for hoodietime's tag challenge (again!): permanent injury.
so this is by far the longest thing i've written, and totally outside of anything i've done before. fair warning.
The thing about hunting is that there are always lose ends left untied. You think the ghost is salted and burned, put back to wherever it is dead things are supposed to go. Everything's fine, just fine, until it shows up behind you and graciously reminds you that you didn't do your job by clawing its way through your shirt.
But it was his birthday, damn it, and he had really hoped things would be different this time.
Dad had the mother of all leads on the thing that killed Mom and now wasn't the time to let something like this escape. Dean understood it. He totally did. It had only been a year since Sam (ran off, stolen away, abandoned us) was accepted to Stanford, and that was even more reason for Dad to go overboard with the hunts. And Dad trusted him now, enough to give him his own hunts, which was kind of a bonus. So it was no big deal to be left on his own for a month while Dad did…whatever he did while he hunted this thing.
It was an easy find- a poltergeist three days' drive away from the motel in Boston. The family was alright, the youngest son (eyes like Sammy's, god that hurt to see) a little cut up from when his bed was thrown across the room. Everyone was fine.
He drove back to the motel, picked up a six pack from the nearest gas station, and settled in for another exciting birthday celebration. Three hours into a celebratory nap, he was jerked out of bed by a hand around his ankle. He didn't even have time to suppress the "oh, shit" before he was pulled out the window, into the darkness.
An hour on the rack is a very, very long time.
Dean had never experienced this kind of pain before. He would admit to having glossed over it in history class (because honestly? it's not like medieval history had a lot to do with his chosen career), but it wasn't something he could have prepared himself for.
It wanted Dad, but it wouldn't tell him why, and if being on the rack wasn't enough to piss him off, that definitely was.
The ropes around his wrists and ankles were twisted tight, and the thing sat casually in front of him, smiling. The smoldered skin of its face cracked under the effort.
"You know, Dean, you really should make this easier on yourself."
"Go. To. He-aaaaugh!" Each word was punctuated by a turn of the crank. His joints pulled and began to separate. He didn't care. He couldn't care.
"Already been. Not really my kind of thing. Now, really," it whispered, sidling in close to Dean, "if you're smart you'll tell me where John is, and this'll all just be one big nightmare."
Dean turned his head, gave a sick little chuckle. The thing sighed and tightened the ropes another notch.
He'd spent most of the day drifting in and out of consciousness. He woke up whenever something important happened.
When his shoulder gave out? He was definitely awake for that. The other shoulder as well. And then the real pain started- the feeling of something tearing in his stomach. He knew anatomy, he knew all about muscle fibers stretching until they couldn't. He knows his couldn't stretch any further.
His right knee gave out before the left. At that point, the screams gave way to hoarse whimpers. The thing seemed almost disappointed. At some point he realized he would probably never walk again, and then shoved the thought to the back of his mind before he had a chance to dwell on it.
"Look, I appreciate the whole 'I'm a strong hunter, I don't cry for daddy' thing, but this is just ridiculous. Call him down. Now." Its hand was already over the crank, but Dean couldn't see. His vision had narrowed to a darkening tunnel. That was fine with him. He didn't want to see the outlines of his ruined arms and legs, especially now that he couldn't feel them anymore. This was beyond pain.
Dean shuddered and coughed, spit bile from the back of his throat.
And it only went downhill from there.
On the third day, hope came in the form of an ambulance siren. The thing contemplated staying and taking a few more victims, then decided against it and split in a wave of black smoke.
He was beyond feeling. With each quiet, reverberating pop, with each tearing muscle, he had given up a little more of his sanity.
Two voices made it through to him from the doorway.
"Do you see anybody?"
"Look at this place. Seriously, why is it we always get calls from houses like this?"
"I'd love to have a movie star with a heart attack, believe me. It's just not plausible."
"Yeah, but this one- such a weird call." The first voice was a girl, low and quiet. She sounded young. Dean could barely see her, between the swollen eyes and prone position. He wavered on the edge of consciousness for a moment, them managed to make some kind of noise without throwing up (first time all day! he would have patted himself on the back, except for that whole torture thing).
He heard a gasp.
"Oh- oh, shit! Bring the crash bag."
"Is he still alive?"
"Jesus-"
She stood over him. Blonde hair, pulled back in a ponytail that looks awkward against her round face. Glasses. She reached out to feel a pulse and he managed to lean into it.
"Oh! He's alive, get the stretcher. Sir? Can you hear me?"
Dean slipped under.
They had him on the stretcher and were beginning to splint his damaged arms and legs when he woke up with a flash of pain, struggling.
"No, please- please calm down, sir, you'll hurt yourself-"
His arms and legs were on fire (the medical jargon flowed into his head, something about blood flow returning after prolonged periods of time), and he couldn't fucking breathe, and where the hell was Sammy-
Not the girl again, but the older medic- he pushed Dean back onto the stretcher, mindful of his bandaged shoulders.
"Listen, sir, we gotta get you calmed down. I'm going to give you some morphine for the pain."
(like he doesn't know what morphine is for, god knows his blood is mostly painkillers by now, all the times he's used it for stitches, broken bones, sliced open by that ghost like he was paper)
"Let me know when you feel a difference."
Five dislocated joints. Irreparable damage to his right leg, the one that had taken the most beating
The physical therapy was worse than the surgery, almost worse than actually being on the rack. He checked himself out of the hospital AMA because he figured Dad would be back soon, but got a voicemail saying something about another lead, and that he was still about a month out. Dean spent the next few days looking up therapy options before getting to work.
On good days, he woke up shaking in a layer of cold sweat. He got to work early, progressing from small weights to larger ones. The knifelike pain in his shoulders and knees stopped him earlier than he hoped for.
On bad days, he woke up unable to move.
When he had rehabilitated himself well enough to struggle in a lap around the house, he took up a job at the nearest garage to pay for the hospital bill.
The nightmares didn't start til Dad got back.
"Dean, we need to talk about this."
"About what?"
He was having trouble supporting himself on his weakened legs. Sometimes he would start to fall and go to catch himself on a chair, only to realize that his arms weren't good for much anyway. But he sucked it up and carried on cooking breakfast.
"You not sleeping. The screaming. You look like you're in pain half the time I see you."
"M'fine, Dad." For a second, fear washes over him. He thought he'd been hiding it pretty well, but Dad wasn't exactly the most observant person in the world when it came to feelings and apparently he'd still noticed, so-
"Obviously you aren't fine. I can't have you messing up the hunt, and if you're hurt, I need to know."
Right. For a second, Dean had forgotten which family he was part of.
The door slammed behind him as he limped out of the house.
When he came back, sweating and still vaguely furious at Dad for bringing it up and at himself for showing the limp and the fear and god I still remember that thing's face when it tied me up- he could see the guilt on his father's face and knew he shouldn't have left. It was too soon after Sam. A year wasn't long enough, and his dad didn't deserve to lose both his children.
They never talked about it again, even when Dean's inability to run faster than a Wendigo almost got his dad eaten.
It was much harder to hide it from Sam. He was Dean's brother, he knew everything (and the things he didn't know, he could find out with a well-placed glance). He saw the way Dean hissed when he jumped a fence or had to carry something heavy. He payed attention the way Dad never could.
The first few times Dean woke up from the same nightmare, Sam thought it was just a fluke. They had been through enough weird stuff that it really didn't shake him to hear his brother mumbling about torture. No, the real concern started when Dean woke up crying.
"Dean, we need to talk about this."
Dean's blood froze, but he took a different route than he did four years ago.
"I know. I know, it's just…I can't. Seriously."
"Why?" And, yep. There went the bitchface.
"The more we talk about it, the more we're gonna have days like this morning." He didn't even want to think about it again, waking up and not knowing where he was, the pins and needles in every part of him. Sam had brushed his arm against him, trying to snap him out of it, but to Dean's oversensitized skin it felt like knives.
They dropped the subject for awhile, but it's not like Sam didn't see the scars. Faint pink lines ran down across Dean's knees and along his shoulders. He rubbed at them when he thought Sam wasn't looking, or when the pain got too bad.
And it did sometimes. The first time he dug up a grave after Dad died, he could hardly keep from sobbing on the way home. His joints throbbed no matter what he did. He didn't know if Sam had noticed, but even though they took turns getting thrown against walls and windows, Dean always came out with a few more dislocated shoulders than his brother. He was weaker than he used to be.
"Sam. Sam." His hands are wrapped around the steering wheel but there's no grip to it. The pain is making him nauseous. It hasn't been this bad in years.
Sam was just getting used to how to take care of his brother without making it look too obvious when Jake happened. And then they spent that year doing everything they could to prevent the inevitable, failing miserably the whole way.
And then Hell happened, and Dean was literally back on the rack.
The days Alistair walks up to him smiling are the ones he fears. Today there's someone behind him, with blackened skin and familiar hands.
It smiles and its skin crackles. "Remember me?"
Dean screams.
He gave his body a once-over in the motel mirror. No scars, except for the awkward handprint.
No scars.
He checked again to make sure, but it was true. The little lines were gone.
And the pain was worse than ever.
The nightmares came back with a vengeance. He woke up with a full body shudder and a gasp, vaguely aware of sheets rustling and Sam by the edge of his bed.
"Dean. It's okay. It's me. I'm here. You're okay."
He constantly tried to push down the memories, but they continued to bubble up with more force than ever.
As much as Dean wanted a happy ending to his story, the truth is that things never quite went back to normal after that birthday. He never walked easily again. The pain was always there, but Sam found ways to work around it. They got used to cutting days short and finding motels. Sam got used to the pain lines on his brother's face. There weren't many good days.
The day Dean got his first prescription for Dilaudid?
That was a good day.