warnings: allusions to body horror, medical procedures of dubious authenticity

–

There are four people seated in the chief of medicine’s office, the sudden weight of their eyes enough to stop Castiel cold in the middle of opening the door. For a split second he stands there, stranded halfway across the threshold; he wonders, very briefly, if he can perhaps get away with closing it again and walking quickly around the corner. There’s a medidroid service closet there, and they certainly won’t mind the company.

“Dr. Novak!” Zachariah says, rising from behind his desk to motion him inside. “Come in, come in. Caf? Tea?”

Resentment rises in his throat, bitter as any cup the man could have offered. Castiel gives the room a tight smile without meeting anyone’s eyes and says, “No, thank you. I apologize for my tardiness.” He eases the door open just enough to slip inside, and closes it with regretful slowness behind him.

“No, thank you for coming on such short notice,” Zachariah says, warning stare above a murine smile. He turns to the seated people and spreads his hands as if to say, what can you do? “Our doctors have very busy schedules, as you can probably imagine.”

“Of course,” one of the seated men says. He’s tall but gaunt, and quite pale, hands gripping those of the woman sitting next to him. The dark smudges under her eyes match his. “Thank you so much for meeting with us, Dr. Novak.”

“It’s… my pleasure.” The couches are stiff and uncomfortable, meant only to give the illusion of welcome. Castiel walks reluctantly towards the group and perches on the edge of the closest one, back painfully straight. “Could I see the chart, please.”

The man only blinks at him. Zachariah tries to glare at Castiel without actually losing his sympathetic smile, and the result resembles constipation more than ire. “In good time, Dr. Novak. Before we do that… Mr. Winchester? Perhaps you’d like to tell us a little more about your brother?”

Castiel has no patience for this tactic, when the only thing that should bear on the clinic’s decision to accept the patient is, to put it bluntly, the viability of the project at hand. There is no other facility within a lightyear of Sol that can do what they do, but there are limits: of science, of compassion, of logic and feasibility. Unfortunately, there is also a reason Zachariah is the chief of medicine, and it has far less to do with his professional accomplishments than his ability to extract improbably large amounts of credits from grieving families.

“You can call me Sam,” the man on the couch mumbles, staring empty-eyed at point in the distance. “I, uh. God, where do I start? Dean’s— he’s older. My older brother. He practically raised me, he’s… he was all I had, for a long time.”

The woman smooths her hand over his knuckles, then looks at Castiel. “Dean is a member of the Interplanetary Corps. He was injured in the line of duty, in the colonies. He saved hundreds of lives.”

“Thousands,” the final person in the room says, speaking for the first time. He has a military posture, now that Castiel is looking for it, and he’s eyeing Zachariah with distaste. “Dr. Novak, the Corps owes Lieutenant Winchester a great debt of gratitude. We would appreciate your honest assessment of his chance of recovery and if possible, a chance to repay that debt.”

Small wonder Zachariah looks so eager, if the military will be funding this. “Our clinic prides itself on being the best in the solar system,” the man says, all but beaming at them. “And Dr. Novak and his team are among our most successful.”

“Could you do it?” Sam says. Hope looks agonizing on him. “Can you…?”

“I won’t know until I see the chart,” Castiel says, as gently as he can.

He hates this, hates that Zachariah has manipulated these people likely from the moment they contacted him and is using their pain to try to sway Castiel’s answer. It won’t work, but it will make the process as painful as possible.

“Of course,” Zachariah says immediately, like he hadn’t tried to stall it at all. A tap of his finger sends it to the datacom in Castiel’s pocket with a faint chime, and he pulls it out to look.

The attention as he reads is awkward and oppressive, Sam sitting quiet and still except for the rapid flicker of his eyes between Castiel and Zachariah. The military man frowns down at the table, arms folded over his chest. The woman rubs Sam’s hands like she’s trying to warm them, and says nothing. Zachariah merely waits, already certain in the outcome. Outside Zachariah’s windows, the bright light of Sol warms the thin verdant loops of the station’s bustling core, and shiptraffic makes a low hum in the ‘skies’ around, above and below them.

The dry, clinical language of the files does nothing to disguise the devastating nature of the damage done. Castiel has seen enough reports like these that it rarely registers, that strange dichotomy, but as he reads he’s struck anew by the contrast. The trauma surgeon at the closest Corps base to the battle hadn’t done more than clamp off arteries before putting this man directly in stasis, where he’d stayed until the transport ship hit Earth orbit three days ago. Where he still is now. The surgeon’s notes are terse, as though they hadn’t wanted to waste time saying more, and their assessment stark: the phrase REC KIA underlined at the end of a short paragraph.

At the very end of the brief paperwork is a bloodless diagram of injuries, flat views of the front and back of the body. It looks very much like a postmortem assessment. Castiel spends several minutes gazing down at it, fingers barely brushing the smooth screen as he traces the outline of the worst damage.

“Well?” Sam blurts into the silence of the room, apparently unable to wait any longer. “Can you— can you do something?”

“… you realize that you’re asking me to reconstruct this man from a head and half a torso,” Castiel says, unable to be anything but blunt.

Sam goes slowly grey, while Zachariah swells with rage. “Dr. Novak—”

“That wasn’t a no,” the military man observes. He’s watching Castiel with sharp interest. “Was it?”

“Ah. No,” Castiel agrees, a little surprised to realize it. The injuries approach the most severe cases he’s ever been asked to take on, but when he looks at the problems— matching tissue growth speeds for different systems,  somehow keeping blood pressure and blood-dependent processes going in the midst of all that, the potential that this could take years— solutions begin to suggest themselves. He looks at Dean Winchester, and he sees potential.

“It will be very difficult,” he says, more to himself than anyone else in the room, “but I think…” He doesn’t know what he’s thinking, actually. Some instinct tells him, though, “There’s a chance. I think we can save him.”