Fourteen bottles of beer on the wall
Summary: In a Winchester operating room, all the supplies you need are a pen knife, some dental floss, a sewing needle, and a fifth of whiskey. Based on "Changing Channels."
This one's a lot lighter than the last one. Much less blood and gore, too.
The Many Glorious Uses of Bourbon Whiskey
Sam stares at the tray holding rows of shining stainless steel utensils. His hands are sweaty inside his white latex gloves.
Various sizes and shapes of scalpels, forceps, clamps, tiny rulers…What the hell? How is he supposed to use these to operate on his brother?
Well, it's not like he's never used a scalpel before—in high school biology, they dissected a frog—but Dean's not some farm-harvested amphibian hatched and raised specifically for the purpose of ending up pickled in formaldehyde to help a ninth grader understand the circulatory systems of vertebrates better. No, he's Dean. Sam can't dissect his brother.
Dean's not dead, for starters.
But a little voice in the back of his mind tells him that he will be if Sam doesn't get his ass moving soon.
He glances back though the observation window at Doctor Whatever-her-name-was, the one who'd slapped him, and she waves at him and simpers. Right.
"I need a…pen knife, some dental floss, a sewing needle, and a fifth of whiskey." That's the kind of stuff he's used to working with. It's not like you can get a hold of lab-sterilized surgical equipment when you live out of a duffel bag and have fraudulent insurance cards.
And oh God yeah, he's really gonna need that whiskey.
The nurses stare at him incredulously. What? Move! Oh right, he's supposed to be a brilliant, brilliant doctor… "Stat!"
That seems to be the magic word because it makes the whole operating room explode in a flurry of activity as the assistants rush about trying to get him all the things he'd asked for.
The pen knife and the dental floss get to him first. Dean's been bleeding the whole while, but strangely, he's been extremely coherent and there for a guy who just got shot in the back ten minutes ago. It's weird. Sam's finding TV-land very bizarre. When they get back to the real world, he's not watching TV anymore. It's kind of lost its appeal.
Someone brings him a sewing kit. "Where's the whiskey?" he asks.
The nurses glance at each other with nervous expressions. Finally, one woman brings her hand out from behind her back, and holds the shaking bottle out to him.
Sam grabs it and takes a loooooong pull from it. "Thanks." Everyone seems even more anxious than before, if that's even possible.
An audible gasp goes around the operating table when he sloshes a portion of the liquid all over the open wound on Dean's back. He glances up. "What?"
A nurse stammers. "B-but Doctor. That's…" She falls silent.
Sam shrugs and proceeds to sterilize the needle—his way, the Winchester way. He pours alcohol over the thin sliver of metal and flicks his lighter (and thank goodness the trickster'd left that in his pocket).
Whiskey's a damned good sterilizer, ya know?
That's not the only thing it's good for, either.
Sam remembers one morning when he'd woken up with an enormous porno 'stache on his upper lip, drawn with a black Sharpie. After raging at Dean for several minutes and promising revenge, he'd retreated to the bathroom to try to scrub the damned stuff off. The rough towel only turned his skin bright red, and left the marker. The result was that his lower face now looked like a caricature of the devil.
Oh yeah, he was so ready to kill Dean.
Then the thought had come to him that this was permanent marker. The Winchesters use permanent marker for a lot of things, normal stuff like writing on labels and containers, but also in the course of their job—sometimes they have to draw sigils on their skin to perform a spell or protect themselves.
They'd just splash a little whiskey onto the marks and rub themselves clean. Presto-cleano—no more permanent marker.
Sam had stormed out into the room to find the whiskey bottle and glare some more at his laughing brother. Dick. "Gonna drown your sorrows in the bottle, Sammy?" he'd taunted.
"It's your turn next, you ass," Sam had retorted. Oh, and had he had his revenge.
Dean really hadn't appreciated the new aftershave Sam had sneaked into his toilet kit. He'd smelled like a skunk had decided to play water tag with him for a whole week. That was an entire seven days of not getting any. Oh, was he pissed. He didn't think that little factoid Sam told him—that the musk comes from the anal scent glands of the skunk—was very interesting at all.
Sam pushes the needle through his brother's flesh and pulls the floss up. There's a neat row of stitches in Dean's back—better than a real doctor's, he thinks, and he should know. He ties a knot in the thread.
"We okay? How's it looking?" Dean's voice is muffled, coming through that pillow with the hole in the middle of it so he could breathe. Sam can't get over the strangeness of talking to Dean while performing surgery on a freaking gunshot wound in the middle of his brother's back. And get this: they're in a TV show. Doctor Sexy, M.D. Yeah.
Sam snips the extra floss with the surgical scissors. "Yep, you'll be fine." Just like any other hunting-related injury, right? You just clean the wound out real well with holy water and whatever alcohol you have on hand and either bandage it or stitch it up. Simple as that. Everyday Winchester-style surgery. Motel-room operations.
Except this time, it was a gunshot wound. To the back. Dean shouldn't be able to just walk away from this. Yet here he is, talking to him while Sam's putting dental floss stitches in his back. That just isn't normal.
Sam turns around to see if Doctor Lovesick McSlappy's still there. Oh yeah. She sure seems to be a clingy one. Mouthing 'I love you' and sighing, indeed. Sam grimaces and returns his attention to his brother.
Yeah, Dean'll be fine. It's a TV show, right? People have miracle recoveries all the time. Doctor Dean seems to be a central character to the show, so they wouldn't kill him off, right? Or is it sweeps or finale season now? Shit, when's the last time he watched TV for fun? It's probably been months. Damn.
He takes another look at the stitches he'd just put in his brother and second guesses himself. What if he'd killed his brother by using shitty supplies and starting an infection? Shit, shit, shit.
He grabs the bottle of bourbon and pours a little more onto Dean's back. Dean hisses and cusses him out. That's perfectly alright.
Then he shrugs and raises the bottle to his own lips to settle his nerves…
Dude, is that clapping? What. The. Hell?
And where the hell his bottle? That's not right.