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wilsonthemoose · 6 months ago

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Warning Signs

John doesn't mind that they play so much basketball. It lends itself quite naturally to their training.

Whumptober Day 10: Blow to the Head

Teen and Up | John, Sam, and Dean | Pre-series | Sports | Head Injury

Sam is four days old the first time John thinks he might lose him— the jaundice sets in fast in the middle of the night and they don't notice till next morning. They're told they did the right thing bringing him into the hospital and in the same sure tone of voice assured that it's quite common and Sam should pull through by day seven.

They bring him back in a gift shop romper with 'World's Greatest Basketball Player' printed on the front. John has mixed feeling about the romper but Dean insists on saving it when they're sorting through clothes Sam has grown out of.

Sam is two months old when he's gifted his first basketball— it's a plush toy with a long tag that Sam tries to use to fling the ball around. He's five months old the first time he manages to clear the top of the crib and Dean yells with delight.

Sam is six months old the second time John fears for his life and after that, no matter how much he may try to temper that fear, it never quite goes away. John doesn't try very hard, and then not at all.

Sam is a few weeks short of three years old when he manages to copy Dean and bounce the ball up and down twice; Dean proudly declares that Sam will make a fine dribbler the way he's going and John agrees as he lifts him up into the air, shrieking.

John doesn't mind that they play so much. It lends itself quite naturally to their training— Sam at eight is fast, a sprinter off the blocks, a rabbit leading a chase, changing direction quicker that John can think to suggest it, and Dean is strong, puts his weight quite naturally into his punches without John ever having to say a word about proper technique.

Sam is 14 when John is forced to admit— not in so many words— that he's afraid for Sam's life. Sam sneaks away behind John's back and gets tested to see if he's a match for donating part of his liver to the wife of one of John's friends, Laura, who took care of the boys when they were younger. John yells and shouts when he finds out, threatens and punishes, forbids. "You're fourteen which means I have to okay this thing and I'm not okaying shit!" he yells, flinging a ceramic mug into the wall next to where Sam is standing. Later, when Sam is sitting on the steps outside, arms around his knees, shivering, John goes out and puts an arm around him. "How am I supposed to protect you from dying on an operating table, Sammy?" he asks and hopes it answers a lifetime of doubts.

John will stop the car outside basketball courts or on empty backroads in the middle of the night when cabin fever is likely, otherwise, to provoke a fight, and let the two of them out for a game or two. He doesn't encourage rough play but he does turn a blind eye to it. They get rowdy as they get older.

Sam, at fifteen didn't quite know what to do with his long limbs, awkward as a doe on ice, but at sixteen he seems to have grown into them. He'll dodge out in front of Dean, snatch the ball right out of the air and dribble away. He's good, in his way. He doesn't make as many baskets as Dean but he's good at making Dean not make as many baskets as Dean. He provokes Dean into taking risks and forces him to make stupid mistakes. Dean ends up angry, Sam ends up smug. John recognizes the tune of their lives but decides to use this too as training: he yells at Dean from the sidelines to keep calm, to not be so stupid. He yells at Sam about proper technique, ("Get low if you want to jump high, Sam") and just to wipe the smug look off Sam's face, steps in himself. He walks away impressed.

If circumstances were different, Sam might've made a hell of a college player, maybe even a decent pro.

They stop playing so much. Dean provokes Sam instead into sparring with him. It's almost a shame.

They get good at taking care of their own scrapes and bruises. Sam will fish out bits of gravel from his elbows under a flickering light. Dean will wait till John turns his back to take a furtive swig of the whiskey he's supposed to be using to clean his wounds. John wonders if it's possible to pinpoint exactly when they stopped playing. Was it on the broken court in Colorado with a camping lamp for light or was it in the parking lot of the motel in Indiana when Sam stumbled back and Dean didn't stop to let him get up again?

John tires them out by putting them through a mini boot camp every time he comes back from a hunt, or by making them do drills in the early hours of the morning when they're with him.

Sam is seventeen when John thinks this time he really is dead. The gunshot echoes in his head, his heart stops in his chest, tumbles to his knees, his lungs feel suddenly empty, and he hurtles through the door, trips down the stairs, and throws himself out of the house to where he stationed Sam to keep watch. This wasn't supposed to happen— he was supposed to be safe out there. He was supposed to be—

Sam takes a ragged breath, his face shines pale in the darkness. The bullet's torn into his side. John holds his hands over the wound, presses down, whispers "Sorry, Sam," when Sam bites down on a yelp, and presses harder. Dean lead-foots them to the hospital with John on his knees in the backseat holding firm pressure on the wound.

In the waiting room, John paces like a caged animal and Dean sits hunched over in a chair.

They're allowed in to visit when Sam comes out of surgery but they're told he might not wake up for a few hours yet.

The gift shop is near empty when John goes in to re-check, see if there's anything Dean missed. Surely, surely, there has to be something in Sam's size sitting around there somewhere. He's shown the same white shirt with the large orange basketball emblazoned on the front that Dean's already bought for Sam. John wonders if he can convince Sam to wear one of the unwashed shirts lying in the trunk instead but then thinks better of it.

Confined to bed for days, Sam reaches an arm out from under the covers and dribbles the ball on the carpeted floor. When the man in the room opposite bangs on the door and tells John to put a stop to the racket, John tells him to go to hell.

Sam bounces back pretty fast. He always does.

Sam was seven the first time he came to John with his head all bloody, swaying where he stood until John looked up from his journal, then he stumbled into John's lap. He was nine the first time John felt he was getting past Dean without Dean letting him. He was ten the first time John had to break up a fight between his sons. He was fourteen when an errant fist crashed into John's arm instead of Dean and Sam froze in horror, genuinely apologetic, earning himself a hard left hook to the jaw from Dean before Dean had a chance to check his blow. He was sixteen the first time he ended up with a concussion bad enough to have John worried. He complained every single time John tried to check up on him that weekend. He's nearly eighteen and John doesn't take it seriously for a long moment as Sam's arms flail, one almost reaching up to his face. John almost dismisses the gesture as reflex. The ball seems to float in limbo, one bright speck of fresh red imprinted just under a black rib of the ball. John sees Sam's pupils, pinpricks, blow out. Or maybe he imagines the detail. The ball thumps to the ground and rebounds thrice, rolling away. "You okay?" Dean calls over his shoulder as he moves to get the ball, then turns around again, confused. It starts to rain, softly. A drop falls to Sam's face, joins the tiny rivulet of blood dripping out of his nose. There's very little of it. Hardly any at all.

John feels himself move forwards, registers pain as the concrete crashes up into his knees, he leans over Sam, takes his shoulder, gently for some reason when he should be shaking Sam, telling him to get up, get in the car. Telling him he doesn't want the two of them taking damp clothes into the car so skedaddle. A drop of blood splatters on the faded grey-blue concrete of the court. John moves his hand under Sam's head— he doesn't remember lifting to cradle it but he must have— and finds a small wound. Small enough that it doesn't even need stitching. Not even a bandage.

"Okay kiddo?" he asks like he honestly expects an answer. Dean's still standing where he stopped, fingers bunched in his hair, palms pressed against his temples. He looks somewhat crazed.

John gathers Sam up, snaps at Dean to help him and they get Sam into the car, make it, somehow, to the hospital. John doesn't want to let go when they tell him they need to take Sam in for a CT, some insane part of him protesting that it's futile, but he signs the form they give him and signs again later— hemorrhage? half listening when the doctor explains about the surgery.

Dean's at Sam's bedside, trying to apologize and trying not to cry, garbling his words so he achieves neither objective.

"Sir? Do you understand?"

"Yes."

They wheel him away.

He can tell by the long walk along the corridor from the elevators, by the way the doctor looks at him for a fleeting moment and then lowers his eyes for the rest of the way until he reaches the chairs, knows it before the man opens his mouth to break the news. "We did everything we could—" and so on.

Actually, he's still alive, in a technical, not-really-there sort of way. They didn't let him go, when his body gave out. "I'd like to talk to you about organ donation." A new voice this time. Sympathetic tilt of the head, hushed tone, muted, sober clothes like this is the exact conversation they keep her around for. He should never have let them cut him open. His head is bandaged as if it makes a difference. John thinks maybe he should shout and tell them to leave him alone but he can't bring himself to do it.

"Sir?" She asks, gently.

He looks up. "No," he growls. "And fuck off," he adds.

Behind him, for the first time since the court, Dean speaks up. "Yes," he says and clears his throat. "He's a match for Laura," he says "She needs a liver—" this to the woman. "He promised her."

"Shit happens." John hears himself reply. "She can find her own liver." The kind of flippancy that Sam always hated.

"He's eighteen in a few hours," Dean's voice cracks. It's probably that, John thinks, that makes him walk out of the room and let Dean sign away Sam's organs.

"He might not have liked hunting but he liked saving people, Dad," Dean tells him later. The woman tells him about a man with cystic fibrosis who will live another several years because of Sam, a little girl who won't need dialysis anymore, a woman who can plan for more than the next few weeks and for more than hospital visits and bills, a firefighter just four beds down who just might make it now. John can't be bothered with saying he wishes them all a speedy death and he supposes, someday, he won't think it either.

They bury him— what's left of him— in the same graveyard as Mary. They never visit.

Laura tries to get into contact, leaves him tearful messages, "He was like a son to me too, John." John blocks her number. When Dean strikes off on his own for the odd hunt here and there, John doesn't object. He tosses the basketball into a storage unit and doesn't bother to go in and look when it bounds into something and breaks it.

Days and weeks muddle past. One day suddenly Sam is nineteen years old except that he never even got to eighteen. They've stopped talking about him.

Given what he knows— what he's learnt about Sam— it might be all for the best, except that he doesn't believe in that kind of thing and since when has fate dealt him a kind hand anyway? At least he died innocent, John thinks sometimes, usually at the bottom of a bottle.

Weeks and months turn into another year, then two, and three. John will stop the car sometimes outside basketball courts and stand there for hours, remembering the squeak and scuffle of shoes on asphalt, the huffing of breaths, cut-off curses, the snatch of a laugh.

Given what he knows— what he'd learnt about Sam— he really should have seen it for what it was. When he hears about the man in Oregon, the little girl with the half-familiar name, the woman, the firefighter, Laura— he doesn't do anything. When he gets a call from a payphone in Illinois and hears Sam's voice, panicked, "Dad?" John realizes it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise.

#Supernatural fic #Sam winchester #John winchester #Fics tag #(in this house we do not miss whumptober) < person who missed it last year BUT I WAS A FAIRY HELPER IT'S FINE!#(they were supposed to have grown up normal in this but that was not fun for me. So excuse the ***** ******** it made more sense in the au)

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