Not so Invincible

A tag to Changing Channels. Had to write this because the moment Dean got shot in the episode, I got this inspiration.

Sam watched him fall to his knees.

Not many things could bring Dean down to his knees, let alone completely down to the ground and out for the count. If he hadn't been hurt badly enough to knock him out, he would get up again by sheer will alone to finish off any monster. Sam had witnessed it a million times, would have said it wasn't possible every time he had watched Dean go down, but would then watch Dean defy natural law, his own body's desire to surrender and get up.

It's not to say that Dean was invincible, far from it. Dean had been brought down and brought down hard. Too many times for Sam to want to think about from their childhood to just the moment when a supposedly imaginary bullet hit him square in the back. He had seen Dean brought down, dragged down.

But to watch him get shot in the Trickster's idea of a bad rerun of a terrible TV medical show, to watch Dean fall to his knees uttering "Real. It's real" almost made his heart stop.

He didn't know why. He had watched Dean die a thousand deaths the last time he had crossed paths with the Trickster, worse than that, had watched Dean being ripped to shreds at the jowls of a Hell hound then really die, but this time, this time, it felt…unfair, unfair that while everything else around them was an illusion, Dean getting shot was real, more unfair than at any other time when it was unfair because just when he had connected across the void between them, a shot had to remind him to not to fool himself. They may be together today, but there was no knowing tomorrow. He heard Dean utter out in pain, trying to catch difficult breaths and he had never been so scared in his life and he had been scared plenty in his life.