Thank you so much for the wonderful feedback. Here's the next part. Please note that in my universe, the Amelia storyline is a lot different. I may write a story about my version later. Let me know what you think.
Chapter 2
Bobby had once said that Dean was one of the fiercest hunters he'd ever seen, but that he loved his brother even more. It was the truest thing anyone could ever say about him.
Dean loved Sam so much it ached.
And now that faced a brutal end. They stared at each other for a long horrible moment, faces wide open with shock and guilt. There hadn't been much lore. The only solid fact about the entire hunt was that the basilisk's poison was impressively lethal.
Sam was going to die.
It seemed unfathomable. Even after all of the times that Sam had died, he was still here. Denial surged so strongly, it saturated his cells and eclipsed unimaginable truth. "Hang on, Sammy, I'm gonna fix this."
His brother had the nerve to arch an mud-caked eyebrow in skepticism.
Dean yanked the poisoned barb out of Sam's chest, not caring about the pain or the alarming stream of red that followed. He ran to his pack, retrieving the brew of purifying herbs. The basilik's poison had no cure, but this would buy Sam time. Dean's head was awash with half-formed thoughts, fleeting prayers and the constant need to move, do and SAVE. Time moved in strobing, ragged bursts, like a movie with missing frames.
Sam gagged on the brew Dean dumped down his throat, but managed to swallow half the large jug.
The first aid kit sank a bit in the mud, but Dean found the gauze pads, grinding down on the worst of the wounds until Sam cried out. Dean nudged his good arm with his hand, sweat soaking his undershirt. "Grab that pad, Sam, press it against your shoulder. You're bleedin' pretty bad."
Sam's head rolled against the damp ground, eyes screwed shut. Blindly, his hand groped for the gauze.
"Good boy," Dean grunted.
When the bleeding in two of the wounds slowed to a scant trickle, Dean applied pressure bandages and bundled Sam in his own jacket. "How you feelin'?" Slathered in half-dried mud, with muzzle burns on his neck and a third of his shirt soaked in blood, Sam should have looked worse.
Sam paused like he was taking inventory of his miseries. "Jus' feel like a pin-cushion. Those suckers hurt. I don't feel sick or anything-"
Dean cut him off before he could say "yet." With a hand under his neck and another behind his back, he scooped Sam upright and propped him against the tree. Guilt and fear pulled at his mask of big brother composure. Dean battled it back using the only weapons he had: denial and orneriness. "This is how it's going to go. You're gonna stay chilled out while we walk out of here. Let me worry about everything else, okay?"
"What about...the p-poison? A-and we're miles from the Impala, and the access road's even further," Sam's already shabby breathing decelerated until shallow, panicky pants.
Dean's heart lurched at the word, but he hushed him with a firm grip on his shoulder, becoming the embodiment of serenity. "Shh, Sammy. Relax. You're just going to stay calm. The slower your heart beats, the more time we have. We have plenty of brew and Baby is gassed up and waitin' on us. We're still okay, right?"
He breathed as deeply as he could. "Right," he parroted.
Dean packed up their stuff, making sure the brew was easily accessible and then stooped to retrieve his injured little brother. Dragging his good arm over his shoulders, they began the miles-long trek back to the Impala.
*Two Weeks Ago*
His tongue repeatedly skimmed the sore molar, registering the saltiness as it still oozed blood. Sam worried if he'd lose the tooth completely. The bloated, colorful cheek that made him look like some kind of deranged squirrel got him strange looks at restaurants and gas stations and it ached miserably but he didn't care.
Dean was back.
And Sam had work to do: 371 days of brotherly bonding to make up for. The Impala rumbled beneath them, clinging to the road despite the monsoon they'd driven into thirty miles back.
His happiness outshone everything. From spending two days wading in the fetid muck of the sewers to being pummeled mercilessly by one of feral demons he'd ever encountered to the pain of his missing his girlfriend.
The radio was fritzed to static. Frowning, Dean adjusted the dial, scanning for a new station. He finally found one, and the hand went back to the wheel. The song, however, took Sam's breath away. He automatically flipped it off.
"Hey! Driver picks the music."
"Don't get your panties in a knot, I know. Just not that song."
Dean snapped on the radio and cranked up the speakers. Sam gritted his teeth and reached to turn it off, only to have his hand slapped with a growl. They grappled a bit, the car rocking as Sam pinned down Dean's flailing arm and snapped the radio off with finality. Some warriors they were.
"What did Prince ever to do you? Sam, do you hear the doves crying?"
"I don't want to hear it," Sam said testily.
Dean pressed on. "What did you and your girl get busy for the first time to that song?"
"Dean, stop." He said warningly.
His brother was the picture of innocence, save for the newfound lethal glint in his eyes. "What? You say I don't care about what you did while I was in Hell's buttcrack, so this is me showing interest in your girl and your mutt."
Sam knew better than to take the bait no matter how much he wanted to. The Dean that returned from Purgatory was frustratingly inscrutable. His wavelength had changed, and Sam struggled to find the frequency. Yet Sam had studied him enough to recognize this color on Dean. His entire body screamed with a restless volatility, and if he couldn't fight physically, he'd verbally clobber anything in his radius. Thus Sam sat silently in his favorite place in the world, and tried not to remember.
He didn't want to shut Dean out, though, not after a year of desperately missing him. "Riot is an Australian Shepherd," Sam offered neutrally.
"Fancy. And your girl? What breed was she?"
Sam smiled wistfully, "A special kind."
"And yet you're here?"
He shrugged. "Where else would I be?"
"Off the top of my head—a farmer's market? A college campus? The dog park? It's obvious you hadn't even thought about hunting for the past year."
Sam sighed. It always circled back to this. "No, I hadn't. You, Bobby, Castiel were all gone, what was I supposed to do?"
"Keep on hunting. I managed to do it in freakin' Purgatory without a car or a crew and an armory full of weapons. Hell, we didn't even have toilet paper."
"You had to survive and I'm so grateful you did, but, man, so did I."
Dean's hands clenched against the steering wheel. "Get over yourself, Sam. All you've ever wanted was normal and boring, and you got it as soon as I was out of the picture. I don't think that makin' your very own Normal Rockwell counts as survival."
Anger flashed within as fierce as lightning, so Sam turned the tables. "How well did you deal after I died?"
"You weren't dead long enough for me to find out. Sorry for being a brother an actually giving a damn," Dean answered casually.
The remark landed like a physical blow, rocking Sam back into his seat. Dean compounded it by turning flicking on the radio. The strains of that wretched song filled the Impala.
Dean didn't have the market cornered on righteous anger or being traumatized from the past year. Sam lashed out, gripping the steering wheel to jerk the car to the side of the road. Dean yelped, instinctively braking. Gravel pinged along the Impala's under carriage. Sam didn't care. He flung himself out of the car and slamming the door.
The rain was deafening, and he was drenched by the time he walked around to the front of the car, leaning against Baby's hood to show Dean that he wasn't leaving, he just needed space.
The strains of the song echoed in his head, despite the thunderous crackle of the deluge. He hadn't heard it when he first made love to Amelia or when they broke into the vet's office to spring a recovering Riot and flee town. It was the first song that played through the Impala's speakers during its inaugural drive after weeks of expensive and costly repairs.
It was the soundtrack to the moment when the cocoon of denial that had sustained Sam through the Sucracorp explosion, Dean's disappearance and Bobby's vanquishing faded, when Sam realized Dean was dead and plummeted into a chasm of grief.
How can you just leave me standing?
Alone in a world that's so cold?
*Present*
With the temperature dropping, snow-filled clouds bundling away the sunlight, and Sam's ever-weakening stride, the trees slashed in neon were the only bright spots in the dense Wyoming woods. Jacket-less, Dean was shivering, his fingers curled and numb from the cold. After being a crutch for nearly 230 pounds, Dean's back and knees would never recover. But his misery had fell dramatically short of Sammy's. Wetness leeched through its shirt and Sam's knees gave way so suddenly, Dean couldn't stop them both from going down.
The once cushioning mud was now unforgiving and half-frozen. Dean's left knee took another brutal thump but he was able to keep Sam from toppling face first into a rock. He wasn't discouraged the limpness of Sam's body or horrified by the bleeding soaking his shirt, but reassured by Sam pushing himself up, instead of trying to lay down. Most of the light was gone now, rendering everything a pasty blue. Dean couldn't see the pallor of his brother's skin, but felt its clamminess. He didn't need the sunlight to see the dark blood soaking through his flannel. "You're bleedin' again." This was the third time Dean had to stop and change the bandages.
"Never stopped," he replied. "The venom. I know what it does now."
"Lemme guess, it gives you wings? We could really use a lift outta here."
"It's an anticoagulant," he said calmly, "keeps the blood from clotting."
Dean's blood chilled, and it had nothing to do with the wintry weather. It was why Sam had been stooping often on their trek to grab the brittle branches of plants. Sam listed to the side, slumping into the dirt, wracked with tremors from the cold and growing weaker. Dean had seen the determination in his eyes, but it was waning faster than the light.
Dean righted him again. "Let's get you patched up." He unbuttoned the jackets, tore through the shirt in his impatience. The shirts and pressure bandages were saturated, and the wounds belched blood when he removed them. They were puckered, and mysteriously dark at the edges. Even in the half-light, he could see the venom leeching into the skin in spiderwebs of black, taking root. Sam's skin was fiery under his frozen fingertips. Dean hid the terror. They'd been rationing the brew, but Dean didn't think they had the luxury anymore. He took the bottle, the wilted herbs swirled in the chalky liquid. "Finish this."
While Sam drank, Dean took the roots Sam had collected and found two large rocks. It took several tries before his frozen-stiff fingers could grip them, but once he did, he made a quick work of the roots, mashing them into a pasty mush.
"You should go," Sam said between pitiful sips. He was trying to keep it down, stay awake. "It'll be faster without me. Gimme my gun, and I can wait."
Dean narrowed his eyes as he smeared the poultice into the weeping holes in his brother's chest and shoulder. "I feel like we've had this conversation before. Back when the scariest things we dealt with was a weirdo demon virus and pissed off bees," he recounted. "I didn't bail then and I'm not bailin' now. You've survived way more than this. Frankly, I'm offended that you don't think your badass, ruggedly handsome big brother can't handle a few owies and an overgrown lizard."
Sam gripped Dean's arm with more strength than he should've had. When he gazed everywhere but his eyes, Sam dug his fingers into the skin, forcing his attention. Sam's eyes were fever-bright and glassy contrasting dry, colorless lips. "We both know what's happening here. I n-need you to get out of here. This thing we're doing, slamming the doors on demons forever, it's bigger than you and me. We have to finish...you have to finish it for Da-"
Dean choose that moment to apply the gauze pads and press down HARD. It had to be done, and it ended Sam's deathbed monologue, that was just an added bonus. "I'm surprised at you, Sammy. You'd think that someone who'd put down Lucifer, survived on months with his ghost kickin' around in your head, and kicked the demon blood habit and lived to tell about it wouldn't throw in the towel so fast."
Sam's eyes closed, his Adam's apple working against some kind of pain. "I left you in Purgatory. You could leave me here."
Impossibly, the gravity at the moment tugged on him even more. There wasn't a cell inside of Dean that wasn't programmed to fightfightfight, but the urge to pack it in, to settle against his brother and let the cold lull everything away was yet another monster he had to fight. "Sammy, no. Look, man, I've been angry, and I take it out on you because you're a freakishly large punching bag and I knew you could take it. I'm tryin' to reel it in, but that place was just...you have to turn into the things you kill just to live...and I'm working on it, but I don't mean it, okay?"
Sam's eyes lightened and he nodded, breaking their gaze before they both started crying icicles.
Dean buttoned up his sodden flannel as the clouds broken open and snow billowed down around them. "You ready to go?"
Sam nodded and tried to stand. "You can take the jacket for awhile. I'm too hot as it is."
Dean obliged only to stave off exposure. Sammy scanned the trees, face twisted, head panning. "Do you hear that?" he said.
He listened, but only heard the hiss of snow hitting winter-dried leaves. "No, what?"
Sam tipped his head back in awed fear, hair sweaty and studded with ice. "The trees, man, they're laughing."