Title: The Fury of the Wind
Author: Windimere Wellen
Part: 10 of ?
Disclaimer: Don't sue me, I'm not making any profit off of this.
Author's Note: Well guys, here we go again! I like this chapter, even though medically, it may not be as sound as the rest of the story will be, but it was needed in the progression. Once again, my mother the trauma nurse, tells me that this certainly is possible, but not likely. Anyway, I hope you enjoy, and let me know what you think!
Lady Winter
The first thing Don was aware of was the pain that he could still feel. And there was lot of it. It was overwhelming; to the point that he wished he was unconscious again. Nothing was working right. His body wasn't responding. His eyes wouldn't open. His hand wouldn't move. His mouth seemed sealed shut. And his mind? His mind was unresponsive. It refused to remind him what was going on.
All he knew was pain. Severe, excruciating pain, that seemed to be coming from where he thought his chest ought to be. For a moment, Don wondered if he was dead, but figured that if this was Hell, it would hurt more, and if it was Heaven, it wouldn't hurt at all.
That made him realized that his brain actually was working. His mind wasn't as dead as he thought it had been. So what in the world is going on?
The realization was like a blinding flash, and the heartache that came with it was painful to say the least. All Don could see in his mind's eye was Charlie, standing in front of him, covered in blood. Oh God, I let Charlie get shot. Oh God. The feeling made him sick.
Don had to know what had happened to his brother. There was no option involved. He had to know, one way or another, so he further pushed his mind for answers.
Slowly, but surely, the FBI training kicked in, aided by a personality that was a perfect fit for a federal investigator, and Don's mind slowly began to focus.
For some reason, Don couldn't seem to recall what exactly had happened. His brain was telling him something about too much trauma. All he knew was that Charlie had been shot. Don thought that he'd tried to stop Charlie from getting shot, but he'd apparently failed because Charlie had blood on him.
Don's imagination quickly amplified just how much blood there was, and fuzzily, Don tried to remember where Charlie had been shot, but he wasn't getting any answers. He also wasn't getting any answers about what had happened to him, and so much thinking was making his head hurt worse than it already was.
It felt like it took all of his strength, but Don managed to force his eyes open. The air stung them, and he squeezed them back shut again, but his need to know what was going on forced them back open. He felt protective tears well up, and they added to his general confusion, but Don quickly realized that he was lying on his back, facing a ceiling that was only a few feet above him, made of what Don could barely make out as gray metal, with white paint on some portions. Everything was blurry, and it took Don a moment to realize there were two people sitting near him.
One was talking, but Don couldn't distinguish the words. It was almost like a foreign language. The other was doing something to him, to his arm, his left arm, and Don suddenly realized that he couldn't feel that arm. His mind supplied that it was likely someone had simply amputated it, but that didn't seem to make sense. But then again, nothing seemed to be making much sense.
The FBI agent strained to listen, trying to make out the person's words, but instead he heard a soft thump thump thump that seemed to be resonating from above him. He tried to turn his head to the side, only to be met with a nauseating feeling as pain spiked down his neck, into his back.
When the flashes of light that had been dancing in front of his vision slowly subsided, Don found he was looking out a window, and he could see clouds. Come on Don, you're really losing it. First you think someone amputated your arm, and now you're only seeing blue skies and clouds. Very funny. He tried to chide himself, but slow rationality poked through the mess of confusion in his brain. Helicopter. You're in a helicopter.
Don couldn't figure out why that made more sense to him, but apparently it did, and he felt strangely relieved. He thought about turning his head back, but didn't want to risk the pain. It was then that he realized the there was something irritating on his face, and he realized with a start that he was wearing an oxygen mask.
It frustrated him that he couldn't think straight. Something like that should have been one of the first things he'd noticed. Instead, nothing seemed to be working properly, least of all his mind. Growing impatience made him try to move.
"Oh no you don't, Agent Eppes," a voice said from above him, and a face leaned down into Don's field of vision. Don was so preoccupied with the fact that he'd been able to hear that he forgot his earlier idea to try to move around. "Just stay still. Hey John, he's awake."
"Can you hear me ok, Agent Eppes?" the other figure said, also leaning over. Don could only stare up at them and blink. Agent Eppes. They know I'm an FBI agent. Come on. Think Eppes. What's going on?
"He's really out of it. Probably the morphine," one of the voices said.
"Or that nasty bump on his head. Severe concussion. Hospital will be glad to know he woke up. I can't believe he's awake at all," the other said worriedly.
Concussion? Hospital. They said hospital. I'm on a mercy flight. I was wounded at the bank. Charlie. What about Charlie? It all came back in a painful rush, and Don started to squirm again, but the pain exploded again.
This time it was worse than before. He could hear the steady beep of some medical monitoring device speeding up. Vaguely he heard the two EMTs jump into action. One was trying to verbally sooth him, while the other was reaching for something to sedate him. Through the pain, Don wanted to yell at them not to put him back under. He wanted to demand to know what had happened to Charlie. The oxygen mask prevented him, but somewhere in the back of his mind, Don had a good idea that even if it hadn't been there, talking might have been more difficult than he would have liked.
He didn't actually see the EMT injecting something into the IV that they had set up in his right arm, but he could feel it. It made him sleepy, but not so sleepy that he fell back into the blissful dark that one part of him craved – a place away from all the pain and all the doubt – a place where he wouldn't have to worry about Charlie. Where he wouldn't have to think about the fact that he'd failed his little brother.
Instead, everything got heavy and dull. His vision faded further, and everything above him became a mass of blurred colors. Moving even his head would have been impossible, and even though he was fairly certain the two EMTs were still talking, he couldn't hear them, let alone make out what they were saying.
That left Don in a terrible limbo between unconsciousness and the pain that his body was in.
There was no way Don could know what damage had been done to him. At the moment, he wasn't even able to remember the events that led up to the fact that he was now in a helicopter, flying over Los Angeles en route to LA Central. He couldn't remember the four bullets lodged in the flak jacket, had no way of knowing just how many of his ribs had been broken, or that, when he'd been shot the fifth time, trying save Charlie, that when he'd fallen, the fall had forced the rib bones into his lungs.
Don didn't know that the oxygen mask was keeping him breathing. He had no idea that the EMTs actually wanted to intabate him because of how many times he'd stopped breathing, but were afraid to do it in the air. He had no idea that the fact that he had even regained consciousness would probably end up as a medical oddity or medical mystery/miracle somewhere in some medical journal at the end of the month, whether he made it or not.
He also didn't know that he was bleeding internally, or that it had taken the EMTs the whole trip to Grace Memorial to stop his arm from bleeding. He could not be aware that when they had arrived, the head attending and head of surgery had taken one look at him and insisted that he be sent straight to LA Central to the trauma unit. Don had been being loaded into the helicopter just as Charlie's ambulance had been arriving at the hospital. And there was absolutely no way that Don could have known that Charlie was fine, or at least as fine as he could be after having a bullet pulled from his arm.
All Don knew was that he had a total lack of control. It was something that he was used to, but never comfortable with. Being in law enforcement was the definition of being "out of control." The fact of the matter was that crime, while enforced, was hardly ever capable of being controlled. And in the FBI, Don had faced all sorts of crime that couldn't be controlled. That was why he was faced with it – to find a way to control it.
Don liked being in control. When he'd lived with Kim Hall, one of their first fights had been about where she moved his CDs. She had at first combined their collections into one pile and she couldn't understand why Don had been so upset when he couldn't find his Frank Sinatra Essentials. She had eventually located it herself, mixed in with several of her 80's rock collections, but Don had been seriously upset.
Kim had pretty much freaked out when she'd arrived home the next day to find that he'd bought two CD towers – one for her and one for him. She'd raged about his obsessive nature, while he'd argued that she was too unorganized. In the end, it had been something that Don used as a comfort when their relationship had ended – she never would have understood his need to alphabetize his CD collection, and if she didn't understand that, how much of Don could she really have understood?
Don understood that life was uncontrollable, but he didn't like it, so where he was able to control things, he did so with as much efficiency as possible. It was actually something that Charlie didn't understand about Don – the basic science behind how Don operated.
Charlie functioned in a world where everything could be controlled – controlled by numbers. Charlie often liked to quantify human behavior, something that had repeatedly gotten him in trouble emotionally while working with Don. Don repeatedly reminded Charlie that humans were unpredictable, even if they often did predictable things, but Charlie rarely wanted to see that.
They banged heads because Charlie thought that Don understood that life could be quantified and controlled – after all, Charlie had pointed out Don's obsessive need to alphabetize the CD and DVD collections that he had. He had perused Don's book collection, finding everything ordered first by author's last name, then if possible, by height. Don hung all of his clothes facing the same way, and more often than not, his clothes were grouped by color. Charlie thought that this mirrored the rest of the way Don looked at life.
What he missed was the fact that Don was all too aware that life wasn't easily simplified and solved. Don was so surrounded by discontinuity and chaos in his job, that he tried to make up for it in his home life.
Don knew that Charlie was learning that fact the hard way. His younger brother had pretty much simply shut down when he hadn't been able to tell that the Charm School Boys, who had been apparently politely robbing banks, had deadly back up waiting outside of each heist, just in case they were challenged. Charlie had seen a resulting shootout involving Don happen on TV and it had taken a lot of angry words, and a lot of patience to make Charlie understand that it wasn't his fault – it was just that life, and people, were unpredictable.
Knowing that didn't make things any easier though. And not being able to control things always frustrated Don. And now was the culmination of most of Don's fears – all centered around lack of control.
Don had no knowledge as to the condition of his brother, and he had no knowledge as to the condition of himself. He had no idea how badly hurt he was, and he had no idea where he was going. He hardly knew what was going on at all.
Don's body was fighting a battle that it couldn't win, and despite the fact that the EMTs had been trying to keep Don conscious, his body had other ideas. Slowly but surely, Don's body refused the oxygen again, and he blacked out completely as the monitors in the helicopter began to go off again.
John Tores, who had been an EMT for seven years, wasn't about to let his patient die there in the helicopter, so he motioned for his partner.
"Tim, I think we're going to have to intabate. I know you don't want to do it, and I know if we get any turbulence that we're in trouble, but he's not breathing again."
"We're only three minutes out!" Tim Horn protested, but he glanced down at the still man lying on the gurney. When they'd been given their charge, one of the nurses that had come up had pressed his personal effects, already in a bag, into Tim's hand. At the bottom was the hard leather case that held Don's badge.
"He's an FBI agent!" she called over the sound of the blades beating the air as the helicopter prepared for take off. "You guys better make sure he gets there alive or you should expect they'll be looking into your taxes next year!" She'd been trying to joke, but he could tell she was being deadly serious that they had better keep him alive. There was something dire about saving law enforcement people. It was like there was some inherent need – to go the extra mile, because somewhere along the line, people felt that law enforcement personnel protected and saved their lives. It was only right to return the favor.
"I know, but he hasn't got three minutes if he isn't getting air in there," John was saying, already with the equipment in his hand. "His body is done for without it."
"You know we're going to be in huge trouble for this," Tim said as he tipped Don's head back a little, opening up his air passageway further.
"Yeah, but something tells me this one's got a will to live, and we're only in deep trouble if he dies. If he lives, we're only in a little trouble," John replied, a grim smile on his face. Tim nodded.
"Ok, let's do this then."
If Don had known what they were about to do, he would have wondered where it all fit in the concept of lack of control, but he doubt he would have argued, because as it was, his chances weren't looking all that great.
As Charlie would have said, statistically he was dead. Five times that day he'd had a gun pointed at him and fired at him, and all five time's he'd been hit. Statistically, he was dead.