Author's Note: I feel it's only right to warn you that this chapter is fairly graphic. As such, I may raise the rating of the story to "M," although I don't think it's any worse than some of things they've shown on the shown already. I'm wavering on whether or not to up the rating, so if you have an opinion, please let me know. Other than that, I just wanted to provide warning for anyone with a sensitive stomach. I'll also take this chance to thank everyone who writes such wonderful reviews. It's so awesome to read them all. Thank you!

Nine

After Dean stopped coughing and returned to breathing normally, Sam allowed him to rest on his back, while Sam examined what remained of Dean's leg. Using one of the large hunting knives, Sam sliced away the fabric around the wound to get a better look at what he was dealing with. "What did this?" he asked, holding back his urge to vomit at the sight of Dean's leg turned into raw meat.

"Big creature," Dean winced as beads of sweat popped out on his forehead and upper lip. His hands spasmodically clenched in the sand, trying to grab onto anything to ease the agony ricocheting through his body. Dean had always handled pain better than anyone Sam had ever known, and seeing Dean grimacing so badly, Sam felt a dark pit of hopelessness unfurl in his stomach.

"No shit," Sam remarked. "It chewed the hell out of your leg." After cutting away the rest of the fabric from just above the knee down on Dean, Sam gagged and felt the bitter taste of bile rise high in his throat. Both the tibia and fibula, the two bones in the lower leg, were crushed where the monster's teeth made contact with the leg, leaving larger, broken portions of the bone to protrude through the tangled flesh with serrated ends. The main muscles were shredded, and the skin was jagged and torn. What remained of the lower leg was connected to a crumpled kneecap by a flaying ligament and some awkward, out of place pieces of muscle. Even under the slightest pressure, blood ran quickly over Sam's hand with no thought of beginning to clog. With hands trembling so badly, he thought that he would cut off his own fingers, Sam hastily started tying off what appeared to be the main vessels using the scraps of fabric he had just cut off. From first aid moments with his father, he knew that he was supposed to apply direct pressure to the wound until the bleeding ceased, but he didn't know where to even begin to apply the pressure when his brother's whole leg was the wound.

"You remember the first time Dad tried to cook us meatloaf when we went camping?" he continued. He needed to keep Dean alert and talking, lest he lose consciousness and not return. Sam's voice quavered slightly against the acute panic growing in him.

Dean was losing too much blood too fast.

As Sam cinched off what appeared to be a large artery, Dean inhaled sharply with a twisted grimace in response to Sam's question. Uncontrollably, Dean rolled his head in the sand, arching his neck and upper back spasmodically. Although he wasn't screaming as a normal person would have been, there were tears forming at the corners of his pinched eyes.

It was the first time Sam had seen his brother cry from pure pain.

"Your leg looks like that, but worse," Sam said in response to his own comment.

Dean gave a short, strangled bark of laughter. "Worse?"

"If it's at all possible, yeah." Sam glanced back down at Dean's pitiful excuse for a leg. "I'm going to need you cut you out of this diving suit. I think it might be ruining the rest of your body's circulation. Looks like it's too small."

"Sam, dammit, I…the pain…" Dean panted, head rolling and arms thrashing. "Give me something…"

Having nothing to ease Dean's pain, Sam pulled the other knife free from Dean's pant leg and handed it to his brother, who put the end of the knife in his mouth to bite down on. When he opened his eyes for a fraction of a second, Sam saw that they were crazed and bloodshot, wild with agony and fear.

"Just hold still, or I'm going to end up cutting more than the suit," Sam warned, fighting to keep the tremble out of his voice. Carefully, he slipped the blood-smeared blade under the end of Dean's pants and made one harsh upward slash towards his head. The suit easily fell apart at the sides, allowing Dean to inhale deeply to stretch the limits of his worn T-shirt and causing color to flood into his cheeks with every breath he grabbed. After Sam finished cutting the suit off Dean, he looked back at the pieces of Dean's remaining leg.

If they had been in the real world, Sam would have already been to the hospital where the miracles of medicine could have eased Dean's pain and given him a prosthetic leg. But they weren't in the real world, and the closest person to a medical doctor was Sam himself, who gagged with every view of the dying nerves and tried to determine what to do about Dean's leg. Dean's skin was already cool to the touch from loss of blood, and Sam feared that he might be going into shock.

Dean's breathing was raspy, and he sucked air in thin little wheezes that rattled his chest, no longer having the strength for larger gulps of oxygen. "Sammy?" His eyelids were closed, eyes fluttering underneath the thin skin, and his skin was fading quickly.

Deciding not to object to the nickname for once, Sam answered, "Yeah?" He hadn't meant for his voice to crack.

"Next time one of us gets to die pain free…" Dean whispered. "I volunteer. Y…You can be the one to swim through Hell to get to…me."

Sam's eyes moved from Dean's graying face to his destroyed leg. The lower half, ruined beyond use, had a larger surface area that was losing more blood than Sam could apply pressure to. There were too many open blood vessels for him to stop the bleeding of. With nausea rising in his stomach, he looked from the hunting knife to the thin bridge of ligament and muscle between the mangled part of the leg to the upper, healthier part.

Regretting the fact that he had gone to school for law, Sam decided that if he cut off the lower half of the leg in a crude amputation there would be fewer vessels for him to staunch. He could apply direct pressure to the stump that would remain of Dean's leg until the bleeding stopped. From there, he figured, he would wrap the pieces of Dean's wetsuit around the leg.

However, Dean would be completely unable to walk on his own, Sam argued. Then again, he wasn't doing any walking as it was, and Dean was already growing dangerously cold and pale from the blood loss. There was no right answer, and Sam knew that whatever he chose, it would not be the right decision.

Lifting the knife, Sam pressed the sharp blade down against the frayed ligament, biting his lower lip. "Dean, hang on, okay? This is going to hurt." If Dean heard him, he gave no response and instead shuddered from an unknown chill. Whispering a silent apology, Sam struggled not to vomit and positioned the knife.

"Stop."

The knife wavered, a scraping pendulum above a pit.

"I will break the rules for him."

Sam turned, pivoting awkwardly in his crouched position, and looked to see who was addressing him.

The gatekeeper, his hood removed, stood behind Sam and stared down at the wounded Dean. It was the first time Sam had seen the man's face, and he was relieved that the man did not look like the god who had first taken them away from the real world. Instead of the finely cut black hair and goatee as the god of the underworld wore, the gatekeeper had long gray hair that fell down his shoulders and crumpled around the contours of his hood. He had a pointed beard and fierce, questioning eyes.

"What rules?" Sam asked, caught between rising to his feet to fully face the gatekeeper and remaining low and beside Dean's unconscious form. "What do you mean?"

The man glanced over at Sam, as if realizing for the first time of his existence. "The rules were broken for you to exist. I will break the rules for him to exist," he said, motioning to Dean, whose eyes were crinkled in pain and was sipping shallow breaths from the cool air.

"I don't understand. Why are you doing this?"

"You came as a living here. This was not supposed to be. Rules of all were broken for a trade of sacrifice. Your brother will die in a world where he does not belong. And now I will break rules of the ages to save his life as the one in power broke the rules to save your mother's life."

Before Sam could question further, the gatekeeper raised his hand over Dean's limp body. The man focused on Dean's leg, concentrating heavily, and suddenly, Dean's body leapt off the sand with a jolt. When his form was still again, his leg was whole and clean. Where Sam had cut the blue jeans, the material was still ragged and bloody, but the skin itself, while scarred and bruised, was mended into one smooth sheet around the muscle and bone. Dean's wound looked to be years old, and Sam's head spun.

As the man turned to leave, bowing his head, Sam clumsily leapt to his feet, stumbling slightly in his haste to rise.

"Wait!" he cried. "How can I get out of here? Help me now, please."

The man turned, acknowledging Sam's request. He lifted his eyes to meet Sam's, and in that brief moment of eye contact, Sam saw what he was supposed to do.

"No!" Disgust overlaid by terror flooded into his body, and Sam shook his head furiously, breaking eye contact and the future he would have to commit. "No, I can't."

The gatekeeper's expression did not change as he spoke, "Break his rules, and only then will you live." Following his words, the man disappeared from his location near by the boys and reappeared closer to the shore, where he pulled the dead souls from the water. Sam remained staring, head spinning and stomach turning, until he heard Dean coughing below him.

Crouching down next to Dean, Sam offered a supporting hand, which Dean angrily shoved away. He coughed red tinged phlegm onto the sand for a moment before he was able to regain control of his shaking body. After pushing himself to a sitting position, he looked to his younger brother.

"Sam?"

Dean's eyebrows furrowed into a knot on his forehead in confusion, and he ran his hand over the hairless skin on his leg, etched in deep scars from the monster's teeth. He was still sitting on the bloody diving suit, and the sand surrounding his leg remained wet with his blood. "Didn't I—What just happened?"

"You were missing a leg."

"Right." Dean scratched his damp hair. "What's going on?"

"Long story," Sam replied with a sigh, deciding it best not to go into details right then.

"Where's all the scuba stuff?"

"Must have been lost when you came in. Nothing came with you besides the suit and half a flipper."

"Everything's gone? Even the oxygen tank?" Dean asked incredulously, eyes widening.

"Yeah, everything."

Dean groaned impatiently and with a slight tint of irritation. "Besides the fact I'm totally gearless, I'm also hairless, now? Dammit. I look like a chick with a bad wax job."

Sam, rolling his eyes with a sigh, stood to his feet. "Can you walk?"

"I think so," Dean said, pushing himself up with a slight wobble. It took a moment to obtain his balance, as if he had been drinking too much and stood too fast. "Whoa, I'm getting these out of here, too. Hurting my back," he muttered. Out of the back of his pants, he produced two guns, one of which he handed to Sam. "You get the rock salt one. I've got silver bullets. I don't know which one will work the best, so I packed what I could." Then he noticed the bloody knife in Sam's hand. "I see you've found the knives. And I've been…biting on the other one?" Without waiting for Sam to reply, Dean looked around at his new setting and whistled lowly. "So this is the underworld? Damn."

"This is just the place where the newly dead souls arrive," Sam explained. "So far as I can tell, anyway. There's more than just this."

"We've faced some weird ass places, but I think this one comes out on top."

"Yeah, well, considering we've never actually been able to count as technically dead…" Sam said and began to move towards the set of steps leading up to the red desert environment. As he walked away, Dean gave one final glance to the lake that had nearly destroyed him and hurried to catch his younger brother.

"Hey, wait up," he called. Sam stopped to face Dean. Behind them a new group of souls approached, mangled from what appeared to be a car accident of drunk drivers. Before Dean could continue talking, one of the souls approached him and rested his hand on Dean's shoulder.

"Have you seen my girl?" the young teenager asked. Half of his face was missing, scraped away against asphalt, and when he talked, a trickle of blood dribbled over his torn lower lip.

"Talk to that man over there," Sam replied, seeing Dean's eyes grow large. After the confused teenager had moved away, Sam turned to Dean and attempted to be nonchalant. "You were saying?"

Dean shook his head, trying to clear it. "Whoa. That's what you're dealing with down…up…wherever here?"

"Yeah, did you see how confused he was?"

"Yeah."

"Everybody here is like that. They just…they don't quite understand what's happened to them. Dean, you and I know that we could be dead."

"That's what I want to talk to you about."

"What?" Sam asked, confused.

"Hold out your hand, palm up."

"Dean, what are you doing?"

Before Dean could answer, he grabbed Sam's wrist in one hand and pressed the tip of his hunting knife to one of Sam's fingers. Although he did not apply a great deal of pressure, the blade was fatally sharp and a bright drop of blood appeared on Sam's calloused skin. More surprised than hurt, Sam yanked his hand away from Dean's grasp.

"What was that for?" he asked angrily, wiping his blood away on his pants.

"You're not dead," Dean grinned as if this was a great achievement.

"Of course I am. I didn't drown like you nearly did when I was pulled out of the water before. I don't need oxygen like you. I'm dead, Dean."

"You're just as much alive as I am. Somebody's been messing with your head to make you think you're dead with no hope of leaving." Seeing that Sam wasn't completely convinced, Dean continued, "Ghosts don't bleed, do they? Tell me, when have we ever encountered a ghost that doesn't only have warm skin like you, but blood and a pulse? Tell me, and I'll knock it off."

Reluctantly, Sam was forced to answer in a mutter, "We haven't."

"Exactly. You're not dead at all. You're alive, too. So, now that means that yes, you can be killed, but even better than that? You can go home just like me." Dean smirked, happier than a man who had just had his leg eaten by an unnamed underwater terror should have been. "And, we're walking out of this damn place…together."

Before Sam could point out that Dean had just entered the dreaded, emotional territory he so often avoided with a passion, his older brother punched him the shoulder and pushed past him to bound up the stairs, cut jeans and all.