Summary: The heart is a funny thing. Some say it loves, and others say that it is just a muscle, keeping you alive for some minuscule amount of time. For Cas Shurley, the heart was a defective reminder that each day was maybe going to be his last. For years he had been in and out of hospitals. For years he had viewed time as something trickling down the drain. Then Sam Winchester died. He died, and Cas got to live. And in what universe was that fair? But he accepted the gift, and told himself that he would live. Each beat of Sam's heart in his chest was an anthem, a siren song beckoning him back to life.
This new heart though, wanted him to do more than just live. This heart had a story to tell. It would wake him up in the night, and visit him with cold drafts and a sense of purpose that would propel him out of bed. But before he could truly live and act on the demands of his new heart, he would have to get out of the hospital, and he would have to meet the Winchester family. And though he didn't know it, he would especially have to meet Dean, Sam's brother. And meeting him would remind him of just how much more there was to life than just the living.
This story was written for DCBB 2015. The art for this fic was made by lotrspnfangirl. I recommend viewing it at her live journal site.
Time. Time, measured in seconds, measured in minutes, measured in hours, measured in days, measured in heartbeats. Time, ticking clocks, tapping pens, alarm clocks blaring. Time, time, time. So much time. The sun rose and set. The wind blew through the room with a winter fresh breath. A nurse closed the window. Her steps when counted, numbered five out the door, fifteen out in the hall until they were too far away to hear anymore.
He breathes, his heart beats, his eyes open and close. People come and go. They talk to him and ask tedious questions. He answers as best he can. Not so long ago he was dying. Today he is living. Time. How did he get so much time? How did he manage to go from a countdown to this? He settles his hand on his chest and feels the steady drum beat beneath his newly scarred chest. He had to be gentle. Even a light touch still hurt. The drugs were good though. They slowed things down and made the pain a dull pulsing thing.
The world spun. His mind spun. His mind spun his life into tapestries and tales called tomorrow and the day after and the day after that. He did not know how to feel about it all, so sometimes he focused on smaller things, the frayed edge of his crisp white sheets, the fingerprint left behind on the metal tray next to his bed, the mylar balloon that was slowly sinking to the floor. Sometimes he just slept, noting the time when he closed his eyes so that he could note it when he woke. He would do the math down to the seconds to determine how long he had let himself close his eyes against a world that was moving and shaping and being.
His family came and went at regular intervals. Apparently, they always had someone stationed in the waiting room to make sure that he was being well-taken care of during his recovery. He could feel them before they even entered the room, like he had a sixth sense of them, of their bodies displacing the space in the hall and the room before they arrived. They did not make him talk much; although, the little that they got out of him sometimes felt like too much. He shouldn't resent them for it, but sometimes he did. Never before had they spent so much time talking. They spent more time not talking, not talking about the inevitable, the tragic, the all too real possibilities.
He almost laughed in the third week, when talking was more tolerable. He did not remember what had prompted it, maybe nothing. He remembered the pain of it. He remembered that every time he breathed now. The way his ribs ached with each breath, the way his muscles tightened in anticipation, the way his lungs wanted to cough out a reminder just for thinking that he could have laughter, was enough to keep him from letting himself go like that again.
His father sat next to him today, his eyes lined in a way that showed his age. The grey at his temples framed features that had been pinched with concern from as far back as he could remember. Chuck could be happy now, if he let himself. He could maybe even look at Cas without the worry and the fear in his eyes like he had for far too long. Time could heal that, maybe. Then again, Cas was in his mid-twenties and had always been the cause of that worry. A few weeks could not undo the damage of decades. It would take far more time than that.
He decided to move away at the earliest possible moment. The thought came to him as the I.V. dripped next to him and one of his siblings sat across the room reading him the most boring novel ever written. He wanted to share his thoughts on the piece, but thought of the alternative, silence followed by some sort of pained attempt at conversation. No, reading is better. The author was actually providing a narrative description of something that the main character just said. Further descriptions are so unnecessary. Aarg, he's reading a sex scene. Living is overrated. He closed his eyes and pretended to sleep, hoping that this might end the reading from hell.
The nights were the worst. All he did was lie in the bed and stare out at the same four walls. His world was small. At night, it felt smaller though. The darkness sinking in on him like a grave. Sometimes he thought that he saw things in it, ghosts of movement that might not really be there, but the mind plays tricks on you. They were still giving him drugs for the recovery and the pain, so it might all be connected to that. Regardless, the nights made him wonder and worry. He tried to force himself into sleep in those hours, but something always pulled him back into the land of the conscious around 3:00 a.m.
There was talk of his time at the hospital ending. Plans were being made. He did not contribute much to these discussions. These plans were temporary. When he could, there would be a place, quiet and just distant enough, that he would call home. Maybe he would live in this city, he thought. He sucked in a deep, sharp breath of future freedom, and it did not make him cough like it had before. He was growing stronger. He and his family lived twenty-five miles outside of the city. The world there was so different, silent mostly. There were vast stretches of wide grassy fields under generous canopies of clouds and blue. The sky in that region was often described as big, an apt description, he thought. He would miss it, sometimes, he mused again as he thought of living in the city.
Sometimes when the window was open he would hear the sounds of traffic and distant commuter trains. He longed to get lost in the city. Back home there were so few people that one could not get lost. There had been a time when he would not have longed for that, elementary school, maybe. He had been a small child, quick to make friends. He never sat alone at the long lunch tables. When he started middle school, it was no different, until his health started taking a negative turn. At first they didn't really know what was wrong. Local doctors were more tuned into the usual maladies like a cold or seasonal allergies. Setting a broken leg was the greatest drama most of them had to deal with with any regularity.
In time, though, things had gotten worse. He collapsed at school and was rushed to the hospital. Specialists came to him, and he soon learned what it was to have a finite amount of time to live a full life. His family had been a positive, chipper bunch before. Something happened to them that day though that they would never lose. Even now, the impact on them was written plainly on their faces.
When he had been released from the hospital, his mother had tried to convince him that he could just stay at home, take it easy. He hadn't wanted that though. He had already seen what it was going to be, this life, the constant hovering, the always being watched for any sign of decline. He went back to school with a note saying that he should be excused from P.E. He hadn't realized what that meant at the time. He hadn't even realized until much later just how much he would miss that one thing once it was gone.
He had been rather active before. His parents had encouraged his love of sports. Most importantly, they had encouraged his later love of running. He had been in a kid's cross country group. It had been fun, and he had made friends. When he returned from the hospital some of them were at his usual lunch table. They had known that he had collapsed, but they did not know anything else. He had decided to keep it from them. When they asked if he was okay, he had said a simple, 'I'm fine" as though nothing had ever even prompted the question. In time he would offer up even less to their conversations. Eventually, by high school, he was no longer sitting with groups or even engaging in polite conversations.
He told himself that the shutting down was necessary. They would not be comfortable having a dying friend. Even now, as he looked back, he could not tell when he went from being a social butterfly surrounded by friends to the most socially awkward loner the world had ever seen, but it had seemed to happen almost overnight after the doctors had handed him his death sentence. His mother would drag him to specialists all across the state, and sometimes beyond. He was placed on a heart transplant list. He passed the time as best he could, hoping that he was not causing his family too much sorrow.
At some point he had decided to throw himself completely into academia. His life became just books and studying. It served two purposes, one being that it distracted him from the finite existence that he had in front of him, and two it gave his parents something to focus on that wasn't his inevitable death. Making school important, kept them from suggesting such things as homeschool and no school. Going to the small, local high school also gave his family a break, a time when he was not in the house casually dying.
After one of his many visits to one of his many specialists, he and his mother were driving home in what was becoming a typical silence. She kept shooting glances at him while the miles slipped by. He had done his best to ignore it, until she said, "You know, courage is like a fire. Sometimes it starts out small, but before long, it will be big and it will spread."
He had looked at her like she was crazy and had said, "What are you talking about?"
"It wouldn't hurt to let yourself have a little courage, Cas. All is not lost." Her words had served to remind him that he needed to put on a stiff upper lip for them, let them see him hammering away at the situation. So that was what he did. He hammered away at living in a great show for them. When he was away from them, he let himself live in the real world, a world of defeat. How would it be now? How does one go from one grand extreme to the next? He was no longer dying. He was actually going to live a very long life, possibly. Changes would have to be made.
"So, are you comfortable with that?" Cas' father tapped his foot to get his attention, drawing his mind back into the hospital room and the conversation.
"I did not hear you." He focused on his father now. He looked tired, and Cas felt a little guilty about not listening.
"They want to meet you, the family." He rested his hand on Cas' leg as if to anchor him in the conversation.
"What family?" It took so much to focus on them even now. So much talk, talk, talk. He longed for a quiet moment in between all of their long, compound-complex sentences.
"The family of the man that provided the donor heart," his father whispered. Cas turned away from him to look out the window. Meeting them seemed like it might be more awkward than Michael reading him bad fiction complete with sex scenes. He could not think of a way to bow out of the situation gracefully.
"They don't want to meet me. Tell them no." Cas turned from the window and leveled a stare on his father.
"They do want to meet you, and I won't tell them no. You want to turn them away, do it yourself." Cas' father got up, angry. He could not recall a time in his life when his father had ever been angry at him. Now, here he was, a storm of intensity.
"Why are you mad?" Cas tried to adjust the bed to a more upright position. He grimaced through a minor touch of pain, but he did not care about that.
His father looked at him and seemed to settle into a quiet simmer. "You are maddening, Casl. I mean, you've been granted a new lease on life and here you are brooding, like it is a curse. This family wants to meet you, wants to know that their son's life had meaning. The least you can do is see them, let them see you."
"I'm sorry. I must be quite the disappointment." He watched his father's face fall a little. "I don't think that they will look at me and feel like their son's death had a point. Death never has a point."
"Don't make excuses, Cas. Just agree to see them. Suck up your awkwardness for a few minutes out of your now long life for this grieving family."
"You make me sound like a selfish prick." Cas had never had this sort of conversation with his father before. It was odd to use such language.
"Well, right now you are. The doctor is going to come in later today to ask for your consent. You need to tell him that it is okay for them to come see you. Help them grieve, Cas. They deserve at least that much. I know what it would have been like for me if I had been in their position."
Cas thought about it and realized some things, "You've had to imagine that position a bit, huh?"
"Yes, and thankfully, it will not be a reality. I don't think that there can be anything worse than losing your child." He got up then and moved to the head of Cas' bed. He leaned down and placed a quick kiss on his forehead. "I'm glad that I don't have to imagine it anymore. Tell them they can see you."
He walked out of the room after getting a nod of confirmation from Cas. He did not want to disappoint him. He knew that he hadn't earned that sort of treatment.