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Dean had been wrestling for almost half of his life, and more than half of that time he had spent in the more brutal arenas of it. He’d wrestled on Lego bricks, he’d been beaten with barbed wire set aflame, he’d even participated in the goddamn Tournament of Death at CZW twice (and though he had lost, he was the only one on the roster at the fed who had ever done it period). In short, he was a man intimately familiar with pain in dizzying amounts.
But he had never been in as much pain in his life as he was at that moment, pinned on one side by the plaster of a cast, pinned by a bronze blur that he had been convinced twenty seconds ago was Roman but may very well have been a cinder block on the other side, and trapped in front by a doctor shining a bright light into his face while it felt like his eye was learning to dance an Irish jig. Every instinct in him was screaming to bolt, and it was only the bone-shattering muscle spasms in his legs when he tried to move them that kept him from bucking like a feral cat. He settled for biting his tongue until he tasted the tang of iron (because just what he needed was another injury, obviously), swallowing back the pathetic whines that kept crowding in his throat with the thickness of the newest pain and desperately drawing his focus in that direction. The light finally subsided, and the weight on his side was released with a low rumbling apology; the doctor made some noises that sounded like a positive result to whatever hellish test he had been subjected to, but Dean was a little too frazzled and still in too much discomfort to absorb the words in any meaningful way.
His eye was still spasming, making the mostly-unused and still achingly-bruised part of his face around it tense and twitch repeatedly. He closed his eyes and tried to melt into the bed, but it was too uncomfortable and he was still teeth-grindingly tense; he had no outlet, couldn’t even move his fingers to release some of the pent-up energy, and to his very great shame, he felt heat pooling behind his eyes, frustration and rage and agony fighting their way out through the only refuge he had been allowed.
“Dean,” and that voice—no, he was still hallucinating, or he was dead, because he was still sort of convinced that this is exactly what his hell would be like, pain and constriction and the tease of people who loved him—that voice that was like pornography, he couldn’t put it in words but he knew exactly whose it was and what it did to him, soothed him almost embarrassingly easily, chased all the howling out of his brain and made his panicking heart stutter and slow, “Dean, it’s okay, we’re here.”
The voice was over him now, and a cool hand was resting on his forearm, a cloud of dampness and pine and wintergreen scent settling over him like a blanket, until his breathing slowed to an approximately human rate. On his other side, a firm weight settled on his leg, and the rumble repeated, “We’re here.”
It was the drugs, it had to be, that made his lips move without his consent, “Are you?” And his voice was shaking and he hated this, hated it all, every inch, because he was Dean fucking Ambrose, he was the streetwise asshole with quips and confidence spilling out of his mouth, not this person who suffered with these thoughts and fears that oozed out like entrails.
The weight on his leg tightened—it must be a hand—not enough to hurt, but enough to bring an edge to his awareness, and the cloud with that voice leaned over him until there was a steady, reassuring th-thump next to his cheekbone and a pleasant coolness that smelled like not hospital against his neck, and words that should have made sense but sounded like nonsense (“We’re here, Dean, it’s okay. We’re right here, and we’re not going anywhere”) repeated against his temple by dry lips. He fumbled with his un-plastered arm to reach up, catch and weave fingers with the hand that had left his arm, and it must have been his imagination but the beat next to his ear faltered, but the refrain continued until he slipped into a twilight that wasn’t sleep or awake but was at least comfortable.
He must have actually fallen asleep, however, because when he awoke, the weight on his thigh was still there, if a bit heavier (he dared to crack open his heavy eyelids, and the barest hint of a smile creased his mouth at the undignified splay of Samoan, forehead pressed against his leg and mouth open more than slightly, hair a disarray of oily ink over yellowing bruises and white sheets the same) and the weight against his good shoulder had disappeared.
He tried not to be disappointed.