Some brotherly love, and shameless hurt/comfort. Brothers have always got each others back.

Can't say i've ever had a concussion before, but I imagine it to be incredibly confusing :')

Set early Season 1, not long after the brothers are reunited.

I still own nothing.

3. Here

Pain: persistent, burning, aching, intense. Darkness: enforced, unnatural, prolonged, consuming. Confusion: distorted, illogical, sensory, prevalent. Nausea: inescapable, fierce, ambiguous, induced.

It was never just a simple salt and burn. Nothing was ever just anything when it came to hunting.

"Dean?" Sam's throat barely permitted the sound. What had happened to him?

"I'm right here, Sammy. I'm not going anywhere."

There came a gentle pressure upon his shoulder, but for all its comfort, it just felt like a further extension of the pain in his head. And god, wasn't that unbearable! He had never seriously considered the benefits of decapitation before, but right now it seemed like a highly viable option.

And then, Dean was talking to him again; whispering … why was Dean whispering? Was somebody sick? Injured? How come Sam hadn't been made aware of this? He endeavoured to recall some third party who they had been travelling with, and around whose death bed they were so evidently situated. There had been him, Dean of course, and … He couldn't remember … Maybe no-body. Sam wasn't sick, he knew that much off the bat … But then, why did he feel so awful? Things were most definitely askew.

Didn't Dean know how greatly even the smallest sound tortured him? Didn't Dean understand that his heart head relocated to the region that was his head – and oh how that ached – pulsating arrogantly so that the receipt of sound was nigh on impossible? This was simple biology, so why was Dean being so resistant?

Did that mean his ears, therefore, had taken up residence upon his chest; filling the void left by his heart? What an obscure notion! He was pretty certain he had not consented to that trade.

"Dean?"

"Right here, Sam."

But where was here? Or was it there? Where was anywhere? He wanted to giggle, but no, the pain was too much: too much to bare. Besides, he was unconvinced that the remainder of his organs had retained their original settings. He was pretty sure that his stomach had rehoused itself in his throat. Or maybe that was just the nausea.

Why was it so dark? This here where Dean was so certain they resided. Dark and comfortable. The two states were incompatible, or maybe they were perfect. He couldn't decide. And when did darkness change allegiance so as to embody such diverse visual stimuli? Why was nothing as it should be? Was the world really nothing more than a bad acid trip, a pantomime of white rabbits and mad hatters?

No. There was too much pain for that.

What had happened to him? How did he get here? How was Dean talking to him when Sam, traumatically, devastatingly, knew him to be dead? Was not that why his heart had eloped in the first place?

Dean wasn't dead!

But he was. Sam had saw him. Pallid and still. Eyes closed. Laying immobile in an open grave.

"DEAN!"

He bolted upright, and instantly knew it to have been an error of judgement. The world oscillated in noisome fashion, like the course of an innovative fair-ground ride, robbing him of all comprehension concerning the states of up or down. Was he on a fair-ground ride? Dean, after all, had not been specific. If so, his memory did their comfort no justice.

Strong arms caught and held him.

"Hey, hey! Easy, I got you. I'm right here. Right here, Sammy. I ain't going anywhere, d'you hear? Nowhere!"

Dean's heart almost broke to hold Sam in his arms, to cradle him in a way reminiscent of childhood, and to feel his entire frame quiver, tormented by spectral convictions of fraudulent anguish. Helplessness was the worst feeling in the world. The will to do, but the practice denied. He could not, in reality, do anything more than what he was doing now, but somehow, it just didn't seem like enough.

The kid was a mess. Severely concussed, with a pretty extensive contusion misshaping the area above his right temple. The bruising was already beginning to spread, making the injury appear just that much more horrific, as if it wasn't bad enough in the initial instance. Sam had missed a trip to the emergency room by a hairsbreadth, and Dean still wasn't above hauling his sorry carcass there.

"Deeaann …"

That one wasn't a question, it was a moan. One Dean was all to familiar with for doddery; a plea offered to the darkness by the voice of a child.

He managed to get the conveniently located trash can beneath Sam's chin just in time for him to throw up in it. A big brothers instincts were infallible. He rubbed his palm in circular motions upon Sam's back, seeking to provide even the smallest modicum of comfort.

Four years away at collage hadn't changed a thing, not when it all came down to it. The bickering and uncertainty which had characterised their initial weeks of reunion was nothing more than surface tension. A process of necessitated re-learning. Their bond ran much stronger and deeper than that, brotherhood was woven into the very fabric of their beings, reminiscent of some primal instinct. To protect, to love, to cherish. They always had been and always would be, there for one another.

"Jeeze, Sammy. What are you trying to do to me, huh? This is payback for the time I put shaving foam in your toothpaste, isn't it?" Dean mocked without feeling. The situation wasn't funny.

He was decidedly uneasy. As hunters, the Winchesters were no strangers to head trauma, but that did not mean they were seasoned veterans either. It was the one injury which paralleled their profession in unpredictability. Disingenuous on a myriad of levels: disproportionate bloodless coupled with a mute severity. Awesome.

Dean knew the effects a concussion wrought upon his brother, better than anyone – a sight to often witnessed for reassurance. How Sam fell into determined and unnerving silence and immobility … unless of course a display of brash overconfidence in the midst of a hunt left him reeling in the throes of misrepresented grief for the brother who remained steadfast at his side.

Sam uttered and unintelligible sound, which could not even suffer the accusation of resembling a reply.

"I know. You want me to shut my yap and stop making your headache worse than it already is." That whine was defiantly an affirmative.

"No can do, I'm afraid," Dean forced a weak cheeriness into his tone, "not until we've got some fluids in you and another dose of the good drugs. And by the way, you've got six hours and counting to convince me you don't need hauling to the hospital."

Well, that got Sam's attention. He opened his eyes for the first time to fix Dean with an unfocused glare, the right one almost swollen shut. Dean was inordinately reassured by the timid expression of defiance.

"'appened t' me? Sam burbled as soon as he had located his tongue. Had it always been so swollen and clumsy? What a hindrance.

Again and again his fingers traced the cold, cylindrical shape of the trash can in animated intrigue. It was just so … peculiar. No beginning, no end. Just like hunting. His hands were loath to relinquish it when Dean attempted its removal, despite the fact that there was nothing left in his stomach for the perpetrator to rebel against. So Dean compliantly relented.

"Damn heroism is what happened to you," he reprimanded with only half-hearted exasperation, before clarifying to Sam's temporarily addled logic; "you got yourself an impressive concussion; whacked your head pretty good. What's the last thing you remember?"

Pain. Always pain. How could there have been anything before that single prevalent sensation? … But, yet, there was … There was a cohesive anatomy for one, purpose and responsibility and … a job to be done. Always a job. These were things which mulled idly in the wake of confusion. Notions which he teased to the forefront … and of course, there was still pain.

"Hunting. Cover-up. Revenge."

It wasn't the most coherent of explanations but he would take it happily; Dean wasn't looking for miracles. That was his boy, never down for long.

Their hunt had led them to back-road Colorado, and the spirit of one particularly twisted Elroy Sands, who enjoyed, in his spare time; origami, stamp collecting and slicing the throats of his nearest and dearest with an inscribed letter opener. Nice guy.

A freak accident had resulted in a family cover up back in the eighties, and now dear Elroy was out for revenge. They had torched his bones only hours before, the scent still clinging to their clothes. His homicidally restless spirit had put up a violent resistance; humbling one brother and maiming the other.

In the brief lapse of conversation, Sam's eyes had betrayed his intentions and fallen closed again, his head lolling automatically upon Dean's shoulder, still finding the same finding the same groves there which seemed as relics of another lifetime

Dean permitted the contact; welcomed it even, for it calmed his disquiet temper – the proximity to his brother, whose mortality had that evening been so violently staked. Though he would contest it with vehemence to anyone bold enough to allude it (and most especially Sam) seeing his little brother laying there, looking so … broken, had sincerely frightened him. More than he cared to admit.

Worse because it had been entirely and irrevocably his fault: the price of arrogance was not one always afforded by the perpetrator.

But more than anything, it was the memory of that fear which fuelled his persistent unease. Hunting with Sammy was a world away from hunting with John, and maybe he still idled in the adjustment period. All he knew was that dad would have done anything to ensure the job was completed – sacrificial to the last, even on the part of others absent of consent – while Sam, in the heat of confrontation, had abandoned his position, endangering himself in order to protect his idiot of a brother.

They pretended like nothing could hurt them, that they could weather every blow and come back swinging, that busted ribs and gunshot wounds were nothing more than playground scrapes. Reality was quite the adverse. There was a reason why hunters barely outlived their fifties, and in the end, it wasn't always the physical demons that got them.

Sam was over-warm, but not feverish, his breathing perceptibly laboured, distorted through unschooled undulations of pain, though it remained strong and rhythmic. Sammy was a fighter. His presence was a comfortable pressure upon Dean's shoulder, just as his safety and well-being was an eternal one upon Dean's heart.

With a gentleness that belied his rough exterior, Dean brushed back the wayward bangs from Sam's forehead. Kid needed a haircut. They would have to contrive some means of preventing the unruly tresses irritating the laceration site while it healed, left exposed to the air. Maybe a headband … a bright pink one.

While Sam's fingers were lax, Dean extricated the trash can, causing his brother to stir.

Sam's whole existence felt precariously uncertain without something to hold onto. An inanimate object had become his anchorage, his grounding against delusion. Wasn't that odd.

"Dean?" There was no panic, just an affirmation.

"Right here," Dean assured with a smile.

"Oh. Wher' we?" His eyes roamed the rooms interior with vague reference, teetering upon recognition, though he never moved his head to widen the vantage, so all he beheld was the significance of a wan light, filtering opalescently through the once cream nets.

Dean understood why the unimportant details might have seemed a little hazy. Sam had spent the entirety of the tense homeward journey drifting alternately in and out of consciousness and bleeding profusely into the white linen of Dean's sacrificed shirt. A macabre vision indeed.

"Broadwalk Inn motel. Closest place I could find to patch you up. You owe me a new shirt, by the way."

"Yeah," Sam agreed without really knowing to what he was assenting. Dean grinned despite the solemnity of the present situation.

"And that hundred dollars I won off you in polka the other night."

"Yeah," Sam agreed again without preamble. Dean chuckled.

"Nah, I'm just kidding. You don't owe me anything."

Dean tousled Sam's messy hair fondly, earning himself a derogatory look which only furthered his amusement. At least Sam's spirit's had not taken the nock. And then, growing abruptly serious, he whispered;

"It's me that's in your debt."

The Winchesters had long since implemented a system of trigger questions designed to access the severity of head wounds. Birthdays, place names, memories and other sentimentalities. The things not even a wizened hunter forgets. While Dean, or even John on occasion, would grit their teeth and weather the interrogatives in a single continuous stream, until their questioner was satisfied, Sam abhorred the practice and strove to be wilfully difficult. It was only over the years that Dean had realized staggering the questions at least made Sam more compliant. And so with the ease of a professional, Dean slipped them unassumingly into conversation.

"Hey Sam, what year were you born in?"

"Ninetee' eighty-three. M'not stupid," he grumbled thickly.

"No?" Dean raised an eyebrow, exaggeratedly inflecting his tone. "I tell you to be careful and instead you rush eagerly into the path of a homicidally motivated spirit. Real smart, kiddo." He resisted the urge, albeit only barely, to rap Sam on the head for the trouble of his chivalry. "Nice shot though. Three salt round to the skull. And here I thought you'd be rusty."

"Saved yo'r a'se," Sam defended the righteousness of his actions with feeble indignation.

"Yeah, you did," admitted Dean with pride.

An instant too long spent revelling in pre-emptive victory had brought the wrath of Elroy Sands spirit upon him. Match poised to torch the sucker, Dean had been roughly shunted backwards into the maw of the open and highly flammable grave site. He had escaped his own cremation by a hairsbreadth when, dazed and winded by the blow, his fingers had slackened to surrender their fuse.

Reacting instinctively, Sam had dropped to retrieve the sawn-off shot gun they had been nursing for just such a show of resistance and loosed three rounds into the spirits skull, forcing it to dematerialize. He then placed himself resolutely between Dean and any advances the opportunist apparition may have made, scanning the periphery with undeterred intensity.

The thing which had broken his focus was the sound of Dean's groan. Some baser instinct, entirely orientated towards his big brother usurped rationality, logic and even the primary compulsion of self preservation, forcing him to turn his back upon their temperamental assailant. And that was when he had seen it: Dean; pallid and still. Eyes closed. Laying immobile in an open grave. That image; the last he perceived before making the brutal acquaintance of a nearby headstone, had become superimposed upon his disillusioned mind. And so he re-lived, again and again, the pangs of unrighteous grief.

Sam just smiled, the warring forces of discomfort and exhaustion leaving little consideration for idle talk. Which one had he sided with again?

Dean must have sensed his surrender, for, though he hated the necessity of it, he stirred Sam with a gentle but insistent shaking and the impart of one final request:

"Think you can drink a little water for me?

Sam was more than tempted to decline. The last thing he wanted right now in his turbulent and sensitive stomach was excess liquid, but Dean second guessed him before he could form a coherent return.

"You know the drill; no water, no drugs." It was an idle threat, but Sam didn't need to know that.

As if to force the point, he pressed the rim of the bottle lightly but unarguably to Sam's lips, allowing a fraction of the liquid to moisten them.

Reluctantly, Sam took a meagre and hesitant swallow, before groaning and moving as if to turn his head away, though without physically performing the action.

"Come on, you've gotta show me more commitment than that," warned Dean, "I'm serious about holding out on you."

Sam begrudgingly took four more swallows, before it became evident that he would humour Dean no further. It didn't matter, Dean was satisfied.

He carefully assisted Sam into a comfortably prone position, noticing how he uncharacteristically folded in upon himself. He had never looked more like an overgrown child, breaking under the weight of responsibility, than he did in that moment. Carefully, Dean stood.

"I'm just gonna rinse this out," he said indicating the used trash can, "and then grab you some more painkillers. I won't be far, okay?"

"Mmm." Sam was already half unconscious.

Pain. Darkness. Confusion. Nausea … each grew more prevalent with times liberal elapse. But what did they matter? What did anything matter when Dean was dead, and he was alone? Sam had seen him, and he couldn't rid himself of the image: pallid and still. Eyes closed. Laying immobile in an open grave.

"DEAN? DEAN!"

So, maybe his assurances of Sam's recovery had been a little premature in their contrive, Dean conceded as he rushed back to his brothers side. Nevertheless, Sam's resilient nature, challenged most prominently in adversity, had convinced him that a trip to the emergency room was unnecessary. That was progress, at least.

"Right here, Sammy. I'm not going anywhere."

Dean shunned the inviting and commodious expanse of his own appointed bed, for the cramped, tangent conditions of Sam's. If his brother needed something during the night, he would know immediately.

He settled down for a long and uncomfortable stretch, sparse on sleep, knowing he would endure the wearisome repetition of questions and desperate calls of his name with good grace and infallible patience. Because Sam had saved his life. Because Sam was his brother. And because, right now he needed Sam here, in his arms, as much as his brother needed him. Maybe more.

Thank you very much for reading.

- One Wish Magic.