive point to encourage.
“Only because he’s gone.” The man sighed, and when he moved his arms to cross them over his chest, Dean could see the pale, jagged bolts of scars down the inside of his forearms.
After a few minutes of talking, Dean learned that the man’s only brother had died in a car accident, leaving just the man and his mother alone. The man had been admitted on account of severe depression and suicidal tendencies over the loss of his sibling.
Finally, though, the therapist looked down at her notes and over at Dean. “So, Mick,” she said through pursed lips with a hint of doubt in her voice, “why don’t you tell us about yourself?”
Dean looked back at her, trying desperately to remember the story Sam and he had created before they embarked on this manic scheme anyway. For the last forty-five minutes, he had been hearing parents talk of losing their children, girlfriends dumped by cheating fiancés, a mother who aborted her child after rape, and so many more. Telling such a fantasized tale for himself seemed to be an insult to the true pain the people around him were suffering.
He was suddenly surprised at the level of compassion that rose up within him, and as he was wondering where this newfound feeling came from, he realized that the therapist was staring at him to say something.
“Um,” he said, shifting himself in the chair that was becoming increasingly uncomfortable. “Well, my dad left a couple months ago, and he’s only called a few times, and uh,” Dean reached up and scratched the back of his head before clearing his throat. “I don’t really know where he is, and he won’t let us come and help him.”
“Us?” the therapist echoed. “Who is this ‘us’?”
“Me and my brother. Younger brother. I mean, he’s been gone for awhile too, and he came back ‘cause I needed his help.”
“Are you angry that he left you in the first place?”
“Who?” Dean asked while the ink pen scratched his words on the lined paper.
“Your brother. You sounded angry when you spoke of him.”
“I’m not angry.”
“Mick, it’s okay to be upset with your brother for going away from you. It would be the most natural emotion.”
“I’m not upset,” Dean snapped harsher than he had intended and bit down on the corner of his lip. “Things just…they just happened. That’s all. They just did.”
“Such as what things?”
“Him leaving. He didn’t have to leave like that.”
“Why did he leave?” the therapist asked curiously.
“He had bullshit to do. Just thought he could up and leave us, all right?”
“Why are you taking your anger out on me? Are you really angry at me?”
“You better watch your questions there.”
The therapist tried again, seeing that questions about “Mick’s” brother were only going to lead to outward displays of anger and frustration. “What about your father?”
“What about him?”
“How do you feel about him?” the therapist questioned, lifting her pen from the notepad where she scribbled in twisted black ink.
“I’m not going to tell you. I don’t even know you. Dad had requirements elsewhere. End of story. None of your goddamn business.”
“Okay,” the therapist said, putting a forced smile on her face. Her eyes, dusted with pale blue powder, fluttered in exasperation. “Who’s next?”
- - - - -
After the group session had ended, the patients were released to their rooms for the night. Reluctantly, Dean went back to his and grabbed the bathrobe Sam had lent him-as Dean had never needed to own anything like a bathrobe-and headed to the shared bathroom with feelings of dread curling around the edges of his stomach. Fortunately, there was actually some privacy with all the showers separated by curtains, so Dean went inside one of the areas and showered on his own.
Outside the curtained area, he overheard a conversation between two of the patients while his fingers were knotted in the suds of his hair. “So, I talked to it last night,” one of the voices said.
“Yeah? What it say?”
There was a pause, and Dean could imagine the first person looking around him to make sure no one was listening. When they spoke again, the voice was lowered to a level that normal people would not have been able to hear over the rain of shower water. “It said we could get outta here. It just wants to be human.”
Dean rolled his eyes, grabbing onto the shower head with his right hand and letting the warm water run down his back to rinse away the soap on his skin. Had to be the poltergeist, he reasoned. Of course it would pick the mentally weakened for a body to inhabit.
“When did it say it’d be back?”
“Tomorrow night. You can come if you want to.”
“Really? Cool...”
At that point, Dean, wrapping a towel around his waist, exited the shower and grinned at the two men. “Evenin’,” he said smartly.
The two people, one of whom he recognized as being the flannel-shirt man who sat next to him in group therapy, looked up in shock. As Dean wrapped the bathrobe around himself with the realization that it was too long for him, one of the men spoke up, “Where’d you get all those scars?”
“Hmm?” Dean asked, pretending that he hadn’t heard the question and instead buying him time to think of a feasible excuse.
“Your scars. I mean,” the man said, looking down at his own wrists, “we all gots scars, but you-”
“Overseas,” Dean replied quickly. “I fought over there.”
The two men nodded, as if accepting this as a good reason for the snarled white marks on Dean’s body. Then, one of them pushed himself off the bench outside the showers with the words that he would get heading to bed, leaving Dean alone with the flannel shirt man from group therapy.
There was a moment of silence before Dean shifted on his feet and cleared his throat, shoving his hands in the deep pockets. “Hey man, I’m, um, I’m sorry about your brother.”
The man nodded. “Yeah, me too. But, thanks. I guess.”
Dean gave a jerky nod in response and turned, beginning to walk out of the bathroom. Just as he had placed his hand on the door, the man spoke again, “You should take care of him while you can.”
“What?”
“Your brother. You,” the man faltered, clearly nervous, “you talked about him today in group.” The man lifted his head to meet Dean’s eyes. “I mean, he’s probably a pain, being your younger bro.”
Dean chuckled. “You have no idea,” he muttered, thinking of just how much of a pain Sam had to be in order to leave Dean as the patient in this mess. The stethoscope fetish was going to definitely be a long-running joke.
“Yeah, but you’d miss him if he ever left, wouldn’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“I guess, I dunno, if I had one more day with my brother, I wouldn’t do half the shit I did. I’d, y’know, actually listen to him and all that kind of chick flick bullshit. Maybe I wouldn’t miss him as much.”
Dean paused and then, much to his own surprise, he walked over to the bench and sat down beside the man. “So what was the best prank you ever pulled on him?”
There was a flicker of confusion on the man’s face, and then he smiled with the memory. When at last, their laughter crept from the tiles and darted off the walls, Dean knew he would sleep easily that night.
- - - - -
Sam visited the next day, an EMF meter in one of his large lab coat pockets and two guns tucked in the sides of his fancy black pants. In Dean’s room, he closed the door and stood on the doorway before they discussed the plan for the night.
“What’d you find out?” Dean asked, shifting his weight on the unmade bed.
“Seems like your typical run of the mill, pissed off spirit looking to inhabit some human bodies.” Sam gave a disgusted look at the rumpled sheets as if he was going to point out his brother’s sloppy habits, but decided better of it and sat down next to Dean. “Rumor has it to be the ghost of an old patient who committed suicide jumping off the ledge outside one of the rooms, but hey, a pissed off ghost’s a pissed off ghost.” He idly rapped his fingers against the head of the stethoscope again. “So, what you get?”
“‘Bout the same. Wants people. Coming here tonight. We shoot the son of a bitch, and go back home.”
“Motel,” Sam clarified.
“Home. Motel. Whatever. I just want my private showers back.”
Sam laughed in a wide mouthed grin. “Poor baby. Public showers. I’m surprised you aren’t enjoying the chance to show off.”
“You know I’m not like that.”
“Sure, Dean, sure. You’re Mr. Exhibitionist all the way, and you know it.”
“Perv,” Dean said, hitting Sam on the shoulder.
“Whoa, watch it. Don’t assault the doctor. I might have to up your drug amount.”
After the conversation returned to the hunt, they agreed that Dean was going to awake in the middle of the night, demanding to speak to his doctor. From there, Sam would receive a phone call from the frustrated nursing staff, and Sam would be allowed into the ward to attend to the frazzled Mr. Tyler. While the staff believed that Sam was taking care of his patient, the two brothers would sneak out and take care of the unsettled spirit.
“And after that?” Sam asked. “What about after we kill it?”
“We run?” Dean suggested.
Sam rolled his eyes. “You’re too good.”
“All right, fine, we run like hell. Better?”
- - - - -
The plan, although rocky and jarred, went smoother than either brother had anticipated. They shot the poltergeist, woke up the entire ward, and thanks to Sam, flashed a tape recorder at the orderlies that played gunfire. “Somebody must be playing a joke on him,” Sam replied with a flash of white teeth and apologetic shoulder pat to the confused orderlies. “Mr. Tyler fought overseas. The gunfire often distresses him.”
The staff looked confused, but as it was four in the morning, and Sam was listed as a credible M.D., they didn’t question his reason right then. It would be some time later, however, when the brothers had already managed to weasel out of the hospital and fly down to the Impala waiting for them in the parking lot, that the staff would realize exactly what had happened.
With the nurses occupied to calm the other patients, Sam unlocked the exit with his hospital provided key, and they both ran out of the building. In the parking lot, Sam tore off his white coat and threw it in the car’s backseat as Dean grabbed his leather jacket in the passenger seat and dug the keys out of the coat’s pocket. When the engine growled to life, he didn’t think anything had ever sounded so sweet. The headlights flashed across the nearly empty parking at such an early hour, and Sam turned to him, and said, “Drive already, would ya?”
Dean laughed and gunned the engine before they lurched forward onto the street. Once they were on the empty roads, and Dean had managed to change out of his bland sweatshirt into a more fitting shirt, he noticed that Sam was playing with something in the seat next to him.
“Dude, I’m getting you and that stethoscope a room of your own at the next stop.”
Sam chuckled. “It’s just fun. This could’ve been me, y’know.”
“I thought you were going to law school.”
“I was,” Sam responded putting the stethoscope on the dashboard, “but I would’ve settled for a doctor. Anything normal, I guess.” When Dean didn’t say anything, Sam continued, “But, hey, whatever, right. Got other shit to take care of now.”
Dean was about to agree, when he remembered the words of the man with the flannel shirt, and instead, Dean grinned. He took his right hand off the steering wheel and ruffled Sam’s primped doctoral hair, causing Sam to grimace and slap Dean’s hands away. “S’all right, Sammy. Either way you’dve gone-doctor or lawyer-you would’ve still been saving my sorry ass.”
At first, Sam looked over at Dean in utter disbelief, and then he, too, began to laugh.
Under the hooded glass, the stethoscope lay sprawled on the dashboard, and as the sun rose with salmon smears of light in the distance, the fresh illumination caught the silver head, and it winked back at Dean as if to say, So much for no chick flick moments, huh?
End