AN: I'm no medical expert, and what I know (and am using as a basis for this fic) comes from google research. If you know anything that may be helpful, I'm always down for suggestions! That being said, I do take some creative liberties with this fic, and would implore you to keep in mind that it's fiction, and not a research paper. Thanks so much for reading!
Disclaimer: Not mine.
So this is how it goes:
Dean doesn't even see the damn thing. All he hears is an awful clank, like—well, like metal hitting a skull, in hindsight—and then Sammy groaning, followed shortly by his 6'4" brother (why he got the freakish height, Dean will never know; Dean would have put it to better use, but he digresses) hitting the floor.
It isn't the first time Dean's scraped his sasquatch of a brother off of a floor, and it won't be the last, but it is one of the harder ones because Sam's like, way out of it, even though his eyes are open and he's sort of walking. Kind of. If his dragging, tripping-over-his-own-feet, stumbling gait can be considered walking, then yeah, sure he's walking. He's just not walking well, which makes a surprising bit of difference when Dean's trying to get him out of the abandoned house and into the Impala and back to the motel without him, like, falling over. Which would not only be bad, but is also quite possible at present.
He manages it (and he is taking full credit for that, thank you very much, Sammy did all of nothing to help with the whole business and, actually, Dean thinks, might have hindered it just a little bit), manages to get his brother loaded into the Impala and get the door closed. Sam just leans his head against the cool glass of the window and closes his eyes and that is not happening, not on Dean's watch (he's not an idiot—that blow to the head had concussion written all over it, even if Sammy's drunken traipse back to the car wasn't a dead giveaway), so he reaches over and pinches the inside of Sam's thigh.
"-Jesus, Dean," Sam slurs and jerks, glaring over at his brother.
"No sleepin' on the job, Sammy."
"Sam," he corrects, almost automatically which, actually kind of makes Dean feel better because, like, if Sam can bitch about Dean calling him "Sammy," well, then he can't be hurt too badly, right?
Wrong, actually, because Sam passes out—not falls asleep, like, legit passes out, like full on eyes rolling back in his head passing out—just as Dean pulls into the parking lot of the motel.
"Well, fuck," Dean says, and turns around, his gigantic brother flopping around in the passenger seat like a god damn rag doll. His knuckles are white as he does ninety on the way to the nearest hospital, but he talks to Sam the whole way there. "I'm gonna kick your ass for this," he promises. "I'm going to kick your fucking ass for doing this. You know how I feel about hospitals. I don't want any fucking part of this, and you're gigantor ass is gonna drag me to a fucking hospital? If you survive this, I'm going to kill you. Even if you don't survive this, I'm gonna make a deal to bring you back, and then kill you again. Watch me. I'll do it. You know I will."
Dean kind of makes up Sam's response in his head as he goes. He thinks Sam would probably say something about misusing their talents to exact petty revenge or some shit, which is, like, exactly what Dean would do. If you got it, flaunt it, right?
So it doesn't change the grip Dean has on the steering wheel, and it doesn't change the screech of Baby's tires as he nearly takes out two pedestrians and a nurse (who is also a pedestrian) on his way into the ER parking lot, and it doesn't change his running up to the front desk and saying my brother got hit in the head and now he won't wake up in between gasps for air because god dammit he's out of shape.
It turns out, hearing Sam's voice in his head doesn't change anything about the current situation and, four hours later, when Dean is staring at Sam in an ICU bed, his eyes closed and the steady beep beep beep of the heart monitor the only sound in the room, well, Dean just kind of thinks "fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck" over and over until his mind is just one long strand of the word.
When they were teenagers, their dad taught them something called "compartmentalization" which is basically taking all of your mental shit and boxing it up separately, putting it away so that you can focus on one thing at a time. Their Dad used to make them do it so that they could focus on the hunt—so that they could give all of their attention to what, Dad thought, was most important.
Maybe he's doing that now, maybe he's compartmentalizing now, putting all those words the doctors said about swelling and brain damage and brain surgery and bleeding aside into their own boxes so he can just think fuck fuck fuck fuck over and over again- or maybe he's way past compartmentalization and just in full on panic mode because what the fuck is he going to do if Sammy never wakes up?
First he's got to stop thinking of that as a possibility, he thinks. Sammy's the most stubborn asshole Dean's ever met in his life, second only to Dean and maybe not even then.
So. Compartmentalization. He manages to stop thinking fuck fuck fuck fuck long enough to start trying to process this fucking trainwreck.
Okay so, this is what happened:
One, Sammy got knocked out by the big bad flavor of the week.
Two, Sammy is beyond concussed.
Three, Sammy is brain damaged.
Four, Sammy might not wake up.
And that's where the compartmentalization ends and the fuck fuck fuck takes over again.
There's nobody they can call, that's the shitty part. No, the shitty part is—Sammy might not wake up, and if he does wake up, he might be brain damaged. That's the shitty part. The shittier part is that there's nobody Dean can call.
Okay, so. This is what happened:
One, Sammy got KO'd.
Two, Sammy is in a coma.
Three, Sammy might not wake up.
No, he has to scratch that one. That always derails everything into fuckville, so—
One, Sammy took a steel pipe to the head.
Two, Sammy's taking a Nap.
Three, when Sammy wakes up, he might not be Sam anymore.
That's the shitty part. All of it's the shitty part, really, but that's the shittiest part of them all, unless Sammy doesn't wake up, in which case-
So, okay. He doesn't even want to think about the repercussions of The Wall with this business. Sammy might be fine. They don't know. They don't know. They don't know.
Which is the hard part. Not the hardest part, but a hard part, and fuck, Dean is tired of the hard parts. He's tired. He's tired. He's just plain fucking tired.
Compartmentalization. That's what he has to do to deal with this. He keeps getting distracted, because Sammy's in the ICU, and he might not wake up and if he doesn't wake up, Dean doesn't know what he'll do, he doesn't know he doesn't know he doesn't—
Okay. Not helpful.
Here is what he knows:
Sam got knocked out. Sam is still knocked out. They did extensive tests on him in the ER. The sum of those tests is: they don't know. They don't know what's going on, or what the extent of the damage is, only that Sammy's brain swelled up when he got hit in the head and there might be Bleeding. Bleeding with a capital B because it's not the kind of bleeding Dean can just stitch up, it's Inside Bleeding which is Bad.
So. Sammy's brain is swelling up and also maybe possibly Bleeding and he might wake up and he might not and it's all just one big Wait and See game which Dean is actually pretty shitty at. Look, Wait and See has never really panned out for him. For any hunter. For anyone. Dean's not good at it, but it's the only option he's got, so. Wait and See.
Okay, those are the shitty details. Dean boxes them up in their own boxes and thinks: Okay, go away. But it's hard to make them go away when Sam is lying in a hospital bed the color of the sheets with a tube down his throat and a tube down his nose and tubes in his arms and a tube—okay. Lots of tubes, that's the point, to the point where Sammy looks more like the Creature from the Black Lagoon than he does Sammy. Like some fucked up octopus—a creature from the deepest, darkest part of the ocean.
A hysterical laugh bubbles at the back of Dean's throat. No, that's not good. Hysterical laughter always makes them come in and say things like Why don't you go get some rest. We can take care of him. And Dean's not about to do any of that bullshit.
He does file away the Fucked Up Octopus to tell Sammy when (if) he wakes up.
So this is how it went:
Dean ran into the ER and he said my brother got hit in the head and won't wake up.
Everyone ran out to the Impala, and then they loaded Sam up, yanking him out of the passenger seat like he was a rag doll, like he was nothing.
Sam didn't move, didn't even flinch just let them manhandle him Jesus fuck he just—
No, he can't think like that. Okay. This is how it went:
Dean went and got Help, and Help came. It's always scary needing Help, he's always been the one to take care of Sammy, Sammy never needs more than—no.
He can't think like that, that's the train to fuckville. Okay. This is how it went:
They unloaded him. They said: Blood pressure too high. They said: Get him to CT stat. They said: He can't support his airway. They said: He's seizing he's seizing, get me a fucking code cart.
Compartmentalize, compartmentalize. Okay. So. His brother went from rag doll to seizing, like, really fast. Like, too fast. They said: Can we call someone for you, and all Dean can think is like, fuck, they're all the other has.
This is what the Doctor said: There is swelling. There may be Bleeding. We are sending him to ICU. Dean said: When will he wake up? The Doctor said: We don't know.
Which is like, fucking scary. Because Dean's always known how to take care of his little brother, he knows, he knows Sammy likes apple juice and chicken soup when he's sick and fancy coffee and peanut butter straight out of the jar. He knows that he likes salads, but that his favorite is a grilled chicken sandwich from Chik-fil-a even though that's, like, the pussiest fast food meal ever, but Dean won't ever tease him about it again he swears he swears if Sammy will just wake up and bitch at Dean for taking him to the hospital and be a general pain the ass little brother. He swears.
So this is how it is:
Sammy is Sleeping. His eyes are closed. There is a tube in his throat. Fucked up octopus. His breathing is mechanical and forced. When Dean touches the back of his hand, he is cold. Like death.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck, Dean thinks.
AN: let me know what you think! Chapter 2 is forthcoming!