A/N: This fic takes place in an alternate first season. Dean and Sam have been hunting together for about a year and are still searching for John. Subsequent chapters will be a LOT longer than this one, which is essentially just a prologue. I'm new to writing fanfiction, so please help me out by dropping some reviews!
Despite the initial evidence to the contrary, Passing the Gun is mostly Dean centered; however, if you are more of a Sam person, don't worry, because he still gets his fair share of attention.
1.
The hunt should have been routine. Looking back on it, Sam is always appalled by how normal that afternoon was, how neither of them even paused to think that maybe this night, of all nights, would be the one where everything finally fell apart. In some dark corner of their minds they always knew that they were long overdue for disaster; but those fears rode backseat, and they seemed trivial on that warm, sun-drenched evening, with the windows down, the crisp, elusive smell of almost-autumn in the air, the Impala speeding through fields of browning corn. Sam had his head tipped toward the window, and Dean glanced at him occasionally and thought about how young he looked, and about how much he needed to get a haircut if he was ever going to pick up chicks again, ever. Sam just thought about Jessica, and how much she'd loved this time of year.
Clouds piled up on the horizon, towering and white, their underbellies bruise-dark. They chased the Impala into town.
Six hours and forty-two minutes later, Sam is kicking down the door of an abandoned warehouse. The rotten wood parts like butter but it still isn't fast enough, and as he hurtles into the vast empty building, through the dank, narrow hallway reeking of mold, he's asking himself why the hell he and Dean always split up when things get seriously dangerous. It's like, hey, there's a ghost ripping out people's entrails and flinging them around like party streamers, why don't I take the downstairs and you take the upstairs? Great idea! Always.
It was only a matter of time until that plan backfired, and tonight it has in a potentially fatal way. Sam's finally traced the little girl – Sarah Phelps, missing for twenty-four hours, blonde, pigtails – to this warehouse, and he's got the feeling that Dean's here too, a hunch he confirms mere seconds later when he skids around a corner and almost trips over a beheaded corpse. Yeah, definitely Dean's work. He steps over the mess, careful not to slip in the blood pooling dark on the concrete, and draws the Beretta from where it's tucked between his belt and his skin. A doorway looms at the end of the hallway, identifiable only as a square of greater darkness against the shadows.
Sam thinks he hears a quiet scuffle; it's followed by a muffled, unintelligible sound that he instantly recognizes: Dean trying to speak through a gag.
When he reaches it he slows down, presses his back against the wall, and looks cautiously around the corner. He has failed to understand his brother's warning. Something else rises to meet him, so fast that he only catches an ephemeral glimpse of light winking off metal before it slams into his head and that streak of silver transforms into pain knifing through his skull, blindingly bright, a searing comet-streak of agony that accompanies him down into darkness like a meteor descending to earth. A distant impact, deceptively silent. Everything fades.