Note: Thanks for existing, guys. And for reading and voting and commenting.
I'm still working my way through a bunch of requests. I promise everyone who's waiting that yours is on its way. I didn't forget.
This one was from tudfo9. I won't write out the request, because I don't want to give away the story. The title is a Fall Out Boy song. Which you should listen to.
Anna is eighteen.
I've Got All This Ringing in My Ears
Anna's head hit the ground hard just as she heard the gunshot and subsequent thud of a large body against the floor that signaled the final vampire's death. Her ears rang momentarily as she pressed her palms to the floor and made an effort to push herself to her hands and knees. Her arms were either numb or simply too weak, though, and she didn't move for a second. Her head thumped with a dull but piercing agony, and she felt overheated. Her vision blurred momentarily, went dark for a second, then cleared.
She realized with a start that Dean was calling her name, and he sounded panicked. She wondered if she'd blacked out for more than just a second, but then when she pushed herself-- successfully this time-- to her hands and knees and looked up, she saw him crouched over Sam, who was lying mostly flat on the floor. She caught a glimpse of red, and all thoughts of her own pain went out the window.
"Anna, get the kit."
Without questioning her brother, Anna forced herself upright. Bobbling to the right, she quickly caught herself and moved unsteadily but at a brisk pace toward the doorway to the old warehouse. Once outside, the sunlight blinded her, and she shied away instinctively, covering her eyes with one arm. Her stomach turned violently, and in the next moment, she was on her knees, retching into a cluster of mostly-dead bushes while everything seemed to buzz around her.
She was almost startled when the world righted itself, and she squinted around at her surroundings for a minute, her mind moving slowly around the questions of what the hell she was doing here and where here even was. Suddenly, it was all there in front of her again, and she pushed herself up and forward at the same time, nearly sending herself back to her knees in her hurry to get to the car.
It took her three tries to get the trunk open, and she growled in frustration at her own lack of motor coordination. As soon as she hit the kit in her hand, she slammed the trunk closed and ran as fast as she could back to the warehouse, nearly running into the wall before realizing she'd been moving in a crooked line and wasn't at the doorway.
"The hell took so long?" Dean demanded when she finally dropped to her knees beside him and slammed the kit open. He dug both hands into the kit and nodded toward Sam's midsection.
As soon as she saw the gushing wound there, Anna knew exactly what he wanted from her. She reached out to press against the wound while Dean readied his stitching needle. "Here," he said and handed her a handful of bandages. Anna tore open a package, hands shaking so violently that she had to use her teeth to successfully get through the plastic. Dean didn't comment if he even noticed at all. She pressed the bandage against Sam's wound with her right hand. Just the energy it took to actively push down hard enough to do anything to stop the bleeding was enough to make her go light-headed. As the room spun, she stared faintly at a splotch of old, fading graffiti on a far-off wall. She couldn't read it, and she wouldn't have spent the energy if she could have.
"Here, let me-"
Sam's groan of pure agony cut Dean off, and he leaned forward over their brother while Anna continued to press down on his wound. She knew she had to keep pressure on it, and she couldn't think beyond that. She heard Dean murmuring something, but the words weren't making sense to her which didn't really matter, because they weren't for her. They were for Sam. And whatever he was saying, the rumble of his voice calmed Sam into some kind of stupor or sleep, because he stopped squirming under her hands.
She felt the sticky slickness against her palms and looked down to see a blurry haze of red and blue in front of her. Blue. Sam's flannel. Red. Sam's blood. Her stomach did a flip.
"Anna. Hey. Snap out of it."
She did. And she looked up from a haze of red to see a haze of green. She blinked, and the green tumbled into Dean's eyes.
"What's the matter with you?" he asked, the words harsh but his tone starkly gentle considering their circumstances. She felt like he should have been yelling at her. Sam was bleeding out all over her hand, and she was spacing out. She couldn't speak, though, her mind still turning in the slowest circles. She looked back down at the blue and the red, and suddenly a hand grabbed her chin and tilted her face up. Dean didn't take the time to look her in the eyes, though, or he might have seen that her pupils were uneven enough that she couldn't even see straight. He turned her head to Sam's face instead. "He's gonna be fine. Alright? Look at him. He's breathin'. That's all that matters. We just gotta stitch him up. Now help me."
While the state of their brother hadn't been the real cause of her spaciness, Dean's hand on her face and his calm, cool, and in-control voice were still grounding for her. She blinked a couple times, focused on the rise and fall of his chest. She didn't need clear vision to see that subtle movement. In fact, if anything, the wavering of her sight made it look more dramatic and more visible the way Sam's chest went up and down, up and down, like a pendulum or a see-saw. If not for the blood and the blue and the way she seemed to be looking at the world through a wine glass, Anna might have found it melodic or soothing. The up and down.
She used to, when she was little, lean her head on Sam's chest at night and giggle at the sounds his heart made. She'd call it gross, and Sam would laugh but pretend to be offended. She would giggle wildly like it was the funniest thing in the world, and she would call it gross again just to see his reaction a second time. But then she would change her mind, and she would press her ear against his chest again. It sounds very pretty, she would say, and Dean would smirk so that Sam told him to shut up.
Anna yanked her phone from her pocket with one hand, the other still pressing against Sam's wound, and fumbled to get the flashlight on as Dean picked back up the stitching needle and moved around to Sam's other side where he had a better angle. Anna got the light just right so that no shadows would block Dean's view of the wound, and she pulled her left hand completely away from all the blood, watching Dean go in with an antiseptic. Her phone would be filthy in the worst way after this, but she would disinfect it once Sam was awake and grouchy.
"Alright," Dean mumbled absentmindedly as he started suturing.
Anna had intended to watch, because there was nothing else she could do, and at least then she felt marginally involved. But every so often, her stomach lurched, and her hands shook, and Dean snapped something about holding the light steady, and she murmured apologies, and her vision blurred. She stopped trying to watch and put everything into holding her arm steady. She had her elbow resting in the palm of her other hand whose elbow was resting on her knee so that she wasn't just making her arms stay steady unsupported. But it was still an effort to keep the light perfectly still all that time. She wouldn't have been able to do it even without whatever the hell was wrong with her. But as it were, she felt weak and nauseous, and every inch of her felt just the tiniest bit wrong, a little oversensitive, a little too warm, a little weak, a little numb. She couldn't stop her hand from wavering. She counted herself lucky she never dropped the light altogether.
She counted all three of them lucky. It was her little job in the process of saving Sam's life, and she'd barely managed it all because she'd hit her head.
She swallowed hard against the nausea climbing her esophagus as Dean cleared his throat and said, "Last stitch."
Anna let her chin dip to her chest and closed her eyes, but she didn't let her hand move a millimeter with that flashlight until she heard Dean whisper, "Done." When she opened her eyes, she saw a blur of color and then it went black. Just like earlier, it lasted barely a second, and the world was back in front of her again in brilliant-- too brilliant-- color. "Bring the car out front," Dean instructed distractedly as he used the last two bandages to wipe the blood away from Sam's wound and then cover it.
Her hands hovered over the kit, but she hesitated, trying to formulate the words necessary to ask whether Dean was done with it or not. She couldn't seem to even coherently think what it was she needed to know, let alone speak any kind of actual question, but Dean said simply, "Take it," and she realized it was exactly what she'd been wanting.
Again, she knew better than to question him, and Anna staggered to her feet. She was grateful that Dean was still working on covering Sam's wound, because she wouldn't have been able to hide the way she stumbled nor the way her whole face tensed in reaction to the stab of pain that assaulted her head as a result of her change in altitude.
She wanted so badly to let herself fall to the floor and curl up in a ball. She wished Sam weren't lying unconscious and dangerously pale on the floor. And she wished it selfishly. If he wasn't so badly hurt, she could've grabbed Dean by the shoulder of his flannel and whispered It hurts instead of forcing herself to run when she could barely stand. But as it were, she was terrified for Sam, and she knew Dean was too, however calm his exterior.
The terror was powerful enough to send her outside where she threw up her arm as a guard against the sunlight before it had the chance to turn her stomach again. Her head throbbed harder with the change anyway, and her heartbeat sounded in her ears, both ways that her injury was demanding attention.
She didn't bother opening the trunk again after all the trouble it had caused last time. Instead, she crossed to the driver's side and grabbed the door handle. She tugged on it so weakly the first time that her hand slipped off the handle rather than the door opening. For a moment, she just stared dumbly down at the door handle, trying to understand what had happened and why she felt like it wasn't what she'd wanted to happen. Again, the information came to her suddenly. She surged forward, gripped the door handle, and tugged the door open.
She slid into the driver's seat and blearily thought how bad an idea it was to drive when she could barely see and couldn't think straight to save a life-- and that was exactly what she should be doing, saving Sam's life. Dean could do his part. Why the hell couldn't she do hers?
The car was moving before she realized she'd never closed the driver's door, and she blinked and took her foot off the gas. In a moment of something halfway between stark clarity and fuzzy disorientation, she felt a new but real fear invade her scrambled mind. There was something seriously wrong with her if she couldn't close a door, couldn't drive the car, couldn't understand her own inability to drive the car. There was something seriously wrong with her, and it could very well mean failing to help her brother, which was not an option.
If it was the last thing she did-- and she felt a smidge of fear that it might actually be the last thing she did-- Anna would make sure Sam was okay.
She slammed the driver's door and pulled the car up to the door. She hit the brakes and shoved the door open again haphazardly. She stepped out of the car with too much zest and nearly fell forward, but she corrected the movement just in time to keep from falling. The sun rendered her blind, and her stomach promised that there was more puking in her future.
Just as she found herself standing up mostly straight, one hand against her forehead functioning as a guard against the sun, she saw the door swing slightly open and Dean stepped out. Sam was, more or less, actually on his feet. But Dean was essentially dragging him along. Anna hurried to grab the heavy door so it wouldn't impede them, and then she yanked the back door open so Dean could get Sam into the car. Before he could suggest otherwise, she ducked into the seat after Sam, leaving Dean to the driver's seat. There was simply no way she could have driven home, but there was just as little chance of her admitting that aloud to Dean and taking any of his attention from their brother.
"How's it lookin'?" Dean called over his shoulder, glancing at them in the rearview mirror as he turned the key. The Impala roared to life, and Anna leaned over Sam, feeling dizzy. "Any blood seeping through?"
She turned her attention to Sam's midsection and the white bandage there. It took her a second to process the question she'd been asked, what she was seeing, and how to actually formulate an answer for Dean, so her reply was a bit delayed. "No blood," she said, but it came out a little slurred, sounding more like n'blood. It wasn't obvious why the words were rushed, though. It could just have easily been because of the day's adrenaline making her rush and mash her words together.
"He's okay," Dean assured her-- and probably himself as well. "Just gotta get home, get some meds in him, and he's good."
Anna bobbed her head in an uncoordinated nod that Dean wasn't paying attention to. She knew her brother was just thinking out loud, but there was something calming about that. She felt like shit, and his to-do list didn't fix the way her head hammered or her stomach churned. But at least the worst of it was over, and Sam would be taken care of in just a few short minutes once they had him settled back at the motel.
Dean was driving a little faster than necessary considering their proximity to the motel, and they got back within five minutes. When he made a sharp turn into the parking lot, she was thrown off balance and nearly fell on top of Sam. She came up with a wiggling worm of nausea in her stomach and a pounding in her head so bad she couldn't think past it. The back door on the driver's side opened with an influx of air and light, and Dean's hands replaced hers on Sam's shoulders.
Anna could hear Sam groaning and trying to talk. She was half-spaced out as she watched the blurry forms ahead of her move out of and away from the car unsteadily, but her own body moved on automatic, following clumsily after them. She turned to shut the car door, but her arm felt heavy, and she just stumbled against it instead, effectively knocking it closed. Ordinarily, she'd have moved ahead to get the motel room door, and then she'd have kept going at the speed of light, readying the bed for Sam, pulling the med kit back out so they could do a better job cleaning Sam's wound and possibly repair some of the rapid-fire stitching done in the warehouse. But her mind wasn't supplying any ideas as to what she should be doing, and her body wasn't remembering on its own either.
The motel room door opened and swung shut ahead of her, and she took a faltering step forward. She blinked and was surprised to see the ground was awfully close when she opened her eyes. Glancing down, she saw that she was on her knees. Leadenly, she considered how strange that was. Why would she be kneeling on the pavement? Her palms hit next, and then she was throwing up. Fortunately she was facing away from the car. Unfortunately, she wasn't with it enough to even move her own hands out of the way.
Her ears rang, and when she tried to look up, all she saw was the white light of the sun. Pain shot like fire through her head.
"-the hell happened? Why didn't you say somethin'?"
Her chin dipped against her chest as hands under her armpits pulled her upward. "M'fine," Anna murmured breathlessly. "M'fine. M'fine."
"Okay, hang on," Dean said as she tried to pull away. He adjusted his grip on her slightly but kept his hands under her shoulders, not letting go. "Hang on. Let's just get inside. Alright? You're not fine, Anna."
The ringing in her ears won over the sound of his voice after that, but she could feel her feet moving under her, and the sun's warmth on her body disappeared suddenly as the two of them were cloaked in shadow. Inside, Anna's mind supplied, but she couldn't make any sense of the word.
"Sit down," Dean urged her, his voice low and calm. His hands were on top of her shoulders then, pushing her down until she was sitting on the edge of a mattress. She looked up from their feet to see another bed, Sam sprawled across it on his back. She couldn't see any more red, and that was good. She couldn't remember why. But she knew it was good. She realized belatedly that Dean's voice had been lilting up and down in her ear. She tried to focus, heard, "You with me?"
"Yeah," she said, confused. Why was he asking... What had he asked?
Dean nodded. "Good. That's good." He put his hand on her forehead and tilted her head back, staring into her eyes. "Did you hit your head, Anna?"
The question rolled its way around her brain until she could come up with an answer. "A little."
Dean released a frustrated sigh and reached behind himself for something. Anna flinched away when there was suddenly light shining directly in her eyes. "Hold still, Rugrat." She frowned a little, but she trusted Dean. He was Dean. So she did as he'd asked and kept still. Her eyes kept fluttering against the pain of the light, but Dean used his fingers to hold them open one at a time. "I'm gonna wager you hit your head more than 'a little,'" Dean said decidedly. His fingers moved to the top of her head, feeling around until they pressed gently on a tender area, and Anna gasped, bending her head forward and away from his hands. "Alright, take it easy," Dean breathed. He placed one hand on her forehead, partly to hold her head in place and partly to comfort her, and the other one carefully moved her hair away so he could see the wound on her head.
Anna pursed her lips, wrinkled her nose, and swallowed. Her stomach was demanding attention again, but odds were good that her stomach was too empty by now for her to really throw anything up. She closed her eyes, hovered in the thump thump thump of the pain in her skull. It only exacerbated her need to throw up, though, so she thought back to something Sam had told her the first time she got a real concussion at ten years old. She breathed in, picturing the pain in her head as a little ball of red and blue fury, tried to picture her breath grabbing onto it, and as she exhaled, imagined the pain going with the breath, leaving her body. It helped only marginally, but it did help.
She continued that way until she felt a hand on her face. She had no clue how much time had passed, but when she forced her eyes to flutter open, she was glad that the room was mostly dark. Dean had flicked off all but one lamp and was crouched in front of her. She squinted at him, her whole face tight with pain. She realized in the dimmer lighting just how exhausted she was. But as she looked past Dean's shoulder, she saw Sam on the bed. Had Dean checked the stitches? Had he disinfected and rebandaged the wound?
"Hey, kiddo."
She looked back at Dean and registered that his thumb was moving back and forth soothingly against the skin of her face. It wasn't unusual for him to be gentle with her. It wasn't even unusual for him to use touch to comfort her-- or Sam, for that matter. As a family, they were better at touch than words. They spoke in body language and actions more so than verbal language. But there was something about the look on Dean's face now that told her he was worried.
"You hearin' me?"
She bobbed her head in a tired nod that only hurt. "Sam okay?"
Dean looked back over his shoulder at their brother again and breathed a sigh. He looked conflicted if she was reading him right, but she didn't have any real confidence in her ability to read anybody or anything at the moment. "Yeah, he's alright. For now. Look, Honey, I can't take you to the hospital right now, but I don't like the way you look, so if you get any worse, I'm sayin' screw it and we're bookin' it to the nearest one."
Anna frowned at him, at first just trying to process what he was saying and then trying to think of something to say to make him feel better. Halfway through that process, though, she blinked, and her mind skipped off in another direction. "Sam is okay?"
Dean grit his teeth and looked back at Sam again. "If he was a little more okay, we'd run to the frickin' hospital," he murmured to himself.
Anna frowned again. "What?"
"Don't worry about it," he told her. "Lay down."
"You don't need help?"
Dean's face wrinkled in confusion. "What would I need help with?"
"Sam."
She heard him sigh again. "Only help I need is a cup of coffee."
Anna nodded resolutely. "I can go get one."
Dean raised one eyebrow at her. "I think you're done, Rugrat. And when you're in good enough shape to go anywhere, we're gonna have a serious conversation about when you quit trying to help other people and worry about yourself."
Anna stared at him, blinking slowly. It was too long a sentence for her exhausted, scrambled mind to wrap itself around, though, and she eventually gave up. "I can sleep now, right?"
"Yeah," Dean told her and helped her lay down. A blanket was soon tossed over top of her. Nobody bothered with her shoes. "Let me know if you feel worse."
Anna hummed something that she meant to be a yeah, leave me alone.
"I'm serious."
She made the same noise, and it worked this time. She breathed in, her breath latching onto her pain, and exhaled.
()()()
She woke to the filter of painful light through the window and rolled instantly away from it. Her whole body ached, but the real pain was in her head, and it refused to be ignored. She glanced at the alarm clock on the nightstand which bled the numbers 4:58 in neon green. She blinked past the glare of it and squinted over at the other bed. It was there that she found what had woken her up.
Sam was groaning, his hands against the wound in his stomach, and Dean was hovered over him, speaking calmly, waiting for Sam to wake up enough to even understand that he was there. She couldn't make out what he was actually saying, he was speaking so softly.
She blinked tiredly over at them. Her head felt heavy, and she knew that it would hurt ten times as bad the second she tried to move it, but Dean was over there having probably not slept a wink all night. And Sam was in worse shape than she was. It was her job to get up and help. So she pushed herself upright. Immediately, her stomach reared in opposition, and her eyes watered with the force of pain that crashed through her head. Her vision darkened for a second, but it cleared much more quickly than it had the day before.
"-down. Now, Anna."
She heard him as the buzz in her ears faded, but she pretended she hadn't. Her goal had been to help him and Sam, not to divide his attention between herself and Sam. Just hearing her name seemed to have alarmed something in Sam, though. His eyes finally popped open. "'Kay?" he murmured so quietly that Anna barely heard it.
Dean let out an annoyed breath. He looked ready to throw his hands in the air. "She's fine." He looked at Anna. "And he's fine."
Anna ignored him and scooted to the edge of the bed. The thought of standing made her seriously wonder if she would throw up.
"Lay back down," Dean told her sharply. "I'm not kidding, Anna. You've got a serious concussion, and I'll drag your ass to the hospital if you make me."
She hesitated. The hospital didn't sound fun. But she could see clearly in Dean's face and in his apparent lack of patience that he was exhausted. And as much as her head hurt, her mind was clear enough that she felt like she could do something to help. As she studied her brother's expression, though, she realized that if she so much as moved another inch to stand up, it was only going to push him past his breaking point.
With a dejected look, she lay back down and closed her eyes against the light from the window that was reaching her eyes again. She tried to remember what the hell had happened last night, but she could only recall fuzzy details. Sam had been hurt, there'd been blood, and they'd stitched him up and gotten him back to the motel. But that was it. She couldn't even remember with any certainty if they'd successfully taken out all the vampires in the nest they were clearing. But she figured they must have. How else would they have gotten out of there with Sam wounded, her head apparently messed up, and Dean distracted trying to help them.
She couldn't be sure how long she stayed there, but she was surprised to blink her eyes open a while later and find that she'd been sleeping-- or dozing, at least.
"Here," Dean's voice filtered from above her. Anna looked to her left and found him sitting on the edge of her bed with a bottle of water and a protein bar. "Get somethin' in your system. You're probably gonna be nauseous for a couple more days, and the more we can keep you hydrated, the better."
She could hear a tension in his voice that made her feel small, but Anna carefully pushed herself so she was sitting against the headboard, and Dean helped her when she faltered a little. She wondered why he was angry, or if he was just in a bad mood, because he'd been up all night. She started with the water, because she actually felt thirsty while the last thing she wanted to do was eat. She'd only taken a few sips when Dean started talking, that same string of tension in his voice.
"You're with it enough to actually understand what I'm sayin', right?"
"Yeah," Anna said, suddenly worried about what he was going to say to her. "Why?"
"'Cause we need to talk. And you need to be listening."
There was little that could induce anxiety like hearing those words from him. They made her feel like a kid in trouble. She wondered if she'd misstepped during the hunt somehow, if she'd been the reason Sam got hurt. Just the thought made her stomach churn with another brand of nausea.
"Why?" she said again.
"Because I didn't know you had a severe concussion until you were half-conscious in the parking lot. That's why."
Anna's face blanched a little. She still couldn't remember precisely what he was talking about-- which was really only evidence to the fact that she had a pretty bad head wound-- but she immediately understood why he was so pissed. If she'd hidden an injury of any kind, she was in deep shit. Being up front about when you weren't okay was gospel law when they were hunting-- and really it was just Winchester law. They didn't hide injuries from each other. She'd seen both her brothers downplay their pain a number of times, and she'd definitely seen them play through the pain to help each other through a worse injury or because they needed to finish a hunt before they could crash. But intentionally saying nothing about an injury-- and a head wound of all things-- was flat out dangerous for everyone.
"I don't remember that," she murmured, both because it was true and because it was her only line of defense.
"No, I bet you don't," Dean said tensely. He rubbed between his eyes with his thumbs. "Maybe I shouldn't even be mad. Maybe you would've even said something if it hadn't been your head that was hurt, I don't know."
Anna didn't say anything. She couldn't answer his maybes one way or another, and there was a pit in her stomach saying maybe she'd known what she was doing when she'd neglected to say anything about her head. It wasn't like she didn't know better. Of course she did. It had been drilled into her head like every other rule of hunting. But she did have a perpetual anxiety about being the weak link on hunts. And she did tend to make bad choices when she was freaked out, especially when she was freaked out because someone she loved was hurt or in danger of being hurt. With Sam laid up, she might've been concerned enough not to think about anything else, including herself. Or, worse, she might've been concerned enough to purposefully ignore everything else... including herself. She didn't know.
"But for future reference, I don't care what the hell's goin' on. I don't care if you don't think it's a problem. I don't care if you think you can deal with it. I don't care if you think there's no time for it. I don't care. If you're hurt-- at all-- you say something."
"I know," Anna mumbled.
Dean studied her for another moment, then stood up and nodded at the water bottle she was still holding. "You're probably gonna be drowsy again in a few minutes. So make sure you drink at least half of that and eat before you go to sleep."
Anna nodded. With their conversation over, she felt the pain in her head amplified by the silence. On the other bed, Sam stirred, and she and Dean both turned toward him in response. "Don't even think about moving," Dean said over his shoulder to her as he headed for Sam's bed.
"You gotta sleep eventually," Anna argued, but the words came out sounding weak. Dean had been right in that she already felt drowsy again. She hadn't even taken a bite of her protein bar yet.
"I slept for two hours," he told her. "And I'll sleep some more next chance I get. Quit worrying about me and Sam and eat before you fall asleep again."
"I'm not gonna fall asleep again." She worked her way slowly through her protein bar and listened to the soft sounds of Dean moving back and forth, checking on Sam, cleaning up, and who knew what else. Anna's head hit the pillow five minutes later to the creak of the couch's springs and the subsequent contented sigh signaling that Dean had finally sat down to get some rest too. She rolled onto her side and pulled the blanket up over her head to shut out the light. But she measured her breathing so she could still hear the boys.
La Fin