Weaver, chapter 14
He really was glad they'd pushed on to Salt Lake instead of stopping in one of the few tiny towns along the highway, but it hadn't made that much difference in the grand scheme. The doctors here couldn't really diagnose Sam any better than a small town guy could have, but he hoped the equipment there made up for that. The CPAP had worked for about six hours and then became useless. Sam was now on a full ventilator, and had shown no signs of life. Dean was counting on the ventilator keeping Sam with him for as long as possible. He needed time. Sam needed time. He had a terrible, sick feeling deep in his gut, the all-familiar panicky feeling that Sam was already gone.
"Excuse me, Mr. Schon?"
Dean looked up wearily. He'd been told, several times by several different doctors and nurses, to get some rest, and part of him knew that now Sam was hooked up to machines guaranteed to trigger alarms if he stopped breathing he should do that. He couldn't. He wouldn't. He blinked dumbly at the short man standing in the doorway. Doctor…Fitzpatrick, he thought. Dean had seen too many different people on the way up from the emergency room to be sure. He didn't really care.
"Yeah?"
"I've run every test I can think of. I'm afraid…there's not much more I can do."
"Are you sure?" Dean said automatically, though he'd already known that answer was coming. "There's got to be something."
"Even if there were…" The doctor shrugged and spread his hands. "I really am sorry. I honestly don't know what's wrong with him. I can't treat what I don't know. I can monitor the bruising of his ribs, of course. In a way, the rest will help heal those injuries…if he wakes up, he'll feel better."
Dean couldn't hear any more.
"Find another doctor."
"Sir."
"Find. Another. Doctor."
He was being a fool. Dean knew western medicine couldn't solve supernatural ailments no matter who the doctor was, but his insides clenched at the very thought of acknowledging that out loud, like doing so would somehow make Sam slip away from him faster. Doctor Fitzpatrick gave him an awkward, pitying look, opened his mouth like he was going to say something, and then silently retreated. Dean slouched back, dug out his cell phone and scrolled through his call lists, looking for anyone he hadn't already contacted multiple times. There had to be someone who knew someone who had once heard of this fucking thing and could help them. He felt like he was throwing Hail Mary passes and there was no one around to catch them.
The heart monitor Sam was hooked up to skipped a couple of beats. It wasn't the first time it had happened, and Dean knew it wouldn't be the last. His own heart, almost intuitively, picked up the slack and started to pound even faster during those times. Just as intuitively, he rose and moved closer to the bed, needing to be close. Sam's heart rate steadied after only a few seconds.
Dean wondered if his brother was fighting in there, somewhere where no one could see. Of course he was. Sam was nothing if not a stubborn son of a bitch. Dean drew the uncomfortable hospital chair closer and sat back down, leaned forward with elbows on the arms of the chair, hands clasped together. He bowed his head down and closed his eyes for a minute. Everything spun slightly in a way that evidenced a pretty urgent need for sleep. If Sam was in there fighting a damned intangible supernatural force, the very least he could do was fight exhaustion. He opened his eyes and leaned close to his brother's ear.
"You just hold on, Sammy," Dean said quietly. "I swear I'll think of something. All you gotta do is not die on me."
Shit, it did suck to say that, and he thought he finally got what Sam had gone through with the whole Reaper thing. He could have gone forever without coming to that understanding in this particular way. Dean rubbed a hand across his forehead, down his face, and watched Sam's chest as it barely moved. He fought the urge to grab his brother by the shoulders and shake him again, an act he knew wouldn't do any more good than the damned doctors seemed to be doing. His gaze ended up on Sam's slack, pale face. Without the customary angst tensing his features, Sam looked even younger than he usually did.
"Sir?"
"What?" he snapped, turning to look at the nurse who'd just entered the room. She looked like she had years of experience dealing with people like him, and merely flinched a little. "What do you want?"
"It's time to change the sheets. You can stay if you like, it should only take a few minutes."
"Change the…"
He had to question the necessity of changing the bed's linens. It was a thought he let hang in the air after catching a resolute glimmer in the nurse's eye. There was probably some stupid hospital rule about it. Dean stood up slowly, shaking his head. He had a hard enough time seeing Sam lying surrounded by machines and poked full of holes; he didn't need to see a couple of nurses or orderlies shifting his brother around like a giant rag doll. Like he was already just a corpse.
"Whatever. I'll just go stretch my legs," Dean said, thumbing toward the door.
The nurse didn't respond, all business. Dean supposed there was only so much that could be said to the family of patients like Sam, the ones with one proverbial foot out the door as far as everyone was concerned. Damnit. He cleared his throat to get rid of a sudden constriction and tried to clear his head of shitty thoughts like that; neither action worked. He left the room and trolled around the stark hallway, not wanting to roam too far away from Sam's room. Stretching his muscles had been a good idea; somehow he'd got a little sore. Several hospital gown clad guys wheeling around IV stands gave him wary looks. He glanced down at himself, realizing the dirty jeans, scratched face, leather jacket look probably made him appear rough. Whatever. He glared at anyone who looked nervous, which of course only made them look more nervous.
He circled the hallway three times before the nurse and orderlies filed out of Sam's room, dirty linens in hand. Dean went back to the bedside, pulled the chair closer and resumed his vigil. He thought it might be a good idea to check out a library now that they were back in a bigger city, but the risk of something happening with Sam while he was off futilely looking at books and microfilm and computer screens was too great. Sam had done as thorough a job as ever researching, despite not having much access. If a book existed that contained the answer of how to kill a dream succubus, Dean was pretty sure it wasn't going to be in a library in Salt Lake City.
"I wish you could give me some kind of sign that you're in there fighting somewhere," Dean said quietly to his brother, giving voice to the thought that plagued him. The doctor had told him that while he didn't know what was wrong with Sam, he did know it wasn't a coma. Sam couldn't hear a thing he said. He had to try anyway. "I dunno, squeeze my hand or something."
He felt like one of those idiots on an after school special, but grabbed Sam's lax, IV-free left hand and waited to see if anything happened. Two things did – Sam's monitors suddenly went haywire with skipped heartbeats, lot of them until there weren't any heartbeats at all, and Dean's cell phone started ringing. Medical personnel streamed into the room, ohshititwasbad, and pushed him out of the way. He pulled the phone from his jacket, intent on silencing it. Caller ID read "Zelda R."
"Sam," he said.
"Sir, you can't use that in here."
Sam might be dying right in front of him and help might be a click of a button away. Dean fled to the corridor, turning to watch the mayhem surrounding Sam. He probably shouldn't use the phone out there either. His hand shook slightly as he hit talk and raised it to his ear anyway.
"Missouri?"
"Dean," came her airy, high-pitched voice. "How's Sam doing?"
"What, you can't tell?" he said, snappish.
"Boy, I'm a thousand miles away, and you know it doesn't work like that." Missouri paused for a second. "Oh, honey, he's not good."
"Not at the moment, he's not. Hold on a second." Dean relaxed a little when the frenzy surrounding Sam abated. The nurse that had booted him out before left the room, scowling at his phone. He scowled back, but pointed to Sam and said, "What was that, is he okay?"
"He's fine now," she said. Her face softened slightly. Damn, if Ratched was going nice on him, Dean must look as scared spitless as he felt. "It's probably going to happen more frequently from now on, I'm sorry. And you really shouldn't be using the phone in this wing."
Dean nodded absently, noticing how the nurse hadn't really told him anything. He leaned against the wall, watched the rest of the nurses and the doctor – not Fitzpatrick, he noted – leave the room. He craned his neck around the doorframe and so he could keep an eye on Sam.
"Okay, I'm back. Please tell me you've got something I can work with." He'd strip to his damned skivvies, light candles and chant a crazy-ass ritual while dancing around Sam's bed right about now. "Anything."
"I thought I did, but now I'm not so sure," she said. Thank crap she didn't ask about Sam again. "If he's in the hospital, it might have progressed too far for this to be of any use. Is he conscious?"
"He's hooked up to a bunch of machines." They're keeping him alive, Dean thought, they're all that is. "He has a freaking tube down his throat. I don't think he's going to…no, he's not conscious."
"That is bad." He heard paper rustling, the faint sibilance of Missouri breathing in his ear. She was right in sync with Sam's ventilator. God. "But not hopeless."
"You know how to kill the succubus, make it so it can't do this to anyone else?" Dean said.
"It's no succubus, Dean. Weavers are almost always genderless, and when they're not, they're male. More like an incubus, if anything."
"Weaver?"
"Weavers manipulate dreams and feed off the energy of the dreamer the same way an incubus or succubus uses sex. Reports on them are very rare, probably only because most don't live to tell the tale. I had to do a lot of digging and talk to a lot of people to find any answers," Missouri explained. Dean felt an inappropriate urge to laugh as that damned hippy 70s song played in his head, and Wayne and Garth danced around. He heard more rustling paper, shook his head to rid it of the tasteless humor. He and Sam had already figured out it fed off dreams. Except for the name, this wasn't news. "It's likely that it had Sam for a lot longer than either of you could possibly know. With his abilities, even untapped as they are, it would have wanted to draw as much from your brother as possible before…you know."
"Damn." Dean pinched the bridge of his nose. From the same information to unpleasant probabilities and none of it anything he wanted to hear. He didn't want to hear how Sam's freakiness was probably the biggest reason for this. "Damnit, he's had more visions since Lawrence. Not too long ago, actually."
"That might have accelerated the Weaver's actions. Sam was wide open for this kind of attack. If it already had Sam while he was having visions, they could have given it such a rush it couldn't resist."
Dean clenched his jaw so hard he thought he heard a molar crack. All that time Sam was having his energy leeched away and he hadn't said a word. Probably because of Dean's own inability to resist giving his little brother a hard time about his…skills instead of treating it with any sort of seriousness. He didn't know for sure what he would have said to Sam if he had known about the dreams, but he imagined it would have been worthless. He stared at Sam, hated the paleness of his face, the immobility. Dean's stomach hurt.
"As long as Sam's still alive, there may be time to stop it. Is it safe to leave him for a little while? You're going to need a few things."
A/N: Almost there. I think…two chapters left. One would imagine I could get those done tonight, but raging migraine says one more second staring at the computer equals death and I'm too young to die. Thank you for your patience!