Imagine a Sastiel AU where Sam is a quiet florist who keeps to himself and one day Cas rolls into town on his motorcycle to ask for directions. At first, Sam’s intimidated by Cas’s wing-patched leather jacket and pierced ears and combat boots that look like they’ve seen the entire Midwest, until he finds out that Cas is a actually a huge softie and spent a long while hiding in the back of the store trying to summon up the courage to tell Sam that he thinks daisies would look good in his hair.
Dean doesn’t cry when Sam left for Stanford. He wants to, but he doesn’t. It feels so unrealistic that his brain needs time to realise it, to realise that his little brother, his lover, isn’t here. That he left him.
It happens four months after that night. Dean just got back from a pretty rough hunt, and while he’s searching for a new clean shirt after his shower, he sees it – Sam’s hoodie.
They did it the first time Dean left Sam to go hunting. Sam couldn’t stop crying, begging Dean not to go, not to leave him. As a compromise, Dean left him one of his shirt to him.
“So you see Sammy, like that, I’m still’ with you. I’m protecting you, even if I’m far away”
Sam didn’t look convinced at first, but he was able to sleep at night and that was still something.
So they keep doing that. Each time a different shirt, hoddie, jeans and, years later, even panties.
Then Sam started putting some of his clothes in Dean’s bag. They never really talk about it, but they didn’t need to.
It was a promise of coming home, of being together again. When you live that life, you don’t own a lot of things. So giving away some clothes is actually big deal, for them anyway.
So finding Sam’s hoodie in his bag – it’s just too much for him.
He starts crying, screaming like a wild animal, cursing whoever did this, whoever put his brother away from him, hating on Sam, hating on himself, wishing he was enough – God, just let him be enough
He ends up sleeping on the floor, Sam’s hoodie around him like a protecting.
Miles away, Sam is crying in Dean Led Zeppelin shirt, his brother smell barely noticeable now.
Dean’s body was rebuilt when he was raised from Hell, but Sam’s wasn’t. What if, once he got his soul and his memory back, his body couldn’t forget what had happened in Hell? How high would his pain threshold be?
~~~
“I’m just going to tuck this warmed blanket around you,” she says. (Ashley, her name is Ashley; the whiteboard on the wall across from him says Baptist Medical Center Emergency Department and Your nurse is Ashley and Today is Wednesday the 22nd and other things they think he wants to know.)
(You are topside. That’s what Sam wants to know.)
“I know you’ve got to be freezing,” she continues. (Ashley, she’s Ashley. Remember. Focus.) He looks at her, puzzled. Freezing? He’s a little cold, maybe, but not uncomfortably so. Falling into a frozen lake isn’t cold. Not like the feeling of Lucifer pressed against him, hand plunged into his chest and curled possessively around his heart, turning his blood to ice in his veins. Compared to that, nothing up here is actually cold.
Behind Ashley, Dean raises his eyebrows briefly and then looks pointedly at the skin of his exposed arm. Oh. Goosebumps. Empirical evidence that he is, in fact, cold. But that’s good. Empirical data is good. It’s better than trying to guess what he’s feeling.
“Thanks, Ashley,” he says. He smiles. He is okay. He is okay.
“Now, how bad is your pain, on a scale of one to ten? If one is no pain at all, and ten is the worst pain you can imagine, where would you put your current level of pain?”
(He doesn’t imagine, he remembers, and he is struck dumb with the effort of not remembering.)
When he doesn’t immediately answer, Ashley says “It’s okay. Don’t worry that we’re not going to give you anything if you don’t give us the right number. My goal is for you to have no pain at all. So, if one is no pain, and ten is being boiled in oil, how much pain are you in right now?
On the whiteboard, a row of cartoon faces demonstrates pain levels one through ten. Face number one is smiling, happy. Face number ten has a mouth curved down into a dramatic frown, fat cartoon tears leaking from its eyes.
(Its eyes have not been gouged out. Its mouth is not stretched open in a desperate agonized scream.)
Ashley doesn’t know what being boiled in oil feels like, and neither does face number ten, but Sam does. If being boiled in oil is a ten on Ashley’s scale, having your spine ripped out through your mouth must be a fifteen. Having slivers of glass scrape down every nerve in your body simultaneously is a twenty.
(Sam can count very, very high.)
How does this scale calibrate to real pain? What is a broken arm supposed to feel like? Should falling through ice into a frozen lake afterward make it hurt more, or less?
Behind Ashley (her name makes him shudder, ash and brimstone and fire and ice and claws and teeth), Dean clears his throat, holds his hands at waist level. Five fingers extended on his left hand, one on his right.
“Six,” Sam says. “I’m at a six.” Dean smiles, gives him a quick nod. (You are topside.)
Face number six isn’t smiling. Sam fixes his mouth into a slight frown to match face number six.
“All right,” Ashley says. “I’m going to talk to the doc, and he’ll order something for your pain. Then we’ll get you in for X-rays.”
Sam nods, tries to concentrate on the distant ache of his broken bones and not the sharp sense-memory of being burned boiled skewered shattered dismembered.
“Thank you, Ashley.”
He is okay.
~~~
(Inspired by a nurse who actually used the “boiled in oil” analogy. The title is from “Human” by The Human League .)
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