This is damn fucking different from all I've done and written so far.
Sue me.
WARNINGS/TAGS/SUMMARY:
This is set quite some time before Sam starts the Trials. He decides to stop taking a medication he had been put on a couple of years earlier. Because of all his past-injuries he's suffering from chronic pain.
Hurt!sam, Sick!Sam, caring!dean, one!shot
EXPLICIT!TRIGGER!WARNING FOR:
mentions!of!suicidal!thoughts, mentions!of!self-harm
depression, withdrawal, discontinuation syndrome, medication, drugs
THIS STORY SHALL SHOW YOU, THAT YOU ARE NOT ALONE WITH THE BURDENS YOU CARRY.
WE ARE OUT THERE.
WE ARE FAMILY.
NO MATTER the distance, no matter where you're from, which gods you are praying to.
The fandom is out there.
The fandom can be family.
I didn't think about posting this anywhere at first. But then I thought … fuck it… some of you can relate for sure and if not, you're going to learn about it.
A whole lot of people are out there are suffering from some kind of chronic pain.
I am not quite sure IF it's "legit" to write shit like that out loud over here on FanFiction or on AO3 and pointing out right here, that I don't just want to post this fanfic for you to read. But I want you to get the deeper meaning of it.
There's a message. Go find it folks... In my head, I had Gabriel reading the lines … may as well try that too … it makes it more funny and sarcastic at some point.
Withdrawal
That's what Sam Winchester is up against at the moment.
Withdrawal is a bitch. No matter if you're doing drugs, or if it's because some weird medication you got from a doc a couple of years ago.
It's a small white/blue capsule. Actually a medication to keep pain at bay and under control. It intercedes in the way your brain works shit out in between the nerve-ends and the actual center for pain-management in your head. But it's also an antidepressant. - Right there should alarm bells go off and drill fucking holes into your skull.
If you weren't depressive before, you sure as hell are after tossing in those blue-white pills. For quite some time Sam could tell.
It's not done after a couple of hours or days, or even weeks.
Hell, it can take MONTHS until this discontinuation syndrome starts to fade. Until then, you're caught right smack in the middle of an ice-cold hot hellfire.
There's no getting away from it. This fire eats you alive, from the insides out. It turns your intestines to mush. It takes damn well care of it, that you don't feel the hunger anymore. Any hunger. Not just the physical one … and at the same time, hunger is burning deep down in your stomach, longing to be fed.
Withdrawal is so much worse than the pain.
Why taking antidepressants when you're not depressive? Well yeah, they might helped for the pain – but that's that.
You didn't want to end your life before the pills? Well, here we go, now you want to. Definitely.
Not because the pain's so hard to take.
Not because you can't handle it.
You can't handle the withdrawal symptoms. You can't deal with that dark depressive mood you're caught in and you certainly can't deal with a tree you're driving by and thinking: "Well hey there pal? You look so sweet. Let's wrap my car around you, because it sure as hell is going to be one hell of an experience for the both of us."
Sounds to Sam Winchester as if the trickster's game to have another funny ride on the mary-go-round, right?
They actually call it discontinuation syndrome and not withdrawal, because withdrawal and weaning off from a drug or medicine sounds so much worse than discontinuation syndrome, doesn't it?
If it wasn't just for the pain returning from which you're not sure if it's because you're not taking the pills anymore, or the discontinuation syndrome causes them , and all these weird thoughts in your head … keep just SPINNING.
There is no calm inside of you.
There are feelings you weren't aware of even possessing.
Your body REVOLTS, screaming and yelling at you to continue and swallow them, even though you don't even know exactly why you should do such a stupid thing despite the wide range of side-effects . Side-effects you weren't even aware of having anyway …
Mentioning hallucinations by the way, so you know.
Auditory and visual hallucinations. They can be a real bitch. Can make you jumpy and angsty and stuff, when you're not aware, that it's from the withdrawal and not from your own right mind.
No matter what you do, it's useless. You have to ride it out. No matter how long it's gonna take. You gotta get that shit out of your system before it's ruining you …
Sam …
He haven't slept in 42 hours straight – well, there's been an one-hour-nap laying spread out across his bed – but only for good measures, so if when his brother would ask if he had slept, he could tell him that he, in fact, had:
"Yeah, Dean. I'm fine." He wasn't forced to lie to his brother about it then.
Which made it for Sam a whole lot easier to get along, since Dean didn't look all that fresh himself anymore either.
And his brother wouldn't believe a single damn world.
He was practicably suffering with his brother in this.
Because Sam looks like chewed on and spit out a multiple times by now.
They are now the third week into this whole withdrawal-shit-thing.
Sam's doing not better. He's doing a whole lot worse than before. Sometimes he would shake. He'd feel so damn cold as if he was wearing a frozen core inside his stomach. And then … in the turn of a second, he would feel raging hot. His skin burning in unseen flames.
He wasn't running a fever. Dean had checked that.
Multiple times.
If anything he was suffering from hypothermia. The thermometer always read around 94,5.
Dean had also checked the other thermometers. There wasn't much difference.
Right at the moment Sam feels so wrecked. Sleep deprivation, his heart unsure as if it wants to skip a beat or two or if it want's to burst out, ripping his rib-cage apart.
Not to mention the paresthesia. It feels like someone is using an electrifying shaving head on him. Sam Winchester's back in the pit with Lucifer and Michael, having their fun with him all over again.
Sam Winchester isn't a whiny girl. He never was. He knew this was going to be hard on him. Like all those years ago that thing with the demon-blood.
Except for the getting flung through the room this was quite as bad. And the hallucinations he's had. Man. They've been a bitch.
Speaking of which. The ones he has now aren't a lot better either . Though they're only shadows in the corners of his eyes and weird noises. It feels like he's super-sensitive to sounds now. He can practically hear EVERYTHING.
So he's wearing headphones, listening to loud music all day only to black out his surroundings and the noises.
At least it's not his brother telling him, that he's a FREAK and a MONSTER and that he would hunt him down for being such an insult to humanity.
So here he is sitting on the couch in the bunker, huddled in a tight ball of flesh and bones, shivering his ass off. Freezing to death in a room which is quite HOT.
As the awesome brother Dean Winchester is, he's up and around as soon as he notices, because he can't watch this anymore. Nothing of this.
There is no way to help his brother thru this except for being there for him. Damned to sense what the fuck was going on, because his little idiot-brother wouldn't tell him.
So he gets him blankets, and wraps him up in them from head to toe.
Sam's teeth are chattering, his whole fucking body is trembling because of the threatening cold deep inside of his burning mind and body.
It's the hunger. Sam Winchester is starving, and though he can't stand food at the moment. No rabbits-food, no half-caff-vanilla-latte, nothing. Not even chinese and he loves chinese.
He's chewing on the food, preferably he'd spit it right out again, but he doesn't. Because he knows that would let Dean worry even more.
So he chokes it down – somehow. Quite not enough for the Sasquatch that he is. But it's more than nothing.
Dean would bring him a hot tea – in hopes that Sam would keep it down. Even when he knows that Sam just CAN'T hold it down.
Sam's not quite sure, if he can hold it until he's in the bathroom, with that anguishing electrifying razor-head in his head under his skin and the immense urge to visit the bathroom.
To take a damn shit.
That's how it goes, he's nearly shitting himself, despite that he's hurrying, leaving a trail of blankets behind, just to collect them up again, on his way back to the living-room
That's actually what discontinuation syndrome means. That's no withdrawal, no way … Dean Winchester laughs hysterically at this thought. Well fuck all the doctors and what they are saying.
Sam's in no good mood. He either feels like crying, and the very next moment severe anger urging him to yell at Dean. And if he doesn't feel like crying or to be angry, he's desperate.
Desperate to end this. Desperate to get it over with. Desperate because of his past life and the one in his future.
If there even was a future for him, right? He was about to take on the trials. This time around he wouldn't survive this.
But Dean swallows it. All of this. He's bearing this along with his brother. He knows the whole thing is not life-threatening, at least not yet.
So he keeps it cool. For Sammy.
Because he knows. He can feel how much Sam is hurting and how tough he is despite everything. Sam's a fighter.
Fighter never give up.
And Winchesters are damn good at fighting shit, whatever is coming their way.
Then again. Sam's so silent. No tortured whines, no freaked out look wherever he would hurt, or if he'd see something that isn't there. He's just a little huge bag of internal hurts at the moment.
Dean has to have a close look on his brother. Watch out for him. This isn't a withdrawal he can take on all by himself in a panic-room, which he would only enter to check on Sam's restrains and to give him something to drink.
It might feel close the same demon-blood-shit for Sam. But for Dean it isn't.
Sam's on the couch again, wrapped up in blankets, sitting there, looking so pained and lost, it breaks Dean's heart.
He tugs at Sam's upper blanket and gives him a nod.
They share a short look.
Dean was not going to tease him about this. He does not make fun of him.
Because this? This was damn serious.
When Sam doesn't move, Dean clears his throat.
He's no one for chick-flicks and touchy-feely-stuff. So he shows his brother how much he loves him – had ever loved – no matter what he had said to him in the past.
Dean wraps an arm around Sam's shoulders and brings him to lay down on the couch, his little brother's head resting in his lap. He's caressing Sam's hair and scalp. Because he has figured out how to make him feel more comfortable. Somehow this seems to work nowadays pretty well.
What surprises Dean even more is, that Sam would let him touch him in this way. That his grown-up-pain-in-the-ass-little-gigantor-brother would allow him to treat him like a kid.
He was trusting him to show, how weak he is right now without using words.
And that's a lot more than Dean Winchester could ask for after all they've been through and what lay before them.
Sam is about to drift off into slumber-land.
"You'll get through this.", Dean says, confidently.
Because that is what Winchesters are supposed to do.
They stand their man. They are never giving up. And even if it looks like there's no tomorrow (due to the apocalypse, the end of the world and, the mother o f all and leviathans and blah), they will always finding a way to stay on the road.
The End.
