A/N: Okay, I know you guys were getting restless because this story normally updates on Fridays, it just didn't work that way this week, so my apologies.
Okay, another prompt down. This chapter is based on a prompt from Hyb10, who wanted a story about a hurt Sam being left behind on a hunt by John and Dean and them returning to find...well, you guessed in. Sam!Whump
So, in other news. Yesterday, I had a killer day, with All The Pretty Monsters, Prisoner of War, AND Tuesday's Child all getting updates. With this update, that makes four chapters in thirty hours, so show me some love.
No, actually, how about reviews? LOL. But seriously, reviews mean the world to me, and they are also a great way to leave prompts, since I am still accepting them for this story.
Just keep it in canon, and romance free and you can take it from there. I would my prompts in order, oldest first, and I have three more to go at this point now that this is wrote. Or, if you have a canon prompt you'd like to see pursued but don't think it would fit this project, pm me and tag it "Salt and Burn Confessions" as I have always intended on starting a prompt based project that was canon but not necessarily so focused on hurt/comfort. I have a Sam centric project called Confessions of a Boy King that is Sam based that I would also accept canon prompts for.
So, lots and lots of goodies for everyone to read, and Jenjoremy, don't worry, according to my handy dandy notebook, your prompt came in next, so keep an eye out!
Please forgive my science, this is the idea I had for this prompt, so I bent it to suit my needs.
As Always,
EverReader
How To Fix A Winchester – Chapter Ten
"The Unfortunate Thing About Aspirin"
Dean glanced back and forth between his little brother and his father and sighed.
John's face was set, lips pressed in a grim line, brow furrowed as he stared down his youngest son. Sam stared back defiantly, obviously furious, and quite obviously down for the count for the next few days.
The bruises decorating Sam's temple and jaw were already darkening from where the poltergeist had tossed down a flight of stairs back at the old farm house they had staked out the night before.
The poltergeist had been a feisty one, that was for sure, it had had the Winchesters ducking flying furniture and shattering glass half the night as they had tried to discover whatever object it was tied to. John had just located what he thought was a hidden crawl space in the attic when Sam had dropped his guard at exactly the wrong moment.
It had been a rookie mistake, that was true, but Sam was only fourteen, and they'd been at it for four hours already at that point. Dean knew Sam had stayed up late the night before studying for a calculus test (and God help him if John discovered that little fact any time soon) and in his exhaustion, the poltergeist had grabbed him up, tossing him down the attic stairs like an old pair of boots.
Dean's heart had practically stopped for a moment when he'd seen his little brother lying motionless on the landing, and he knew John had felt the same, which was part of the reason he was insisting on Sam remaining behind tonight.
That, and Sam's injuries, the bruises only being the most obvious. Sam had been limping all day, and his breath sounded just a touch wheezy, leading Dean to think that a rib might have been cracked, though Sam denied it hurt.
"I'm fine. I want to help finish this." Sam insisted.
"I'm not going to let you go back there again and get killed, or let you get me or your brother hurt instead." John said sharply, and Dean sucked in a breath.
Of course, John was still furious over Sam's lapse in attention the night before.
Sam snapped his mouth shut with an audible click.
"Yes, Sir." He finally mumbled.
John's eyes narrowed at Sam's defiant tone. "And I want you to finish the rest of that Latin translation Bobby gave you last week. You've been dragging your feet. Research is an important part of hunting, just like being aware of your surroundings. Maybe you can put a little more effort into this task." John added harshly.
Sam's shoulder's stiffened, and his eyes narrowed, but he didn't say a word, instead heading into the kitchen where the book Bobby had sent him was stacked neatly next to some of Sam's textbooks.
"Let's go, Dean." John ordered summarily, turning and exiting the house.
Dean hesitated, wanting to say something to comfort his younger brother, knowing that John's words hadn't been entirely fair. Sammy did more than his fair share of research, sometimes on the fly for John and Dean when they were in the field and needed intel.
But he also knew that Sam's hunter training wasn't likely to get any easier any time soon, and besides, he felt disloyal saying anything against John.
"Don't stay up too late. I'll call when we're on out way back." He finally offered.
Sam didn't even turn around at his words. "I'll be here." He said flatly, and Dean sighed.
"Don't stay up to late," He repeated "And go easy on your ribs." He said, closing the front door behind him, double checking that the lock had caught.
Supernatural Supernatural Supernatural Supernatural Supernatural Supernatural Supernatural Supernatural Supernatural Supernatural
Sam held on until he heard the familiar rumble of the Impala starting, along with the sound of John's new truck.
With a deep exhale, he sagged dispiritedly in his seat before wincing sharply, one hand going to his ribcage.
He head pounded, and he'd been seeing double off and on most of the day, though that had seemed to finally clear up a few hours ago. He was exhausted, the few hours of sleep he'd gotten before school that morning hadn't been near enough, but he'd hit up the coffee shop on the way home from school, and besides, he was used to being tired.
The ribs were proving to be a problem though. He;d played off Dean's concern, well aware that any other injuries coming to light would simply aggravate John further, but the truth was, Sam hadn't been able to pull in a deep breath since he'd woken up last night on the landing in the old farmhouse with Dean and John looking down at him worriedly.
He sighed, closing his eyes for a moment, focusing on his breathing, but the sharp, insistent pain flared with every deep breath he wrenched from his chest.
Finally giving in, he settled for short, shallow breaths that didn't aggravate his lungs. He knew enough first aid to know that wasn't ideal, but he would manage for the night and hope the pain was better tomorrow.
Getting out the copy paper he was translating the book on, he settled in for a long night of work. The poltergeist was located over an hour and a half from the house they were currently renting, so Sam knew it would be several hours before he could expect Dean and John to return.
Nearly three hours had passed when he finally finished the translation.
Sighing, he laid down his pencil flexing his cramping hand as he tentatively tried to straighten up his back. His muscles had seemed to tighten up on his as he had hunched over the table, however, and his chest screamed at him in pain when he moved too fast.
Closing his eyes against the sharp pain flaring in his chest, Sam focused on breathing through the pain like Dean had taught him to.
Slowly, the pain began to subside.
Unfortunately, now his head was pounding once again.
Wearily, he glanced over at the living room table behind him, hoping against hope that the bottle of pain reliever he'd snagged from the bathroom that morning was still sitting on the coffee table, but the table was empty.
He cursed softly as he remembered seeing Dean carry the bottle back upstairs shortly before he and John had left.
A part of him was ready to throw the towel in for the night, but he still had chemistry homework to do, and Sam was already the youngest kid in the class. The teacher had taken an instant disliking to Sam, and Sam knew he wouldn't hesitate to use Sam's failure to do the assigned work as a reason to kick him out of the class.
He closed his eyes again, rubbing vainly at his forehead.
Okay.
It was just one flight of stairs, after all. He'd gone up and down them half a dozen times today already.
He was just stiff, as long as he moved slowly, he'd be fine. He'd grab the bottle of pain killers, and come back down and kill off his chemistry homework. It was only midnight, with any luck, he could be in bed by two, translation and homework done, and John would have nothing to find fault with.
He levered himself out of the chair with a low hiss of pain.
Slowly, like an old man instead of a kid of fourteen, he made his way to the staircase, bracing himself with every step. At the bottom, he took in as deep a breath as he could managed, before beginning his ascent.
The pain was bad, but not unbearable, and Sam made fairly good time, though he felt a little breathless at the top. The trek to the bathroom was fairly uneventful also, and Sam gratefully swallowed down three aspirin with a handful of water from the tap.
He made his way back to the staircase and started down, feeling more confident this time.
That was when the room suddenly tilted on it's axis, Sam's chest seeming to suddenly seize on him, and black dots were dancing in his vision, though whether they came from the pain in his head or the lack of oxygen, he was beyond telling.
He didn't even feel himself fall the last two thirds of the way down the stairs.
Supernatural Supernatural Supernatural Supernatural Supernatural Supernatural Supernatural Supernatural Supernatural Supernatural
Dean let himself in quietly, frowning when he saw the lights still on in the kitchen. It was after three in the morning, Dean was exhausted, and Sam was probably asleep at the kitchen table, head on his books, like Dean found him at least twice a week.
Dean moved silently towards the kitchen, intent on waking his brother up and guiding him upstairs to bed so Dean could get some shut eye as well. John would be along in a few hours, and it was better if he didn't find Sam asleep over chemistry or calculus or whatever Sam was worrying over this week.
Dean's heart stuttered to a painful halt when he spied his brother splayed out at the foot of the stairs, a sinking sense of deja vu sweeping over to him as he ran to his brother's body.
Sam was breathing, but he was unconscious, pale with cold sweat beading his forehead and Dean recognized the signs of a person in shock.
"Sam? Sammy? SAM?" Dean called urgently as he ran practiced fingers along Sam's body, trying to decide whether it was safe to turn Sam over. Nothing he could find seemed broken, but Sam still wasn't responding.
Tentatively, Dean tilted his brother over carefully, sucking in his breath at the new, much larger bruise along his brother's temple, and now Sam's breathing had a gaspy, wet sound to it, as if he were choking on the air itself.
Dean spied a trickle of blood start to make it's way from Sam's open mouth, and the blood in hisown veins turned to ice as he put together Sam's symptoms.
Shock, that was blood loss. Low oxygen, that meant some sort of fluid in Sam's chest.
With shaking hands, Dean dialed 9-1-1.
"I need an ambulance, right away. My brother fell down the stairs. He hit his head, and he won't wake up. And I'm pretty sure his ribs are broken, bad..." He babbled, stroking back the sweaty hair from Sam's clammy forehead.
"What make's you think that, Sir?" The dispatcher asked.
"Because I think he's choking on his own blood." Dean replied, pulling Sam up onto his lap, against his chest as he listened for the ambulance, trying to give Sam's lungs the leverage they needed to breathe.
Supernatural Supernatural Supernatural Supernatural Supernatural Supernatural Supernatural Supernatural Supernatural Supernatural
Dean looked up as John stumbled into the waiting room.
"Dean, what happened?" John barked, looking around wide eyed, as if Sam were going to walk into the room at any moment.
"Aspirin." Dean replied dully, looking down at his hands, where traces of Sam's blood could still be seen.
John recognized the signs of shock as well as Dean could, and he knelt immediately in front of his oldest, taking off his jacket and wrapping it around Dean's shaking shoulders.
"Start at the beginning." He said gently, even as his eyes searched for a nurse. The small town hospital was quiet, the Winchester's the only family in the waiting room this late, or rather, this early.
"Sam's in surgery. The doctor came out a few moments ago. Sam fell, I..." Dean swallowed before continuing. "I found him at the foot of the stairs when I came home. The doctor's said he already had a concussion, that could have been what made him fall, or maybe it was the ribs."
"Ribs?" John prodded, rubbing Dean's shoulder soothingly.
Dean nodded. "Sammy must have broken a couple of ribs last night, at the farmhouse. When he fell last night, the doctor's said it pushed a fragment into Sam's lung."
"It punctured it?" John asked, a pool of dread growing. "That's what they're trying to fix?"
"If they can." Dean replied bleakly. "He keeps bleeding, Dad. They asked if he'd taken anything that would make him bleed more than normal. I found a bottle of aspirin on the floor where he fell. He's been taking the stuff all day. And now he won't stop bleeding and he couldn't breathe, Dad, we was barely breathing..." Dean broke then, and John simply gathered him into his arms, fighting his own emotions down as he realized he needed to be clear headed for both of his sons right now.
"It's okay, Dean. Sammy's going to be okay."
"You don't know that." Dean whispered brokenly, and John had to choke back a sob of his own.
"Sammy's tough, Dean. He held on until you got there." John reassured his eldest, as a man in blue scrubs entered the room grimly.
"Family of Sam Winchester?" He asked, and John nodded tersely.
Supernatural Supernatural Supernatural Supernatural Supernatural Supernatural Supernatural Supernatural Supernatural Supernatural
The two oldest Winchester's kept vigil at Sam's bedside for three days. The doctor's had managed to repair the damage to Sam's lung, and he'd been extubated on his second day. He was breathing well enough, but he wouldn't wake up.
The Doctor explained that Sam had crashed twice in the operating room, and had needed three separate blood transfusions to make up for what the doctors had pumped from his lungs. Between the concussion, and the fact that the Doctors had no way of knowing just how long Sam's brain had been forced to go without oxygen, things looked pretty grim.
The Winchester's didn't give up, though. Both John and Dean slept in Sam's room room every night. John and Dean took turns going out for food, and they ate in Sam's room. Neither man had showered in days.
Dean quelled his restlessness through sheer force of will, returning on the second day with two of Sam's text books. Gearing himself up for the long haul, he opened the book to the first chapter, and started reading.
John, who had been silent at first, took up where Dean left off whenever Dean's voice would start to go out, and the two men continued like that, moving from one book to another, the cadence of their voices a steady lullaby offsetting the beeping on the various monitors Sam was hooked up to.
More than once, the nurses would simply stop in the door way and watch the family of three, broken though it seemed.
Once, a kindly nurse had offered to take over for Dean, but Dean had simply shook his head doggedly.
"He's my brother." He said simply, and turned the page, launching back into the chapter without another word.
Dean was so tired by the third night that the words of the page he was reading were starting to dance on the paper, and John had turned from the window as Dean's voice flagged, about to offer to take over, when his eyes widened.
"Sammy?" John asked tentatively, and Dean's eyes flew to the head of the bed, where, sure enough, a sleepy pair of hazel eyes met his.
"Dude..." Sam's rusty voice echoed quietly in the now silent room. "You are totally mispronouncing that word. Didn't you ever go to class?"
The book dropped from Dean's numb fingers as jumped up with a loud whoop of excitement that had the nurses running into the room quicker than the call button ever would have.
Dean ignored their fluttering and questions, shifting forward to lean his forehead against Sam's.
"I was doing it on purpose, you know. Bitch." Dean whispered, closing his eyes against the sting of tears.
Sam snorted, making a small face of pain. "Sure you were, jerk."