AN: Again, thank you to everyone who is following this story! Your reviews are like pure gold. Thank you! And hoorah for email alerts coming back online, slowly but surely, now you will be able to receive my blathering responses. ::wink:: Hope you enjoy!

BLOOD ON THE TRACKS

- Chapter Seven -

"You're going to be fine," Dean said from his seated position beside Sam's bed. The elder hunter leaned forward, elbows on knees and hands clenched around a thin bundle of papers that he rolled and unrolled with jerky repetitiveness.

Dean's rigid posture and the panicked look on his face gave the lie away, even if Sam had not already known that he was in trouble. His only hope lay with science, and the three medical specialists who had been ushered into his room the moment he had woken. Sam had been leery of them, immediately on edge, warily watching the Professor and his two assistants as they talked around him and about him, but not to him. He had been afraid, but did not know why. He soon learned.

"Sammy, did you hear me?"

Sam shrugged listlessly and fingered the nasal canula that fed chemically tainted air into his nose. It burned – the pressured stream of air painful to the sensitive tissue – but the balding Professor with his flushed face and keenly bright eyes had been reluctant to change it. Said that it had to be high pressure so Sam could breathe, the alternative was intubation and sedation. So now he welcomed the burn, because he knew the absence was worse.

"Sam?"

"Yeah," Sam said breathily. He looked up at his brother and briefly smiled, then let his wandering gaze rest on the other man in the room. Older, with bushy eyebrows and hair that seemed never to end. Garbed in white and looking decidedly unhappy. Sam frowned at the stranger who looked oddly familiar.

"Ted," Dean said abruptly, his voice dripping with displeasure as he shifted on the chair. Denim rubbed against the patterned fabric. "We met him on the train. He's the father of the bitch that did this to you."

"Melanie's father," Sam said in a whisper, his attention still on the stranger. Pain spiked and he groaned as cold worked through his limbs, tingling and prickling already over sensitive nerve endings. It locked onto his chest and his hand. His hand. He panted weakly and peered at his hand, bandaged from fingertip to elbow. Severed fingers the Professor had said, then murmured something about reattachment and microsurgery, and that someone else would explain it all later.

"I did that," Dean said, his voice bitter and dry with self recrimination.

Sam wrenched his gaze up, his heart hammering as he looked at his brother. His lips parted but no words came.

Dean pulled in an unsteady breath and looked down at a sheaf of papers that he held in his hands. His thumb flicked through the half dozen creased and curled pages. "In the subway, I didn't get your hand clear. I thought… I had. But you're going to be okay. They sewed them all back on, good as new."

Sam looked back at his hand, his brother's forced cheeriness making something twist inside of him. "Did the doctor speak to you?" he asked cautiously after the silence had extended a beat too long.

"Yeah, Fergus Frankenstein and that round headed little professor who grilled you for over an hour want to send you to Boston."

Sam's mouth went dry. He stared at his brother as Dean raised the pages in an abrupt gesture. The older man's lips kept moving, but Sam did not hear. Instead, he heard the minutes counted off in horrific recollection. Oxygen deprivation as a means by which to understand his condition. Professor Sandbaum had wanted to know how long it took for Sam's vitals to drop and his blood to turn cyanotic once they took his oxygen away. So they did, without sedation or pain relief. They stopped the slow torture when Sam's lips turned blue.

Forty three minutes and twenty seconds: the pain of slow suffocation incomparable.

"Professor Shit-for-brains expects me to sign consent for you to be transferred and…" Dean's voice overpowered Sam's memory. "But it's not happening, little brother. I promise you that."

Sam tugged on his lower lip with his teeth and looked away. He searched for reassurance, for hope from his brother's words and vehement protectiveness, but he found none. He thought his hope must have died somewhere around the thirty minute mark when the round headed Professor had wiped away his tears and told him that it was for the best. Maybe it was, because nothing else made sense. "I know how she did it," he said quietly. "She pulled me through the metal siding of the train. Through it, Dean I felt it, and… it hurt. Like she had torn me apart."

"Beam me up, Scotty," Ted said, his voice oddly disconnected.

"Ted," Dean growled. "Thought I told you to keep your mouth shut."

Ted slowly raised his head, glanced warily at Dean then directed his attention to Sam. "They never said that, you know," he said as tears filled his eyes and his chin trembled. "It was actually Scotty, beam me up. That annoyed Melanie. Said it defiled Emory's name, detracted from who he was and what he had done. She said she had met him. Told me he had taught her almost everything he knew. I didn't believe her. I should have. And now she has done this to you, to all those others. I should have done something – should have known she was ill and helped her, but I didn't, because I'm a bad father."

Sam's heart thumped into a jagged palpitation and his vision blackened. In that brief space of nothingness, it all became clear. He struggled back to full awareness and found Dean pacing the room, waving his arms animatedly as he bawled out an already inconsolable Ted.

"Dean."

The elder hunter turned immediately.

"She dematerialized me. She… beamed me up. Took me through that metal wall. Said if I hadn't fought her, it would have worked. She called it a transporter accident and said Emory would fix it. But Emory isn't real, Dean. He's not real."

Sam blew out a pathetic half breath as pain speared through his chest and tears stung his eyes. "Star Trek," he rasped. "Jesus Christ, Dean, it's not real. How… could she do this to me?"

Dean gaped, disbelief and shock blanching his features. Sam pushed back against the pillows as growing panic and pain made it damned near impossible to breathe. He waited for Dean to deny it, to laugh at the insanity of it, to reassure him that it could not be true. Instead his brother stared, horrifically wide eyed, and time slowed to a numbing crawl.

"She must have opened a window or forced the doors," Dean finally said, his voice insipid with horrified doubt. "She must have…."

But she had not. Sam knew it, and he could see that Dean did too. Sam looked away, struggled to swallow, to breathe, to keep the welling wave of panic that threatened to consume him. Ted continued his quiet introspective monologue, berating himself for his pathetic parenting while Dean clasped the back of his neck, spun on his heel and stalked to the window to stare out at a view that Sam knew he did not see.

Sam suddenly felt alone, trapped in a body that had been physically reconfigured so that it no longer tolerated an aerobic environment. Maybe he could breathe underwater. The inane thought came and went, but the pain and the terror stayed – as did the bitter realization of where it all led.

"Sandbaum can't fix this," he said around the rawness in his throat and the constriction in his chest. "Melanie screwed me over, man. There's no coming back from this."

"We'll find a way. We just have to think it through. Work it out. That's all."

"That's all," Sam grunted. He tried to roll his eyes, but they were too filled with moisture and heavy with pained exhaustion to do anything other than close.

"Don't give up, Sam. Don't you dare."

Sam didn't want to. Not really, but the temptation was there. Right before him, the delicious pull of oblivion. Peace. No more pain. He slipped toward it, wanting it, desiring it. But something held him back. Kept him physically grounded – a tight pressure around his wrist from where his brother's calloused hand pressed against his flesh. Hard enough to bruise, but that's the way they were. The way their lives were. So much pain.

"Tired," Sam whispered, and his voice betrayed more than he ever knew it could.

"You don't get to sleep, Sammy. Not now. Not yet. Not for a long time, little brother. Not while I'm around. You hear me!"

The grasp around his wrist became painful and Sam gasped, his eyes jerking open. "Dean."

Dean let go immediately, his expression tortured, then the older man crossed the room, grabbed Ted by the front of his gown and slammed the frail looking drunk against the wall. "Tell me everything that bitch told you," Dean snarled as he shoved Ted again and made his head bounce off the wall. "Everything! You hearin' me?"

"Shit," Sam breathed. He pushed up on one elbow, gasping and grunting as Dean drew an arm back in preparation to strike the cowering man. "Dean, stop!" He trembled, one arm outstretched and the IV line pulled tight. "Stop," he repeated. "Please stop."

A book hit the floor at Ted's feet, landed with a muted thud then flattened on its back. Sam's lips parted as Dean glanced at it, then bent down and picked it up. He flipped it open, ignorant of Ted's frantic attempts to retrieve it. Sam flopped back, exhausted and sickened as Dean kept the small brown ledger just out of Ted's reach. Everything about his brother's behavior and Ted's distress rang warning bells in Sam's head, but he couldn't express his anxiety so instead he stared and gasped and struggled just to stay conscious.

"It's her diary," Dean said caustically. "This is the bitch's diary."

"Dean, don't."

Dean looked across at him, his eyes blazing. "He had this all the time, Sam. Her motives and method, all the deranged thoughts she had while alive that expanded exponentially in death. I'll bet it's all here. Everything!"

Did it really matter? Sam's vision blurred as Dean bowed his head and roughly flipped the pages. Ted's whiny voice chorused in the background and Sam's consciousness took a sudden, unscheduled nose-dive.

He did not know how long he had been out, but it must have been several hours because the light seemed different, the sun's angle changed, the room darker. Dean leaned over him, frantically tapping his face in an attempt to rouse him. The book had vanished and Sam wondered if he had imagined it all.

"Sam, you with me?"

Sam shifted and absently plucked at the nasal canula. He started a little as he saw Ted watching him. The older man stood by the end of the bed, his dirty khaki overcoat clutched around him, the fabric caught up in one hand while in the other he held the journal. Sam frowned as he saw the book.

"Diary," he said as he pointed to it.

"Enlightening reading," Dean ground out. He unhooked the nasal canula from under Sam's nose and hesitated as Sam flinched. "Sam, you good?"

"Yeah."

"You ready to bust this place?"

Sam grabbed the tubing, held it between forefinger and thumb, poised to tear it back and fit it back into place. His hand shook and he couldn't help it. "Why?"

"They want to use you for medical research, Sam. Not to heal you, but to heal others. They don't know how to fix you and this," the rolled sheaf of papers flashed in Sam's field of view, "confirms it."

Guinea pig. Used for medical science. There were humanitarian laws that protected people from that. He read about them, when they had been abused. It is how science advanced, how lives were saved – a worthy sacrifice.

"I should stay," Sam rasped as he tugged on the nasal tubing.

Dean's features hardened. "No. They can't heal you. They're not even going to try."

"I can save lives. Babies. That's good, isn't it?"

"Shit, Sammy, what crap have they been telling you?" Dean firmly pulled the tubing away, out of Sam's reach. "You're leaving here. Now."

Sam panicked, clawed at his brother and begged for the oxygen. He didn't realize what he said, or what he did, but moments later he found himself forcibly stilled, and the nasal canula back in place, the burning sting through his nose helping to calm him down.

"Sam, what the hell?" Dean dropped to the chair, one hand tight around Sam's forearm, the pads of his fingers sweaty against Sam's skin. He leaned forward, heatedly whispering. "The chopper is on its way. Less than an hour out. Sandbaum's legal team found some freakin' loophole in the admission forms that Ted signed. It's horse-shit, Sammy, but there's money and egos and power behind this and… they say they can take you." He leaned closer, sounding frantic, panicked. "Fergus had gone home to pack. He's going with you. He and that fucking smarmy professor will have you and they can do anything they want." He paused, glanced at the door and Sam saw the raw fear in his eyes before he looked back. "Once they move you to Boston, there's no way… there's no chance."

"No chance… now."

"There is," Dean said in a vehement whisper as he stabbed toward Ted and the diary. "There's years of psychotic rambling in that thing, diagrams, theories, conversations -- everything that the dead chick ever thought, everything she ever did, and it's all about Star Trek and this Emory dude. Sam, the supernatural did this, the supernatural will fix it. But I have to take you off the oxygen to get you out of here. I've got an oxygen tank, and I've got drugs." His hand tightened, clasped harder around Sam's forearm. Not painful, but demandingly protective. "Trust me. I will fix this, but not if you get taken to Boston. It has to be here. Right here. It's the only way."

Sam trusted his brother. He really did. He tugged his arm out of his Dean's grasp and touched at the canula. "Forty three minutes and twenty seconds," he said in a bare whisper. He wet his lips and clutched at the thin plastic tubing. "Thirty minutes. Don't leave it off for longer than… thirty minutes. It's… it hurts so bad."

Something dark and deadly rapidly crossed Dean's face, but it was gone too fast for recognition. Dean nodded curtly, seemingly unable or unwilling to speak. When Dean reached for the canula a second time, Sam did not resist because he trusted his brother more than anything in this world, and if Dean could not fix this, no-one could.