But in Your Dreams (Whatever They Be)
Five times people passed out on Dean, and one time he returned the favor.
3.
"Dad, stay with me, you just gotta stay with me," Dean pleads, pressing as hard as he dares on the ripped-open flesh of John's side. His father's breath is whistling in and out like a lung's been punctured and Dean hates that he has to hope that that's the least of their problems, that John hasn't been poisoned or infected by the thing Dean emptied his gun into six miles back.
Dean himself hasn't escaped unscathed— blood's dripping into his eyes and running down his arm to join John's in soaking the dirty shirt he's balled up into the wound— but Dean is upright and driving where John is slumped over the passenger's seat, pale as death and coughing up little flecks of red onto the Impala's leather. Dean presses harder and fights to keep his eyes off the blood and on the road.
He has to be doing over a hundred twenty miles an hour, peeling down the highway toward Corona, New Mexico, the last town they'd driven past before leaving the car to hunt something furred and fanged up and down the Manzano Mountains. When Bobby had called them, they'd been in Tulsa, going through the motions of salt-and-burns and trying to ignore the gaping awful hole of a third bed, third plate, third chair gone unused. Sammy's been gone for two months and it's not getting any easier, turning to share a grin with an empty back seat.
"C'mon, Dad," Dean says, more urgently as John's eyes flutter shut again. "Stay with me."
He hadn't even seen the thing coming, hadn't even been looking, because right flank was Sammy's position and had been since he was hold enough to take the recoil of a shotgun. Dean took point, John held the middle and Sam kept rear guard, always, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. After eighteen years some things are so ingrained that even if you can stop yourself from automatically adding that prissy summer salad to your otherwise beefy, manly lunch order, you can't stop your instincts. Hunters live by their instincts, and now John Winchester is dying by his.
"D'n," John says thickly, and his head drops to his shoulder with an air of finality that ratchets up Dean's fear to screaming panic.
"Please, please," Dean whispers to the horizon he's driving towards, and doesn't know who he's begging.