Heard 'Round the World

Summary: Set directly after 'Shadow'. Dean and Sam lick their wounds as they investigate a town whose youth have seen too much. And some of their deceased peers are out for the revenge denied them in life.

Disclaimer: Everything recognizable is owned by Kripke and Co.

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In his arms, Sam bled and smiled, traced his face with a battered hand, and died. Dean desperately searched for a pulse on the one person he could never imagine losing. The cold skin beneath his fingers ushered his worst nightmare out onto center stage.

"No. NO!"

"Dean, wake up!"

Dean jerked awake with a start and grabbed for the face so near to his own, hand grasping at thick hair and tugging, just to make sure it was real.

"Dean! Let me go!" Sam pulled at the hold slightly, knowing that Dean was currently functioning with neither brain, upper or lower, so knowing that his brother most likely had no idea that the "Biggest Chick Flick Moment Ever Recorded" was threatening to break down their motel door unless Dean decided to come to his senses and abandon the tug-of-war with Sam's hair. So far, not many follicles were on the winning side and Sam's head was suffering the consequences.

"Sammy?" Dean muttered, sleep moving his voice down several octaves. His dream was flashing in bits and pieces before his eyes, the animate face in front of him constantly switching back to the rigid face in his mind, the rigor mortis preserving for eternity the look of a doomed man smiling in the face of death, before the physical contact brought him back to reality. Finally, it came back to him – Sam and he had crashed at the first motel they had come to once they were several cities out of Chicago. Dean himself had escaped with minor cuts that needed no stitches, which Dean would be eternally grateful for, since he neither like getting sewed together or the scars that such things left on his handsome mug.

Sam, on the other hand, had not been so lucky. The slices on his face had required some thread, and the ones across his stomach were bleeding profusely. Once the blood had ceased to soak through every material applied to it, Dean had been able to see that the cuts didn't actually need to be sewed, just bandaged. The blood loss worried him for a while, but Sam had been as alert as could be expected and had remained conscious to help convince his psychotic pit bull of an older brother that a hospital visit courtesy of Brian May 1 was not called for.

Struggling to catch his breath, the elder Winchester unhooked his fingers from the younger's tender locks. Sam rocked back to sit on the bed, his eyes tracing Dean's face. "You there, man?"

Dean swallowed, fighting the bile that rose in his throat as he remembered cooling fingers traveling the same paths as those hazel eyes. "Peachy."

"Didn't seem so five minutes ago when you were trying to mimic a pre-pubescent girl."

A sneer worked its way onto the man's face. "Screw you."

But Sam was a predator when it came to seeking out buried emotions and now there was blood in the water. "I'd think that telling me about your dream would be more appealing to you than incest."

"You'd be surprised," Dean grunted. Sam merely raised his eyebrows, eyes flashing with something that was gone too quickly for his brother's sleep clogged brain to identify, before a concerned look came over his features. "You were screaming for me. Pretty loudly too. I'd be surprised if no one else heard you." Dean rolled his eyes at his brother's characteristic digging into his psyche.

"Don't look too much into it, Freud, just a little snapshot of how things could've turned out in the Windy City." Sam nodded, rising to his feet and shuffling back to the other motel bed. He laid down on his back but though the younger brother closed his eyes, Dean knew his brother wasn't slipping into a land of lollypops and candy canes; Dean knew everything about his brother. "Sam, you need to sleep."

"You need to get your dream off your chest so that I won't be rudely awakened again."

"I didn't wake you up."

"You could've."

"I also could've taken up the cute bartender on her offer of a night I'd never forget." The heavy cotton of the bed sheets wrapped and twisted around his legs, reminding him of the feeling of another sensuous body tangled around his own. Now there was something he hadn't experienced for an ungodly amount of time. Pushing down his unsatisfied libido – for the time being, anyway – Dean let himself relax into the bed, determined to not have an encore of his nightmare. Within minutes, his exhausted mind was floating into Morpheus' realm.

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A/N: So here it is, my first attempt at a SN story! I hope people enjoy and stick around for upcoming chapters.