Disclaimer: Supernatural and the characters of Sam and Dean are not mine.
Many heartfelt thanks to art3mis, SilverKitsune1, Crystal Music, PadfootObsessed329, sasha2002, barkeep, Harrigan, Mellaithwen, Sara Wolfe, Libramentum, sugarquill4ron, carocali, fuzzylemon, MistyEyes, Kaewi, bally2cute and PissedOffEskimo for being kind enough to take the time to review. You guys rule.
Crystal Music: thanks for the concrit! The qualifiers are in there deliberately, in an attempt to give some sense of a colloquial, stream-of-consciousness style, but I definitely appreciate you letting me know what you think and will consider what you said for the purpose of future stories ;).
art3mis: It's not the first time someone has mentioned that episode of SG-1 to me in relation to this story. I adore SG-1 and have seen the ep loads of times, but it didn't even cross my mind when thinking of a title for this. I guess the SG-1 writers and myself just both had the same idea that the quotation "There but for the grace of God go I" was a good source for titles of AU stories ;).
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"Sometimes I think maybe I'm already back there," Sam added quietly, as if he wasn't really talking to Dean. "Maybe I'm in that freakin hospital and the visions are just the only glimpses of reality I'm getting."
Dean took a deep breath, clenching his fists. "Listen to me, Sam. You were never crazy, you understand? Doesn't matter what they said to you, what you saw was real. I'm real. Dad didn't freakin kill himself, and Jess sure as hell didn't die because of faulty wiring. What are you going to believe, a bunch of quacks who can't tell their ass from a hole in the ground, or your own senses?"
Sam laughed. "Dean. I'm sitting in a vault with some of the most amazing artwork ever produced, planning to steal an ancient artifact so I can use it in a magic spell, with a man who says he's my long-dead brother who I never knew I had, having visions of an alternate me in another dimension. Oh, also, apparently everyone I ever loved has been killed by the same demon, and I have psychic powers. You really think that's believable?"
Dean was speechless. When you put it like that, it did sound kind of... nuts.
There wasn't time to think any more about it, though, because at that moment the door started to open.
But for the Grace, Chapter Nine
Dean was on his feet in a moment, dragging Sam up into a standing position and putting himself between his brother and the door. He put his hand on his gun where it was tucked in the back of his pants, but didn't pull it: maybe they would be able to talk their way out of this. (Also, pigs might fly. You never know.)
The sky was just beginning to lighten, and in the grey light the man who stepped through the door looked like a spook or something, except the way he moved Dean knew he was human. Pity – if it had been a ghost, Dean could have just hauled out the canister of salt he always kept in his pocket (because perfectly ordinary robbery or no, there was no sense in not taking precautions) and got rid of it long enough for he and Sam to get through the damn door. He could have tried that with this guy, of course, but tossing condiments around was pretty much not a great policy with flesh-and-blood people. Anyway, the guy spotted them almost immediately, and took a step back, holding up his hands.
"Who are you?" he asked, and Dean did his level best to think of a cover story, but really, what the hell was he going to say? We were out hiking and we got lost in your vault. Yeah, sorry about that, won't happen again.
"We're from the security company."
Dean turned and stared. Sam had stepped out from behind him and was looking – well, trustworthy, despite the mud smeared on his face and the black clothing, and the shaking that the pre-dawn light could only do so much to hide.
"They hired us to see how secure your house was. We're sorry, we thought you were out of town."
The man's mouth opened and closed a couple of times, and he was starting to look less shadowy now as the light grew, more like he was just lean and stately in that kind of rich white guy way, and less like he was, well, dead. "How secure is it?" he asked, and Dean could tell he was just trying to think of something to say to cover his surprise.
Sam shrugged self-deprecatingly and gave a half-smile. "Well, I have to admit the perimeter defences left something to be desired, but this room, well," he gave an impressed-sounding laugh, and Dean tried to remember if his Sam was this good a liar, "as you can see, it had us pretty stumped. Getting in was fine, but getting out..."
The man shook his head. "Can I see some ID?"
Sam stepped forward, smiling still, looking so goddamn reassuring that Dean almost believed him himself. "Sure, but I'm afraid it's in our bags. We left them downstairs. Hey, I know it looks bad, you can call the company if you want, check us out."
They had him. They totally had him.
Except that they didn't have him at all. Because just as the man turned and looked like he was about to lead them out of the room, just as Sam stepped up to follow him, shooting a glance at Dean that Dean hoped meant cosh him as soon as we get out, because that was sure as hell what Dean was planning to do, the man turned back, and grinned, and that definitely didn't look like a rich white guy grin, not at all.
"Well, if it isn't Sammy Winchester," he said, and his voice had a new tone to it now, deeper, mocking. "Fancy meeting you here."
Sam froze, staring, and to be honest Dean was pretty much floored as well, which was a problem because it meant that the man had time to swing his fist with enough force to lift Sam off his feet and fling him across the room before Dean had even managed to pull his gun. And then there was the fact that a skinny guy who was at least six inches shorter than Sam and looked like the most working out he ever did was lifting the phone to order room service had just managed to send his brother bodily across the floor with one punch. Dean might not have been the greatest judge of character, but he was pretty sure that was not normal. Ordinary robbery my ass.
"Hey," he growled, pointing the gun now and employing his best Mr. Blond expression, the one that rarely failed to get him what he wanted. "Keep those hands where I can see them."
The guy turned to look at Dean, as if he hadn't even noticed he was there before. He smiled, but it was not the sort of smile Dean would want to run into on a dark night. Or a grey morning, for that matter.
"And who might you be?" the guy asked, sounding like he was honestly interested. Behind him, Dean heard the sounds of Sam picking himself up.
"Never mind who I am. Get away from the door. Now."
The man's eyes narrowed, and he took a step closer to Dean, not even seeming to care when the sound of the safety coming off echoed through the dusty air. "Interesting," he said staring at Dean intently. "You're not supposed to be here."
"Well, duh," said Dean, not sure what it was about this guy that made him so nervous. Well, apart from the super strength thing, of course. That was enough to make Clint freakin Eastwood a little antsy. "But we'll be leaving now and we won't bother you again. Away from the door." He gestured with the gun, in case the guy was in some way misunderstanding him.
The man stared at him for a moment longer, with that appraising look on his face, like Dean was something weird his cat had dragged in (oh yeah, look at this guy, he definitely had a cat. Probably a white one that he stroked while telling Bond his evil plan. There had been no shark pool marked on the plans for the mansion, but Dean figured that was the sort of thing you didn't bother to mention on planning applications). Then he shrugged. "Not as interesting as I thought," he said, and took a step towards Dean.
Dean pulled the trigger.
The guy stumbled as the bullet ripped into his leg, then for a moment his eyes went totally black, whites and corneas both, like someone had painted them over. Shit. Dean knew what that meant, and freaky contacts wasn't the half of it.
"Sam, get out of here," he said, backing up, knowing it was useless because the guy was between them and the door and Sam was too far away to outflank him. Still, Sam started moving on his command, but the guy moved faster, was too quick, grabbing Sam and flinging him across the room again, where he crashed against a display case and collapsed among the shards of glass. Dean fumbled in his pockets, still backing away, hoping to God he'd remembered to shove the flask of holy water in there along with the salt (always be prepared, right? Dean was a regular boy scout). For once, the big guy seemed to be on Dean's side, and his fingers closed around the flask just as his back hit the wall.
"Why don't you tell me just what you and Sammy are doing here?" the guy – the demon – crooned, still advancing. "I wasn't expecting to see him quite so soon."
Dean growled. "You ain't gonna be seeing much of anything when I'm through with you." And he turned sharply and shot at a case in the corner of the room, shattering it. The demon's head turned, and that was all Dean needed to get the flask open and fling a spray of holy water in the thing's face.
The demon hissed and stumbled back, clawing at his skin, steam rising, but Dean didn't have time to stop and watch the goddamn floor show. He spun and raced to where Sam was lying, hoping against hope that the little geek was awake and able to walk, because there was no way in hell Dean was getting out of here with six-foot-four of unconscious Sammy over his shoulder and nothing but half a flask of holy water for protection.
Shit. Sam was out cold, sprawled among the broken glass like a gigantic rag doll. Dean reached in his pocket again to grab the salt and started pouring it in a circle around them both, but he knew there was no way he could get finished before the demon recovered, and he was right, feeling a hand grab his collar and jerk him backwards before he was even halfway done, the canister of salt flying out of his grip and catching Sam square between the eyes, which would have been funny if he'd been conscious. And if they hadn't been being attacked by a freakin demon. Yeah, that too.
Dean felt himself flying through the air, and he struck the back wall with so much force that he was pretty sure he felt a couple of ribs break. Damn, but this sucker was strong. He reached for the holy water again, but the demon was across the room in an instant, grabbing him by the throat and lifting him off the ground, holding him so that his toes just barely brushed the floor, and squeezing. Shit, turned out in this bizarro reality it was Dean that got choked. That utterly sucked.
"Tell me what you're doing here," the demon hissed, and it didn't look like it was playing around any more. It looked pretty pissed. Well, Dean was not about to care about hurting its feelings.
"Well, you know," he said, his voice coming out slightly strangled. "I'm a connoisseur of fine art. I understand you have an original Constable--" his voice gave out on him as the demon squeezed harder, and black spots began to appear at the edges of his vision. Damn, I always thought that was just a figure of speech.
"You're wrong," the demon said. "You're not supposed to be here. Who are you?"
Dean tried for a grin, but he was pretty sure it looked more like a rictus. "Name's Bond. James Bond."
And then, just when he thought that this was it, he was really going to choke to death—and that was fucking ridiculous because that was supposed to be Sam's girly pathetic thing, Dean was supposed to die in a hail of bullets in an ambush in Bolivia, or at the very least get savaged to death by a giant hellbeast, not get fucking strangled by a guy who looked like he had a special manservant to fold his underwear, not get fucking strangled at all, not least because he'd seen Sam choking often enough to know that the whole red-face-bulging-eyes thing was not a good look—the demon's hand suddenly relaxed, and he turned sharply and snarled, "What are you doing?"
Dean was just about to point out that what he was doing was being choked, when he became aware of a low murmuring. His feet hit the floor again, though the demon didn't let go completely, and he peered around its body to see that Sam was awake and reading something from a book. Shit, it was the book Sam had borrowed (stolen) from Jim.
"What, you think you can hurt me with your pathetic mumbling?" the demon asked, still not letting go of Dean's throat, but paying no attention to him now. "I could kill you without breaking a sweat."
Sam looked up, still speaking, and Dean recognised the words of the rituale Romanum at the same time as he realised that the circle of salt around Sam was now complete. He felt like giving a freakin victory yell or something, because goddamn, how the hell did Sam know about the salt? (And why the hell hadn't Dean told him, why had he just made some stupid joke like it wasn't important?) Victory yells were pretty much out of the question, though, because Dean's throat was sore as a porn star's ass, and in any case, they weren't out of the woods yet, not by a long chalk.
The demon laughed, and goddamn that was not pleasant. "You've been doing your homework, Sammy," it said, and Dean cast his eyes around desperately for a way to get out of its grip, cursing the fact that he'd dropped the holy water in the scuffle. "Only took you twenty-two years and your entire family going up in smoke to work out what was going on. Honestly, they tell me you're supposed to be bright. I suppose daddy must have damaged that brain of yours with all his tough love."
Sam froze, staring at the demon. Dean tried to catch his eye. Just finish the ritual, Sam. Don't listen to the damn thing.
The demon smirked. "Of course, it wasn't really love, you know that. He didn't love you. Why do you think he used to do those things to you? He wished you'd died in the fire instead of your mother. Instead of your brother."
Sam's mouth was hanging open slightly now, and Dean knew how he felt. OK, so this demon knew about the fire, even knew about Dean's alter-ego, something which no-one ought to know. Was this the demon? The one they'd been searching for all this time? Because if it was, Dean thought it pretty much had the worst timing ever.
"Get on with it, Sam," he growled, ignoring the burn in his throat, and the demon whipped its head around and stared, its eyes boring into him as its grip tightened again.
"He won't listen to you. You're nothing to him. You're..." It stopped talking, and Dean struggled, trying to loosen its grip, but it was like goddamn iron. "You're a Winchester too," it said suddenly, and Dean felt his stomach lurch, because he was pretty sure that the more this thing knew about them, the more danger they were in. "There aren't supposed to be any more," the thing said, lifting Dean off the ground again, and Dean wondered if maybe this was the longest time anyone had ever been choked without dying. "Who are you?"
Behind it, Sam had started chanting again. Dean fought for breath. "Would you believe me if I said I was selling girl scout cookies?"
The demon flung a glance at Sam. "You keep going, this one dies before he hits the ground," it snarled, and it smacked Dean's head hard enough against the wall that he actually saw stars, which at least had the upside of being kinda pretty. Sam hestitated, the hands holding the book shaking violently.
"Well now, that's not very neighbourly," Dean said, or at least he thought he said it, but it was hard to tell, hard to hear his own voice through the buzzing that had started to fill his head. He couldn't really hear if Sam was chanting or not, and he definitely couldn't see anything past the goddamn demon's stupid face, which was pretty much filling up all of his field of vision that wasn't occupied by dark spots that were now rapidly giving way to shiny colours, and actually, this wasn't so bad, apart from the panicked thoughts that were running through his mind, but even they were only a vague annoyance, distant and pretty much irrelevant. He started to feel warmth flooding through his limbs, and that was pretty nice, though there was still the irritation of his aching ribs and throat, but that was fading all the time, and he was pretty sure that in a minute or two it would be gone altogether. Yeah, that was something to look forward to, anyway.
And then suddenly things came sharply back into focus, and Dean felt first his feet hit the ground, then his entire body, which should have hurt but right now he was concentrating on the fact that his lungs were on fire, his ears were roaring like crazy, and his throat felt like he'd taken up sword-swallowing and really wasn't getting it right.
Also, there was a skinny rich guy vomiting a cloud of darkness at the ceiling, but that was never the sort of thing that Dean let bother him.
Hands were pawing at him, pulling him to sit up, and he blinked as his vision swam again and he saw Sam's worried face, those goddamn eyes of his doing that concerned puppy thing that always made Dean want to smack him (mainly because actually it made him want to hug him, and Dean was not about to give in to that sort of emotional blackmail, half-choked to death or not). He could tell Sam was saying something because his lips were moving, but he was still pretty much stuck with the roaring noise that he couldn't quite place the source of. Then Sam glanced over his shoulder and said something that Dean didn't need to hear to understand, because really, fuck is one of those words that pretty much anyone in the English-speaking world should be able to lip-read, and ducked out of Dean's line of vision again.
Dean was pretty sure that he ought to be doing something, but he couldn't think what the hell it was, and to be totally honest, he couldn't give a fuck right now. His ribs were burning like crazy, and the only reason he even thought about them at all was because the fact that he could actually feel them probably meant he wasn't dead, because really, right now he had bigger things to worry about, like the fact that every breath he dragged in felt like it was coated in ground glass. Son of a bitch. Being choked was fucking lame.
He didn't know how long it took him to get himself together, but he figured it wasn't so long, because Sam still hadn't reappeared. Once he noticed the ribs, he started to become aware of various other aches and pains – chief among them a thumping headache right behind his eyes, and wasn't that a bitch – and the more of them he noticed, the more he felt himself beginning to connect to the world around him again, the roaring in his ears dying down until he could hear something else, a sort of muttering, like someone had let a crazy hobo in or something, and for just a moment Dean was still fucked up enough to glance round to check out where the hobo was and whether he was maybe possessed too, before he realised it was coming from Sam. Sam who was sitting in a spreading pool of blood.
Shit. Dean hauled himself to his feet and staggered the two steps to his brother, almost blacking out as his ribs ground against each other. "Sam," he gasped, and talking felt so much worse than breathing, so much freakin worse. And Sam looked up at him, his face bloodless and terrified, and Dean thought suddenly that somehow Sam was dying.
A second later he realised that that was definitely not what was going on. Because if anything could explain the pool of blood, Dean was pretty sure it was the skinny rich guy lying on the floor with a freakin hole in the side of his head.
"I killed him, Dean," Sam said, and he didn't sound scared, just kind of blank. "I didn't know it would kill him."
Dean dropped to his haunches next to the body, wincing again at the pain in his ribs. "That's a bullet hole," he said, then coughed, and that was possibly the worst freakin idea he'd ever had. Jesus goddamn fucking ow.
Sam was staring at him. "So?"
"You shoot him?" Dean asked, wishing his voice didn't sound so fucking broken.
Sam shook his head slowly.
"Then you didn't kill him."
Sam seemed to be settling in to think about this for a while, but there was no time for that. They had to get the hell out of here, before someone called the cops – if they hadn't already. Dean had no fucking idea what was going on with the dead guy who had been possessed one minute and then dead of a gunshot wound the next without a single shot being fired, but it wasn't the weirdest thing he had seen in his life by a seriously long chalk, and right now he really didn't give a shit about anything except getting his brother and himself and the Freakin Bastard Cell-Phone Holder of Goddamn Doom the hell out of there. He grabbed Sam's arm and hauled, hissing because his goddamn ribs really weren't shutting up any time soon, and Sam stumbled to his feet and seemed to come back to reality, grabbing hold of Dean's shoulder.
"Shit," he said. "You OK, Dean? You hurt?"
"Just a scratch," Dean said, trying for a grin, but his voice sounded like shit and he had to grit his teeth, and that was plenty enough reason for Sam to go all mother hen, even this Sam.
"Fuck," he said, and put his arm round Dean's back, and together they started towards the door, Dean just for a moment thinking about going back for the holy water flask, but figuring there wasn't much point because his fingerprints were pretty damn unlikely to be on any police database, at least in this reality. Ha. Dean Winchester had had a clean slate for all of a week before managing to find himself at the scene of what looked to all intents and purposes like a murder. Yeah, he was pretty goddamn hardcore.
The path back through the mansion was about a million times longer than it had been on the way there. Jesus, the place was so freakin big, you could've parked a goddamn fleet of space shuttles in it and still had room to spare. Who the hell needed so much space? Except for apparently a skinny guy with a bad case of possession. Maybe the demon was claustrophobic. Anyway, the trip wasn't being helped any by the fact that Dean was having trouble thinking straight enough to remember the route back, and now that the adrenaline rush had worn off, Sam was beginning to shake again. There seemed to be no sign of any other inhabitants in the house, though, which was pretty lucky, if you considered running into an honest-to-Beelzebub demon when you were just trying to innocently take off with a priceless art treasure lucky.
They made it out the front door and stumbled into the burgeoning sunlight. Dean had figured there was no way they were making it back over the fence, so their only hope was to find the controls for the front gate and crack them or disable them, which was easier said than done since it was hard enough putting one foot in front of the other, let alone doing the whole MacGyver bit. They were lucky again, though (and Dean was beginning to think it was seriously just a big cosmic joke that all their luck would come now when they really could have used it a few hours ago, Jesus, someone up there had a lame sense of humour) because it turned out the controls were pretty easy to operate from the inside. Seemed like no-one was worried about anyone breaking out of here. Not like the goddamn vault.
And then they were staggering along the road towards where they'd left the Impala, and it was pretty much a nightmare, because it was a remote road but they were walking along it in daylight, which had not been part of the plan at all, and they looked like utter crap, not to mention their bloodstained clothes, which meant that if anyone came along they were going to be interested and they were going to remember, and Dean did not exactly want his face (or worse, Sam's) to be part of a Kodak moment less than a mile away from a dead rich guy. So, Sam, what's your ambition in life? Well, I always wanted to drop out of college and spend the best years of my life in jail, actually. Lucky I have a big brother to take care of that for me.
Keeping to the trees seemed like the best option, even though it made the going slower, but after what seemed like for-fucking-ever but couldn't have been more than a mile, Sam suddenly let go of Dean and fell back against a trunk, his eyes staring, and Dean stumbled and caught himself and then allowed himself to slide to the ground.
"Jesus," said Sam. "Jesus, Dean."
Dean lay back on the grass and stared up at the sky through the leaves. It was bright blue, and the sunlight dappled his face, and the whole thing was ridiculously goddamn cheerful considering the mess they were in. "We just gotta keep going," he rasped. "It's only another mile."
Sam sank down to sit next to him. "I can't," he whispered. "I can't."
Dean closed his eyes. "No," he muttered, "I can't either."
"Let's just rest... just for a minute," Sam said. He put his head in his hands. "What was that thing?"
Dean turned his head to look at Sam, and observed that he was shaking pretty bad now. The beer was in the trunk of the Impala. They needed to get there, but all sense of urgency seemed distant and somehow not really relevant. "You're the one who knew how to exorcise it," he said.
Sam gave a shaky laugh. "So it was a demon. I didn't... I wasn't sure." He looked up at Dean from under his bangs, his eyes unfocussed. "You're sure I didn't kill him?"
Dean blinked and nodded slowly. "Wasn't you."
"Fuck," Sam said. "The things it said..."
Dean tried to make his lips form the words demons lie, but the little bitches wouldn't do it. He felt himself drifting away, and he thought probably he should fight it, but he couldn't quite remember why. He was always having to remember stuff, to do stuff like... like something... there was something he was supposed to do...
Then he was coming back to awareness with a snap as somebody shook him. "Dean! Don't you fucking pass out on me!"
Dean blinked a couple of times. "Son of a bitch, Sam," he croaked. "Give a guy a break over here, would ya?"
"God, you need to get to a h... to a hospital," Sam said. "Shit. Shit. I'll... I'll call an ambulance." He pulled out his cell, but his hands were shaking so hard that he dropped it in the grass. "Fuck," he said, and then suddenly he looked straight at Dean, and the expression on his face made Dean feel about as cold as that time that Reverend Lansdale had walked in on him and the reverend's sixteen-year-old daughter. "Fuck, Dean," Sam said, and that was all the warning Dean got before Sam went stiff and started to convulse.
That was pretty much when Dean remembered what it was he was supposed to be doing. And doing a damn fine job of it he was too. "Shit, Sammy," he groaned, managing to get to his knees and trying to move Sam so that he wasn't going to hit any of the trees. Not this shit again.
Sam's jerking stopped almost as soon as it started, which was just another item on the list of things that were lucky while also being utterly fucked-up. "You OK?" Dean asked.
Sam blinked a couple of times, and Dean saw that most of the terror had gone from his face, to be replaced by a hard expression that was unpleasantly familiar. He choked out a laugh. "Something worth dying for, right Dean?"
"Hey!" Dean said. "Nobody's dying here, you got me?" But honestly, the sentiment was pretty fucking weak, given that Sam looked about as good as Dean felt, and Dean felt like freakin death warmed over, and not the romantic kind of death either, the shitty kind where you got knifed for twenty bucks in a back alley and ended up face down in the mud.
Seemed like Sam pretty much felt the same way. "Whatever," he said. "You know, I..." He broke off, and Dean saw that look again.
"Fuck, Sam, don't you do that again," he said, but it was too late, because Sam's muscles were already spasming, and it was worse this time, way worse, Sam's eyes rolling crazily in his head, and going on for too long, too long. Dean could feel reality begin to rush away like it had back at Jim's, only worse because his head was pounding and he hadn't slept for two days and his ribs fucking hurt, everything hurt, but that didn't matter, because Sam was going to die, and what the hell was he going to do about it?
He looked up desperately, looked to try and see if he could see the Impala, even though he knew it was a mile away if not more, or then maybe there would be someone driving past, he could flag them down (stumbling out of the trees with bloodstained clothes on a remote road was pretty much guaranteed to get drivers to stop for you, right?), but there was no-one, nothing but the birds fucking tweeting in the goddamn trees like this was some freakin Disney movie or something, and Sam was still seizing.
He turned back to his brother, but he caught the glimpse of something in the grass. Sam's cell. Thank fucking God 911 was an easy number, because Dean's hands weren't very much steadier than Sam's. He heard the operator speaking to him in a quiet voice, reassuring him that the ambulance was on the way, that he should stay on the line, even though he didn't remember telling her where they were or actually even speaking at all. It didn't matter really, though, because his hands made the decision for him, dropping the phone on the ground as Sam finally (finally) went still, which Dean was insanely grateful for for about two seconds before he realised that Sam was too still, his body not even trembling now, and he hauled himself forward, ignoring the blackening of the edges of his vision, just to make sure, just to make sure that Sam was still breathing.
Except Sam wasn't. And wasn't that just a kick in the head?
Dean's brain was broken. He looked down at his brother lying stretched out in a clearing in the middle of fucking nowhere, somewhere near Spokane for God's sake, limbs still twisted grotesquely, hair sticking to his forehead with sweat and mud and blood, and not breathing, not breathing, and he knew that he was fucked, because his brain just wasn't working.
Turned out, though, he didn't actually need his brain too much (which Sam would totally have a field day with if he knew), because his body remembered, his body knew what he was supposed to do, tilt the head back, open the airway, hold the nose shut and breath in, hands over the chest, one, two, three.
Dean watched his hands and remembered practicing this on Sam in a back field somewhere in Iowa, their dad watching, giving instructions, Sam complaining that he was hurting his chest, you're doing it too hard, Dean, it's only supposed to be pretend, his face still childlike even though that was the summer that he had started to go from playing with toys to slamming doors and hiding his feelings, looking up at Dean from underneath his lashes with that pissed-off expression of his that always made Dean feel like he was a six-year-old being scolded for stealing candy.
Give me that look now, Sam. I can take it.
But Sam ignored him, just like always, and his face remained blank and empty of anything, his mouth slack as Dean bent over to breathe into it again, his body shifting slightly when Dean pumped his chest, but not in a kind of hey I'm alive way, more like a fish flopping on a market stall, and OK, hey, not carrying on that line of thought any longer.
Hands on the chest. One, two, three.
Dean was vaguely aware that his ribs were sending sharp pains through him every time he leaned over to breathe into Sam's mouth, but as far as he was concerned, they could fuck right the hell off. Ribs were important, but he was pretty sure breathing was more important. In fact, he could remember that when the demon had been choking him the whole broken ribs thing hadn't figured very high at all on his list of priorities, and right now they were about as urgent as renewing his subscription to Hustler (which was pretty pointless, since they were pretty unlikely to be able to send it out to him in another dimension, right?). He was also aware that he didn't know how much time had passed since Sam had stopped breathing, but he still wasn't doing it, and he remembered Dad's voice, lecturing, in that Dean-listen-this-is-important tone – it doesn't revive them, it just keeps the blood pumping until they can get medical help.
Where the fuck was the medical help?
And then, of course, they weren't on the road, they were in the trees, the ambulance wouldn't be able to see them, because they were hiding, they were freakin hiding, and Dean panicked and ripped off his boot with one hand, continuing to pump Sam's chest with the other one, two, three and flinging the boot out onto the road, which was utterly freakin lame but what the fuck was he supposed to do?
He didn't realise that time was moving in jolts again until he felt hands on his shoulders pulling him away from Sam, even though he'd never heard the sirens. He tried to fight, but his ribs screamed at him, and then he saw that someone else had taken over the CPR and worked out what was going on.
"Sir, can you tell me what happened?" someone asked him, shining a light in his eyes.
A demon kicked our asses. Which I guess was fair enough, since we were trying to burgle his house and shit.
"Uh," he grunted, trying to see past the light, see what was happening to Sam. "Got in a fight. Sam's... Sam's got..." he tried desperately to remember the stupid name, he'd read it off the leaflet enough times "delirium... something."
"Delirium tremens?" the voice asked, and Dean nodded. He heard the voice shouting something, and then the light went away, and he saw a woman leaning over Sam, holding his mouth open with some kind of... some kind of stupid doctor thing or whatever, Dean was fucked if he could work out what it looked like, and she was peering into Sam's mouth, and Sam, God, Sam looked dead, with his head tilted back and this woman poking around in his mouth like he was just a thing, not a person at all (and maybe, said a voice at the back of Dean's head, maybe he was by now, just a thing, nothing in there, no more Sam). Dean had the weird thought that it ought to be dark, it was always dark when these things happened, right? He'd been mauled more than once in his life, and it was always freakin dark, but the sun was shining down like it was the fourth of freakin July, making patterns on Sam's still face, and that just wasn't right.
Then the woman was holding a tube, pushing it into Sam's mouth, and Dean at once clenched his fists in irrational rage and felt a horrible relief because if they were doing that then Sam must not be dead yet. He felt a stabbing pain in his side, and turned to see a guy pressing on his skin.
"Hey, watch what you're freakin doing," he said, and the man looked up and said does that hurt?
"Yeah it freakin hurts, my ribs are broken, genius," Dean said, wishing his voice didn't still sound like someone had rubbed his throat with sandpaper (and also that his throat didn't still feel like it had been rubbed with sandpaper, because it hurt like a bitch). He was pretty sure he was going to pass out soon, but he stood as they lifted Sam up on a stretcher and carried him towards the ambulance, the woman now squeezing a plastic pouch attached to the tube that was down Sam's throat.
"I'm going with him."
The guy with the wandering hands looked at him in consternation. "We've called another ambulance for you. Sir, you need to sit down."
Dean shook his head vehemently and tried very hard to look like he wasn't about to keel over. "I'll sit down in there."
No-one got in Dean Winchester's way when he wanted something bad enough. And that was how he found himself sitting in the back of the ambulance, with the sirens screaming and making his head pound even more, watching as a stranger with a freakin plastic bottle breathed for his brother, holding his life in her hands.
And all he could think was Jesus. I really screwed up this time.