A year ago, I returned to fanfic after many years away with the posting of my first SPN story, "Of Other Fathers." I wanted to celebrate this anniversary by posting a new story. A little humor, a little h/c—and a whole lot of wordplay.

Dedicated to my fellow SPNsters, four ladies who are awesome and adorable; to word-nerds everywhere; and to those who follow/review my stories.

Of Whump and Words

Dean, who most definitely had a potty mouth, was turning the air so blue with various inventive invective—Sam, who loved words, liked that image immensely: inventive invective; and he wanted to share that admirably creative linguistic coupling with his brother, but maybe not right now—that Sam was fairly certain Dean was sucking all the oxygen out of the air in their immediate environment.

"Stop swearing and breathe," Sam recommended, because Dean was spending significantly more effort on spitting out curses than on inhaling. And inhaling was pretty important if one wanted to, like, actually remain among the living. But his brother was nothing if not stubborn at the best of times, let alone when he was injured; and right now was not a best of times but a bad time, and if Dean wanted to swear and not breathe, eventually he'd pass out and their current location would instantly become a much kinder, gentler place.

And while Dean was large enough to make it tough even for a guy of Sam's height and power to lug him out of the forest as dead weight—or, well, living weight that mimicked dead weight, which was more acceptable than actual dead weight—having Dean pass out would make everything about Sam's life a little easier at the moment. Because he needed to get his brother out of the forest, to the car, into the car—which would hurt like hell—and hauled off to the motel Dean would insist upon even though Sam would prefer to head for a hospital.

Of course if Dean passed out, then his brother could take him to the ER and there'd be nothing he could do about it.

Sam liked that image even better, and promptly changed tack. "Okay. Swear a lot, if it makes you feel better."

Dean stopped swearing. He was sitting on the ground with his spine shoved against a tree while his right leg was bent up toward his chest and his left beat a tattoo against forest deadfall. His bloodied right hand was cradling the underside of his damaged thigh, and his fisted left was also beating a tattoo, but it was against his good leg. He was simultaneously digging a hole in the ground with his boot-heel, and very probably bruising his own flesh by pounding on it. And Sam knew exactly why he was doing it.

Dean's voice was tight as he finally expelled actual words. "Son. Of. A. Bitch. I swear, Sammy—I think I'd rather take a bullet than a freakin' dog bite!"

"Well, it was a possessed dog," Sam reminded him, "and a Rottweiler/Doberman/something cross, so not exactly a yappy little ankle-biter." He'd ignored protests about limited pairs of jeans and sliced open denim from hip to knee to inspect the bleeding bite in his brother's thigh. "Missed the femoral artery," he pointed out helpfully, "but, yeah, this is gonna hurt."

"It already hurts, you moron!"

Sam knew it was pain driving his brother's frustration and anger, but also a fair amount of sheer, unalloyed annoyance. Dean was stoic about most injuries, even truly bad ones, adopting the Sylvester Stallone John Rambo school of just blinking it all away in a fatuously blank face, refusing to say a word about what was sometimes pretty ferocious pain. He'd been clawed, knifed, shot, shredded, beaten half to hell, burned, battered, eviscerated, electrocuted, dragged all the way to hell, strangled, and suffered any number of other bodily insults on a regular basis, but he had focused on this attack as a critical failure because it was someone's beloved pet.

Or had been, before the whole possessed thing happened. But trust Dean to feel stupid and embarrassed for getting himself chomped on by something that once was a perfectly friendly and mundane family companion rather than, oh, say, a pissed off, possessed, psychopathic Velociraptor.

Twelve punctures from a substantial Rottweiler/Doberman/whatever mouth—four of them from those big, long canines—and the dog had gnawed on the leg.

It was downright fugly, and Sam decided then and there they were ER-bound. Serious bites from large dogs, even when not possessed, were potentially dangerous.

Dean was swearing again. Sam didn't blame him. Inside his own skull, Sam was swearing, too. "I'm patching this up for now," he said, keeping his tone smooth, "and then I've got to cut off the dog's head and take it with us to the hospital."

Dean stilled for a moment, eyes so wide the whites were practically glowing. "What? Why?"

"The first thing they'll ask is if the dog has rabies."

"It doesn't have rabies, Sam. It was possessed."

Sam dug a bottle of holy water out of the weapons duffel, uncapped and poured it all over Dean's thigh. "You wanna tell the ER docs that? Really?"

Dean was practically grinding his teeth. "We don't have to tell the ER docs anything, because we aren't going to the ER."

Sam held his silence. He uncapped a second bottle—this one was peroxide—and resolutely upended the contents all over the puncture wounds. Pinkish froth bubbled up, lifting grit, shredded cloth, blood, and whatever else might be in the wounds, briefly washing away the detritus. Rivulets ran down Dean's thigh to the knife-sundered denim. It wasn't enough, but something. Better than cutting off the limb entirely, an action to which his older brother might, in passing, mention mild opposition.

"It's a series of shots, Dean. The rabies treatment. And unless they've changed protocol - I haven't looked it up lately - the last I knew it was administered via needle to the stomach. You get bitten and the animal can't be found and no one knows if it's rabid?—hey, you get the shots. Now, if you take the severed head in, the lab can test the brain to see if the animal is infected. If not, no shots. I'm actually helping you, here. And no one, no one, questions a dog bite. It's not like trying to explain a vengeful spirit, you know."

Holy water, peroxide; Sam now moved on to alcohol. Dean, perfectly aware of what was coming, practically squirmed against anticipated discomfort. "We know it's not infected. It was possessed! And we can avoid the whole question of severed heads and brains and infections and shots in the belly by not going to a hospital! We don't—"

But that was the end of anything approaching articulate speech from Dean, because the application of alcohol to bite wounds triggered a subterranean growl, followed swiftly by another raft of—inventive invective—that somewhat mimicked the English language if one squinted really, really hard.

"Rambo would be ashamed," Sam observed, because he knew that was just off-kilter enough to distract his brother for a moment.

Dean was on the verge of hyperventilating. He stared wide-eyed—and wild-eyed—at his brother, incapable of speech, even of swearing, as his brain briefly went offline, then began to come back, to process, to compartmentalize the pain.

Sam pulled two clean bandanas out of the duffel, folded them square, placed one atop the wounds in the surface of Dean's thigh and the other over the corresponding punctures on the side, then swiftly took several wraps with gauze, stuck them in place with Disney animation-themed duct tape. Now: machete-time. He pulled it from the duffel, unsheathed, grabbed a big towel.

Dean's voice was tight. "C'mon, Sammy . . . "

"This, or shots," Sam said flatly. "I'm not screwin' around. Got it?" And he stalked off two trees away to where the dead dog lay.

All the practice in taking off vamp heads made it easy to decapitate a canine. Sam wasn't proud of it—this had been someone's pet—but it wouldn't have survived the possession and you do what you gotta do to save the humans in the equation. Several people had already been attacked, all were undergoing painful rabies treatment, and had nothing been done to stop the possessed dog, the next time someone might have died. Maybe even his brother.

Sam had purposely not looked at the collar tags.

He approximated a bag shape with the towel, placed the head inside, hauled it and the cleaned machete back to Dean, then put weapon and towel-swaddled head into the duffel.

"Goddamn mother hen," Dean muttered between gritted teeth.

"Yup." Sam zipped closed the duffel, looked his brother dead in the eye. "We're doing this my way. Understand? Because unless you can stand up on your own, walk to the car on your own, and drive us to the motel on your own, you've got no choice."

Dean was sweating, ashen face sheened in a fine film of dampness. A muscle jumped in his jaw, rolled, jumped again. He was angry in the eyes because he knew Sam was right, and if there was anything Dean hated, irrevocably detested, it was feeling helpless and hospitalized. It didn't matter how many times he'd boosted his baby brother off the ground, or tended his wounds, or actually carried him to the car; that was part of a big brother's job, and acceptable. His blind spot was that he could not allow himself to be the job, the one who required aid. He might know he needed it, but he hated it. It would take far less time and burn less energy if Dean would just go with it, would just keep his mouth shut and allow Sam to do for him what Dean did for Sam. But, well: Dean.

And suddenly Sam was angry. "You are without question the most bull-headed, pig-headed, hard-headed, stiff-necked, cantankerous, intractable, obdurate, recalcitrant, pertinacious, contumacious, perverse man I've ever known in the whole entire world. You belong in the Guinness Book of World Records under the heading of Stubborn Sons of Bitches. And we are going to the ER, and you're not going to say shit about it, hear me? Because I'm sick of it. This time I get to be the big brother. Hell, I'll even be John freakin' Winchester if that's what it takes. Because I'm sick of it. Okay?"

Dean was staring up at him in startlement, and Sam realized that at some point he'd risen to his feet and was looming, literally looming over his brother, who was still seated against the tree with one now-wrapped, trembling leg bent up in the air, as Sam's shoulders heaved and the breath ran loud in his chest.

After a moment, Dean asked, "What did you call me?"

"A stubborn son of a bitch."

Dean waved his hand. "No. All the shit you said before that. And something to do with me being a pervert."

"Perverse, not pervert. Though probably some might argue that you can be a little pervy on occasion. But no. Perverse. It means contradictory. Intransigent."

"Now you're adding insults!"

"They are synonyms, not insults. Because God knows Dean Winchester would never aspire to being an antonym."

"What the hell does that mean?"

"The opposite," Sam said. "An antonym, in this specific case, is the opposite of stubborn. Think: agreeable. Compliant. Reasonable. See? Things Dean Winchester will never be."

Despite pain, Dean managed to summon his patented Glare of Doom. "I can be perfectly agreeable, when there's something to be agreeable about. Reasonable, too. Not too sure about compliant, though."

"Flexible. Tractable. Yielding."

Dean pursed his lips. "Okay, not too good at those."

"We're going."

"Sammy—"

"Dean."

"Tell me something."

"Yeah?"

"What's the antonym for 'pain in the ass baby brother?'"

"I don't think there is one. 'Pain in the ass' is part of idiom, Dean; no, not idiot: idiom. It's an idiomatic phrase." He paused, threw more vocabulary at his brother, who looked terrible. "Vernacular. Slang." Dean was scowling up at him, and Sam really wanted to get him on his feet and moving before his leg got any stiffer; but now he was in the nerd zone. "Argot. Lingo. Patois. Jargon. Colloquialism."

Dean growled something inarticulate, then tacked on: "Just shoot me now."

Sam knew he needed another distraction. And since he was in the word-nerd place, he had one at the ready.

He bent, scooped up the duffel, hooked straps over one shoulder, then leaned down and extended an arm to his brother. "Hey, you know—" He timed it just as Dean closed trembling fingers around Sam's wrist, even as Sam clamped down on Dean's, "—I can't help it if you have hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia."

And with that he pulled his brother up from the ground.

The sound Dean made as he transitioned from semi-horizontal to completely vertical was not identifiably human. Sam took as much of his brother's weight as he could, because Dean only had one good leg and the bad one was—well, bad. After an endless moment where he breathed in rapid, noisy bursts between his teeth, Dean steadied himself as much as he could, considering one thigh had doubled as an exceptionally large Snausage dog treat.

And muttered something under his breath.

Sam was surprised his brother was capable of anything approaching actual words. "What?"

"I said, I do not have a fear of monster water horses. Or of any kind of hippopotamus." Pause. "Hippopotamuses." Pause. "Hippopotami." Then he surrendered with a dismissive wave of his hand, and moved on. "Those dudes are kinda fugly, you know? Fast suckers, too. You ever see them run?"

Sam, who didn't know the correct plural of the animal, either, but intended now to look it up, said, "To paraphrase The Princess Bride, I do not think that word means what you think it means."

"Monstrous hippo that is apparently well-equipped? I left the equipped part out before. So sue me."

"It really doesn't mean that, Dean."

"Then what does it mean?"

"Fear of long words."

"I am not afraid of long words! I just don't waste my time on them when one or two syllables will do. Saves time."

Sam scoffed. "Prove it."

"I'll even give you the freakin' antonym for the hippo-word, okay?"

Sam made a rude rumbling sound in the back of his throat. "Yeah. Right."

Dean, clinging to Sam because he was in dire danger of falling down otherwise, drew in a breath and announced with excess clarity, "My pain in the ass little brother is a sesquipedalian."

Sam was so startled he nearly let Dean fall over. "You know what that means?"

"Lover of long words," Dean answered tightly. "That's you to a T, College Boy. And yes, I know that word. It's roots are Latin. Horace, I think. I'm all over Latin."

"Son of a bitch," Sam muttered.

"There's even a song for it. The hippo-word. On how to pronounce it."

"I know. It's how I learned it."

Dean sighed. "So, we hangin' out here in the forest until tomorrow—or we goin' to the ER?"

"Now you're willing to go?"

"I'm being flexible. Reasonable. Compliant. But we'd better go soon, or I'm going to puke all over your shoes." Dean paused. "That's idiom. Like: blow chunks. Hurl. Hork."

"I get the drift." But Sam was now wondering if maybe they should hit the thrift stores in search of an old Scrabble game, because his brother obviously had a much better grasp of vocabulary than Sam had ever believed up until five minutes ago. He was downright impressed.

And he was pretty sure hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia would be worth a lot of points.

~ end ~

A/N: I have broken up a few dog fights in my day and can attest that even fairly straightforward bites are extremely painful, and bad bites are considerably worse. I have also self-treated with peroxide and alcohol and did some hopping around the bathroom while making strange, garbled noises and expelling lots of bad words. One's vocabulary does expand exponentially into inventive invective under such circumstances. Fortunately none of the dogs was possessed, so holy water wasn't needed.

As for the hippo-word? Yes, it's real. The ever-devious Nova42, when I invited prompts for my anniversary story, provided it. There really is a song about how to pronounce it, which can be found on YouTube, but since FFnet doesn't allow links you'll have to search on hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia song, or else the easy version: long word song. Thank you for reading, thank you for reviewing, and I look forward to writing more fics about our boys in the future. Currently counting the days to the S11 premiere!