Tecumseh

By Tidia & MOG, May 2006

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Chapter 16/18

“Look at the pretty girl in the mirror there. Who could that pretty girl be? I’m so pretty, yes, so pretty….”

Uncle Frankie sang, closing his eyes and swaying to the melody in his head, while his voice croaked out a different tune.

“Oh, God,” Dean groaned, “stop singing.” He caught Sam’s eyes in the rearview mirror and received a sympathetic look.

“You don’t like ‘West Side Story’?” asked Frankie. “I know all of Le Miz,” he offered as a suggestion, before starting to hum.

“I don’t think he likes showtunes,” Sam reasoned. Of course, he didn’t want the older man to sing anything else either.

“Just trying to get his mind off the pain.” Uncle Frankie looked at the arm again. Swelling around the bite had increased and mottled discoloration now covered the area.

“It’s not working,” Dean gritted out. With his right hand, he wiped at the beads of sweat peppering his forehead. “Are the windows broken?” He snapped. “Can we get a little air in here?”

Sam pressed on the accelerator and rolled down his window while Frankie took care of the one on the rear passenger’s side.

The younger Winchester’s eyes flicked from the road to the rearview mirror and back again. “Hey, remember when you did that science experiment when we were kids? You grew grass in the dark and it was like albino grass….”

Sam looked back and this time Dean met his gaze.

“Would you watch the road!”

Sam turned his attention forward as Dean shook his head, and banged it softly against the vinyl seat, trying to refocus his attention away from the burning threads of fire radiating up his arm.

“Jesus, Sam, this must be bad - you never talk about when we were kids.”

Sam ignored his older brother and continued to tell the story. “So we decided to try it with the toad….”

Dean rolled his eyes and exhaled a hissing breath as a throbbing wave worked its way up his shoulder. “Happy memory there, bro, the toad to think of it, the grass died too.”

Sam winced. “Oh, yeah.”

“Frankie, get your hand off of my chest - I don’t want your hand to be the last one that touches me.” Dean gritted his teeth. “Damn, this sucks!”

The rest of the ride was in silence, except for the sound of Dean inhaling and exhaling each breath with concentrated purpose. Sam braked hard in front of Scarlett’s house. The fact that his brother didn’t bitch at him for excessive wear on the brakes worried Sam more than he thought it should have.

Frankie had alerted Scarlett by phone and she met them on the porch. Holding the screen door open, she couldn’t help but notice Dean’s ragged breath as Frankie and Sam helped him inside.

“That’s right, honey, breathe - in and out, that’s right! Heesh,heesh,heesh...hooh,hooh,hooh.”

Frankie placed a hand over her mouth to get her attention. “Damn it woman, that’s Lamaze! I told you, he was bitten by a rattler.”

Her eyes widened and she nodded before Frankie dropped his hand. She escorted them down the hall to a guest bedroom, watching as they gingerly helped Dean onto the bed.

Frankie looked at Sam. “Why don’tcha get his shoes and socks off, I’ll go call Ben – find out how far away he is.” He patted the younger man on the shoulder as he walked out and spoke in a low voice, “Talk to him, Sam, about anything - rattlesnake is very painful.”

He put his arm around Scarlett’s shoulder and escorted her out. “Let’s get him some water, Letty.”

Sam noticed that Dean couldn’t bear to touch his left arm any longer. Pain lines wrinkled the smooth skin around his tightly closed eyes and his right hand balled up a fistful of the pale blue, embroidered bedspread. Morbid curiosity brought Sam’s eyes to the unnaturally puffed and swollen arm held immobile partially by the Impala manual.

Sam winced, desperately wishing he could do something to help. ‘Where’s the Chilton’s Dean Repair Guide when you need it?’

He moved to the foot of the bed and unlaced his brother’s boots. His last attempt at a distracting conversation had failed miserably. He kicked himself for forgetting how the toad had ended up.

“I could sing some Motorhead,” he offered, with a small smile.

Dean attempted a grin. “No. God, this sucks.” He tried to ride the waves of burning pain pulsing through his arm.

“You said that.” Sam pulled off his brother’s heavy boots and stripped off his socks. He couldn’t help but notice that the thick fabric was damp with sweat. He tucked the boots under an antique oak vanity and carefully laid the socks across the tops of them. “I guess you were jealous that I was getting all the attention from Ben’s nurse.”

“I get all the…right kinds of attention,” Dean replied, through broken breaths. “Besides…it was my ass she was looking at.” He grinned, closing his eyes for a moment, before another shot of fire forced them open again.

A squeak and a loud bang from the screen door opening and closing signaled Ben’s arrival.

“Where is he!”

“The back bedroom,” answered Frankie.

“How long has it been?”

“Since the bite? About twenty-five minutes maybe.”

Ben walked into the room and looked from the advanced swelling and bruising of his patient’s arm to the worried young man standing at the foot of the bed with his arms folded tight across his body.

“How you doin’?” he asked Sam.

The younger Winchester merely answered with a lopsided smile indicating that very little was right in his world at the moment.

“I thought I was the patient,” mumbled Dean.

“I don’t have to ask how you’re doing,” Ben replied. “I know you feel like hell.”

Uncle Frankie moved in behind him, set a large plastic cup filled with water on the nightstand and stepped back to lean in the doorway.

Ben dropped his oversized bag on the floor and pulled out a soft IV pouch filled with clear fluid. Though from where Sam stood, the blue letters on the bag were upside down, he could still read the label - ‘Lactated Ringer’s Injection, USP’. Next came one small glass vial after another, Ben vigorously shook the contents of each container before resting them on the nightstand.

“Usually we do a skin test first to see if there’s going to be an allergic reaction to the antivenom, but…Sam, has he ever had an allergic reaction to any medications?”

Sam shook his head. “Never. No allergies at all; food, plant, dust, animal – none of that.”

Ben pulled on a pair of latex gloves and continued to work as he talked. Tearing open several small, square packages of alcohol wipes, he swabbed the hollow of Dean’s elbow, before moving on to wiping the tops of five vials and stripping away the sanitized wrapping from a needle, then from a plastic syringe tube.

He spoke in general terms to keep the brothers up on what he would be doing. “Okay, this is how it works – antivenom into our handy fluid replacement bag, then all that into Dean.”

He worked with smooth, precise movements; taking only seconds to pull the antivenom from one vial into a syringe and transferring it into the Ringer’s bag before dropping the glass container to the floor and moving on to the next.

After the fourth vial, Sam spoke up. “Um…how many of those do you need?”

Ben answered as he prepped the IV tubing and tied an elastic band around Dean’s right bicep. “This is normal. Most bites are treated with 15 to 20 vials. We start with five and between the piggyback setup on the IV and a gravity drip, we’ll get it into his system over the next hour. After that, we reload – pace the drip at a vial every five to ten minutes.”

He found a vein in the hollow of Dean’s arm, slid the IV needle in and untied the elastic band. “Sam, there’s a pair of thick scissors in my bag, get ‘em and slit that left sleeve open, can you do that for me? And watch the time, ten minutes from now we’ll get that splint off.”

Sam nodded, eager to do anything that might help his brother. Digging past more Ringer’s bags, he finally found a rubber-handled pair of trauma scissors. He quickly moved to Dean’s side but winced at the ugly condition of the affected limb. The skin was stretched tight with swelling that eradicated any muscle definition, which was usually obvious.

Sam couldn’t help but notice his brother had begun shivering despite the beads of sweat across his forehead. His eyes were only half open but when Sam laid a hand on his head to wipe the moisture away, Dean struggled to open his eyes.

“Dean, man, you hear me? Stay with us. I need to cut your shirt, okay?”

The white cotton of the short-sleeved t-shirt strained against the swelled arm. Sam easily cut through the sleeve and decided to continue through the collar. He folded the loose fabric back so it rested on Dean’s chest but the movement garnered a reaction.

Dean opened his eyes and focused on his brother, trying to keep contact with the familiar. Moisture glistened along his lower lids and as he looked at Sam, his brow creased with a pain-filled wince that struck the younger Winchester to the core.

Sam settled a hand briefly in his brother’s hair. “I know,” he said softly. “Hang in there.”

Minutes passed and Ben cut away the loose Ace wrap that gingerly held the immobilizing splint in place. Dean’s eyes were nearly closed and he didn’t react to the jostling.

“What else?” asked Sam anxiously, as he watched Ben finish setting up a second round of treatment and rehang the IV bag from an antique floor lamp next to the bed.

“That’s all for now,” replied Ben. “If there was going to be an allergic reaction we would have seen it already.” He pressed two fingers to Dean’s right wrist, looked at his watch and checked his friend’s pulse rate.

Sam spoke again. “But we got the antivenom in time, right? He’s gonna be okay?”

“We got it in time, yes…but…the left arm – that close to the heart…I don’t know.”

Ben shook his head and looked at his patient. He fingered a cut on Dean’s forehead, then touched the fresh bruise on one of his cheekbones. A puzzled expression flitted across his face and he pulled the flap of cut t-shirt down further when he noticed bruising around Dean’s throat and collarbone. A reddish-purple mark extended down his ribcage and the doctor stared at Sam.

“What the hell is this from?”

“We were at the Wheelock Mission and things got a bit hairy….” He wasn’t sure if Ben would believe him if he tried to explain that Dean had been in a locked room with the pissed off ghost of a ‘yanged out’ serial killer.

Frankie spoke up from his position in the doorway. “Got your share of Scarlett’s ten thousand, though, didn’t ya?” He came forward, scooping up a comforter that lay across the back of a large oak rocking chair. Maneuvering in front of his nephew, he carefully covered Dean’s torso and legs with the heavy blanket and spoke to Ben.

“You did good work here.”

The doctor sighed and brushed from his face a few strands of hair that escaped his ponytail. Frankie’s words made him focus again on the immediate situation. “I’d like to get him to the clinic so I could at least do some blood work. The hospital would probably be better. But I don’t want to risk a move if he’s not stable. Maybe if I--”

“Go take a break?” interrupted Frankie. “Great idea, you should do that. Ben, I love you, but sometimes things aren’t what they seem. This boy needs me now, not you. Ni chobeka.”

He corralled his nephew and Sam to the door. “Go,” he ordered gently. “Out.” But both men resisted.

Frankie stared at his nephew. “You’ve got to trust me.”

Sam’s face registered confusion; he knew he’d like to see his brother in the security of a hospital. “Ben?”

The doctor studied his uncle for a long moment. “All right,” he nodded, “but, if his breathing changes or I don’t notice a reduction in that swelling - hospital.”

Frankie nodded. “Go watch Oprah,” he suggested, as he closed the door to the room.

Ben looked from the door to Sam. “He says stuff like that and then wonders why I don’t trust him.” He rested a hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “C’mon.”

Sam shook his head and shrugged off the friendly touch. His first instinct was to force his way back into the room and drag Dean out if need be. “This is crazy, why aren’t we going to the hospital? I mean why did we just leave them…? That’s my brother-”

“And my friend,” stated Ben soberly. “Sam, I applied the same standard of care that the hospital would.” He glanced at the closed door. “I know Uncle Frankie seems like a kook, but there are times - like this - when I know it’s right to trust him. Like he said, ‘Ni chobeka’ – it means ‘my medicine’. You have to believe me when I say he’s given me numerous reasons to trust him in serious situations.”

He laid a hand on Sam’s shoulder again and guided him down the hall. “Your brother trusted me with your health. Believe that you can trust me, and Frankie.”

Sam looked back at the bedroom, then scrutinized the doctor. “If anything happens to him….”

Scarlett interrupted the warning as they reached the front room. She fixed her large brown eyes on Sam and spoke gently. “No offense, but I hope your brother doesn’t die in my guest room - I mean I’m sure Frankie kind of knows what he’s doing...”

Ben gaped at the woman. “Ignore her,” he mumbled to Sam. Glancing out the picture window behind Scarlett, Ben pointed. “Hey look, Scarlett, a chinchilla!”

She spun around “Where?”

Ben guided her to the door and pointed again.

“Ooh, poor thing is probably hungry.” Scarlett pushed through the screen door, making an odd chirping noise. “Come here, baby.”

“She’s easily distracted,” Ben said, turning back to Sam.

The other man stood in the middle of the living room, unconsciously chewing at the side of his thumbnail and staring down the hall. “He’s all I’ve got, ya know?” Dad didn’t count, not at that moment.

“Yeah,” Ben replied, “I know what you mean.” He took up position in a recliner that allowed him to see the bedroom door. On the tv in the background, the talk show audience applauded and cheered wildly over the arrival of a new guest.

Sam dropped into a matching recliner close to Ben. “I can say what I want about Dean, but no one else can throw him under the bus.” He let his head drop against the high back of the chair and ran a hand through his hair.

Ben gave a half smile. “I complain a lot about Frankie - but he’s always there for me.”

Sam nodded without shifting his gaze from the ceiling. “Same here.”

Ben glanced down at his own hands, reflecting on his uncle. “Sometimes do you think we take them for granted?” he muttered, not meaning to vocalize his thoughts.

“What?” Sam asked, pulling himself from his own thoughts.

Ben gestured to the television. “Nothing…I hate Oprah.”

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