If you want to check out my original fiction, my account is her brown eyes on fictionpresss. Hinthint. I'm gonna be posting cracky poems about my first day at school after this. Those are always fun.

Set in no specific time during season 2, but I'm thinking sometime after Simon Said but before Hunted. AU

Words in Slow-Motion

The motel room was bloody. Everywhere he looked, there was that scarlet hue. And then there was his brother, unconscious on his bed.

It was true head wounds bled badly, but weren't usually as fatal as they looked. Dean would be fine. He wasn't sure when Dean would wake up, but he would be fine.
Dean was going to be absolutely fine.

Sam had to believe that, or he wouldn't have anything else to believe in. Because he was really worried. Dean had barely made the slightest twitch, the only noise a nearly inaudible moan since Sam had brought him in almost three hours ago.

But Dean was gonna be fine. Dean was always fine. And if Sam didn't have food for him when he finally woke up, well, he was going to have to deal with a very cranky Dean later on.

That's why Sam left for ten minutes.

Ten minutes.

Only ten minutes.

When Sam walked in the door, he was both relieved and annoyed to be greeted by the sight of Dean, cleaning up the blood.

"Dean," Sam warned him.

He got the meaning perfectly. That didn't mean he'd listen to the warning. "Don't get your panties in a twist, Samantha. Someone has to clean up this mess, and you're slacking on your domestic duties."

"Lay down," Sam growled, chucking a burger from the fast-food restaurant he'd gone to down the street. Dean caught it a second before it hit his chest.

"Geez, you'd think I was on my death bed or something," he grumbled before sitting down and unwrapping his burger.

Sam ignored him. "How're you feeling?"

Dean smiled, "Pretty amazing." Sam shot him a look of exasperation. "Considering I got thrown down a flight of stairs and landed on my head," he finished, before Sam could bite his head off for playing down his injury.

"Yeah, well, I hope you've learned your lesson."

"Never mess with a demon unarmed near a very long staircase?"

"Exactly."

Sam was a little surprised that Dean was up and walking around so much. Not that Dean wasn't usually an awful patient, but even he had his limits. He'd been unconscious for over three hours. Sam had been about to take him to the hospital. And now he was up and walking, cleaning, being his annoying, pesky self. And Sam had tried so hard, God knew he'd tried, to get him to lay down, but Dean wasn't having it. Because yes, he had saved Sam too many times to count, but he enjoyed shortening Sam's life with worry.

It went on like this for a couple days: Sam would make Dean lie down and rest. Sam would go out to get something for them to eat. Sam would come back to find Dean walking around outside. Sam tried to keep him inside because he knew he should be helping the healing process, not going against it, but he was actually kind of relieved he was doing well enough to walk around outside. So he partially ignored it.

Until the day Dean ripped his stitches.

"Dean! What is so damn important that you have to be up and about?" Sam scolded him, none too gently, while examining the cut, trying to decide if it was necessary to stitch it back up.

"I'm just bored," Dean whined. "There's nothing to do."

"You've never been this bored before. Go watch Dr. Sexy M.D. or something," said Sam as he picked up a needle.

"Please, Sammy. I'd rather choke on my own teeth than watch your girly shows."

Sam frowned at that. While Dean frequently denied he watched the medical drama, it was weird he'd try to pin it on Sam. He might do a lot of things to annoy Sam, but averting blame on his little brother, no matter how minor the offense, was not one of them. Or at least it didn't used to be. And that's when Sam got worried.

"Dean," Sam lowered his voice and put down the needle. "What's going on?"

"What do you mean?" Dean asked innocently.

"The way you're acting! I know when you're upset, Dean. You get restless. You get weird."

"Weird? I'm really not feeling the love from you, here, Sam."

"And you start doing that! You start getting that flip attitude with me. More so than normal."

Dean glanced up from where'd he'd been examining his hands to look over him for a long moment in silence. "Nothing, dude, I'm fine. Stop worrying about me." he resumed his inspection of his fingers, flexing them and running his nails across his palm.

"I know you're hiding something from me, Dean. But you don't have to," Sam told him, trying to be reassuring without being too emotional, which he knew would put Dean off.

His head shot up suddenly, eyes flashing. "You wanna know, Sammy? You really want to know?" It was a rhetorical question, he kept going. "You're my problem. You know it, Dad knew it... He was always telling me there was something off about you. There's a darkness inside you, Sam, and I've been fighting it so long, you've been fighting it so long. I don't think you can anymore. I think you're starting to break. Dad always wanted... to stop you. I told him not to. But these past few weeks... I dunno, Sam. I just dunno anymore. I think maybe I have to."

Sam stared at him, completely shocked. He- he hadn't been expecting that. Not at all. He averted his gaze from his brother. Dean had just thrown every fear Sam had been having about himself and thrown them in his face. He couldn't say anything, because Dean was right. So he bolted from the room.

Sam came back an hour later, bruised and bleeding knuckles and red, teary eyes. He'd put a gun to his head but couldn't pull the trigger. Not without knowing Dean was gonna be okay. Not without even telling Dean what he was gonna do. No matter how Dean felt towards him right now. Instead, he'd punched the hell out of a brick wall until the pain inside gave way to the pain in his hands.

He stopped outside the door, unsure what to say when he walked in. He decided to let Dean do the talking first. He opened the door. And found something he never would have expected.

Dean sitting on a bed, talking into a chalice full of blood between his legs.

And damn, shouldn't he have expected that? Maybe if he hadn't been so wrapped up in his own self-pity, he would have noticed that Dean wasn't just being weird because something was wrong. He had been acting weird because Something Was Wrong, that something being demonic possession. And, sure the demon was pretty good at impersonating his brother. But he should've known.

"Dean" looked up at him. In a moment of quick thinking, Sam thew himself inside, closed the door, grabbed a bag of rock salt lying handy in the corner, and salted the door and window in record time. Oh, another thing to add to the list of Things He Should Have Noticed- that Dean hadn't laid down salt lines since they'd been here.

"My, my, Sammy. Really thought you would've killed yourself by now."

"Fuck you," Sam breathed.

"Someone's a little touchy, aren't we? Did someone get upset that I'm wearing your big brother? Or is it the fact that you didn't notice for almost a week? What would Dean think of you know? Because I'm really curious, honestly."

"You... Shut up."

"Shut up," the demon mocked him. "Just shut up," he whined. Sam threw himself at him, but instead of Sam connecting with him, he connected with the wall behind him. The demon cackled, and Sam didn't even have to say how wrong it was hearing that coming from his brother's mouth.

He was ten different kinds of pissed. And an angry Sam is dangerous. He struggled and gasped and threw himself against the invisible force that bound him to the wall. Until it broke, and he was free.

He was past staring in horror at the revelation that he couldn't be held by a demon. He was past caring how dark he really might be.

"Regna terrae, cantate Deo, psallite Domino qui fertis super caelum..." he started. The demon was startled, it tried to run. But where could he go? He was trapped.

"Wait," said the demon, starting to get desperate, but trying not to show it.

Sam ignored him and continued the exorcism.

"Fine. Don't say I didn't try to warn you."

Sam didn't want to stop, but oh, he wanted to know, even if it was just a ploy. "What?"

"Don't you want to say goodbye?"

He raised his eyebrows in confusion. "Um, not really, but okay... Bye? Have fun in Hell?"

The demon wearing Dean was quick to clarify. "Oh, not me. Your charming brother, Dean. He's dead. He's been dead for quite awhile, actually. So I suppose you can't really say goodbye, but I figured you might rather say goodbye to me in his warm body than to nothing in his cold, dead, very lifeless body."

Sam froze for all of four seconds before opening his mouth to continue, "Caeli ad Orientem Ecce dabit voci Suae vocem virtutis, tribuite virtutem Deo. Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus omnis satanica potestas, omnis incursio infernalis adversarii, omnis legio, omnis congregatio et secta diabolica..."

The demon was screaming as he started getting pulled out of the body, but he managed a smirk all the same. That smirk that conveyed everything Sam did not want it to convey. I'm telling the truth; you don't believe me, but you will; sucks to be you; I wish I could see the look on your face.

When the smoke left and Dean's body slumped in the seat, Sam jumped into a kneel beside him.
"Dammit, Dean. Stay with me, here. Don't leave like this. Don't leave me like this," Sam begged. He knew he shouldn't but he shook Dean a little anyway. "Dean. Please, man."

He heard a whimper. He knelt forward even closer. "Hey now, you're going to be okay. You're going to be fine. I just got to get you to a hospital, alright?"

There was no answer from Dean. No indication that he'd even heard him. He moved to pick up Dean so he could carry him to the car. Dean let out another whimper.

"Sorry!" he yelped. "What's hurting?" He asked as he tried to figure out a different way to move Dean. Still no answer. He was probably unconscious. Sam checked his pulse, which he should have done earlier, he chided himself. How slow was it? He moved his finger around his neck, trying to find it. He'd never had a problem finding his brother's pulse before. After wasting a few precious moments on failure, he moved to Dean's wrist. Still nothing. In desperation, he placed a hand over his heart.

There! Another whimper. Proof Dean was alive. Even though he couldn't find his heartbeat, either. Even though his body seemed to be getting cooler and cooler.

What the hell?

Dean started letting out a low, guttural moan of hopelessness and desperation. And Sam realized it wasn't Dean. It had never been Dean. Only himself. Every whimper, every little gasp that had sent a little pulse of hope towards Sam, it had all been false. The demon had told the truth, as they normally do when the truth is in their favor.

He'd left for ten minutes. He'd lost his brother in those ten minutes.

Sam was not absolutely fine.

Dean was never gonna be fine again.