One Winter's Night, for katzenspn

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Title: One Winter's Night
Recipient: katzenspn
Rating: R
Word Count: c. 3,000
Warnings: Character injury, suicidal ideation

Summary: On the longest night of the year, there is a veiled glimpse of things yet to pass and battles yet to be fought.

December 21, 1995


"SAM!"

Dean runs through the woods towards the last sound he heard. A deep growl cutting short a cry of terror. He hears it still. Over and over. Forever. His name, Sam calling for him, Sammy in trouble, afraid, and Dean's not there.

"No. No, no, no, no, no, no... Oh, God. Oh, God." Denial after denial puffs white into the air with each stride. But there's no running away from what happened.

He runs through the dark and the cold and tries not to think of what he'll find.

Sometimes, the gleam bouncing in his flashlight is a puddle, and his boot fills with fuck-that's-cold water as he splashes through. More often, he skids and falters before his foot breaks through the scrim of new ice. It barely slows him down.

"SAM!"

He's breathing hard now, hard enough that he stops a moment so he can hear any faint cries that might be drowned out by the roaring of his own breath in his head. Nothing. He hears a crack - could be a gunshot, could be the ice on the lake, could be a dead branch breaking under the ice, could be anything. Anything, followed by more nothing. He gives it another ten seconds, then he crashes on through the woods, lungs burning with cold. The snowfall picks up. It falls in a steady hush through the bare branches, stinging his cheeks, slicking the ground, and covering the prints that had shown so clearly in the earlier dusting of snow.

"Where the hell are you, Sammy!"

The two sets of prints are barely visible now, but he still sees how the giant paw prints are right on top of achingly small boot prints. The boots are ones that Dean outgrew less than a year ago, but to him they look like they were made by a toddler's sneakers.

Sam had to put on two extra pairs of thick socks - including one of Dad's - to get them to fit halfway properly, but he hadn't complained. He even joked that at least his feet would be warm tonight.

That was fifteen minutes ago. Just fifteen. Maybe less.

It feels like much longer. An eternity longer.

Dean slides and wobbles to a stop where the icy trail branches in two different directions. He whips the flashlight beam down each path in turn, then back again. Where, where...

If only he could turn back time, get back those fifteen minutes. He would give anything - anything - to go back and not lose track of Sam. There has to be some spell, some wish, some thing that would let him hit the 'undo' button.

"SAM! Where are you? Can you hear me?"

The snow muffles sound, packs the world with cotton. He can't tell if he hears his own name off in the distance or if it's just stupid hope, but then his flashlight glints off something red that vanishes under the snow just as he sees it.

He knows what it is, but he won't let himself even think the word. He takes the safety off the revolver and takes off down the trail. Six silver rounds are in the gun. Twelve more are in his pockets. It doesn't seem anywhere near enough. Not now.

Why the hell did Sam have to strike out on his own like that? He knew what they were hunting. He heard what Dad said about waiting by the car until he got there. And where the fuck was Dad? He should have been there over an hour ago.

Dad. Shit. Dad is going to kill him for fucking up what was most important. Again.

"Watch out for Sammy," Dean pants. "Watch out for Sammy. Gotta watch out for Sammy."

Dad's going to kill him, and Dean will stand there and let him do it.

Dean turned his back for no more than a couple of minutes. Maybe Sam did tell him that he was going to go check something out or go take a piss. If he did, Dean missed it or just plain ignored it, because he saw what looked like a wolf track and let himself get lost in a daydream. Him and Sam, taking out the werewolf, just the two of them, without Dad. He was just picturing the look on Dad's face when Sam's shriek of terror yanked him back to cold reality.

"Dean! Dean!"

This time, the memory doesn't cut off with a snarl.

"Sam?" This had better not be his mind fucking with him again...

"Down here!"

It's real, and it's Sam. Dean's legs nearly give way, but he stumbles forward towards and almost into a creek bed. Sam is down there, sure enough, sitting against the opposite bank with his legs splayed out in front of him.

"I winged him!" Sam croaks, pointing with his gun at a spot just a little further down. Dean swings his flashlight and sees where something with claws had scrabbled up the bank, pulling down snow and clumps of dirt. There are still a few blots of red visible in the falling snow.

Dean slides down the frozen bank, wincing at the cold and the rocks. "God fucking damn it, Sammy! What the hell were you thinking running off like that, huh?" he roars, furious in his relief. "You know Dad said for us to stick together until he got back from setting traps at the other trail-head!"

"But I shot it!" Sam protests. "I hit it!"

"Yeah, but not good enough to kill it, dumbass! Now it's out there and pissed off as fuck because you 'winged' it instead of popping it in the heart!"

Sam looks down, pressing his lips together the way he always does when he gets his panties in a twist about something. Yeah, this is going to be a fun walk back to the car.

"What? You were hoping to make a kill on your own or something? Trying to prove something? To me? To Dad?" The pissy look vanishes in a flush of guilt, and Christ, Sam looks so fucking young. He is so fucking young. Dean takes a deep breath and allows the freezing air to take his temper down a notch. "Hey, hey... Give it a few years, and you'll be just as awesome as me and taking down the ghosties and the ghoulies all by your lonesome. But in the meantime, quit it with the stupid shit, okay? I swear, you just cut a year off my life. Now lemme look after you like I'm supposed to."

Sam mumbles something that maybe sounds like 'look after you,' and lets his chin drop to his chest. He's quiet after that, not bothering to protest.

Dean looks at the trail the werewolf left and thinks they should be able to track it down easy enough. If it's been shot with silver and is leaving behind that much blood, he bets they can make short work of it.

"C'mon, short stuff. Get up. Let's go finish what you started."

He holds his hand out to Sam. Sam shakes his head.

"I can't," he says.

Dean's about to give him shit for that, say something about getting right back on the horse and all that jazz, but Sam's voice is shaky and Dean remembers that splash of red. He lowers his flashlight and sees that the dark on Sam's jeans isn't snow melt, isn't a shadow.

"I'm sorry," Sam sniffles. "I didn't mean to - "

Dean's down by Sam's side before he can think. "Hey, c'mere. Let me look at you," he says with a cheerfulness that's a hair's breadth from screaming. Sam's starting to slump over, so Dean catches him by the chin. Sam's skin feels clammy, and it's not just from the cold. "Listen to me. We're gonna patch you up, okay?"

There isn't a lot of blood, he tells himself. The spot on Sam's leg was small enough to be masked by his hand when Dean first saw him. If it was the femoral artery, Sam would already be...

No. Focus on what next, not what if.

He doesn't think that the blood loss is too bad, but Sam's leg is torn up and he's been sitting on his ass in the cold, and the adrenaline's starting to peter out. Small wonder he's getting shocky. Dean gets Sam's arm around his shoulders and hooks his own arm around Sam's side. He's got a nasty feeling that this is going to turn into a fireman's carry before they can get to the car.

"I've got you," he says. "I'm gonna take care of you. You pain-in-the-ass. C'mon."

Sam manages to stay on his feet long enough for them to get out of the creek bed, then slumps against Dean's side. Dean tries not to think about the term 'dead weight,' and hopes to hell that's not what this is, that he'll never, ever have to feel what that would be like for real.

"You're going to be so embarrassed about this in the morning, you wuss," Dean jokes, but it sounds desperate even to him. He tries getting his arm under Sam's knees so he can carry him all blushing bride style, but the weight's more than he expects and there's a sudden smell of smoke even though there's no fire, and Dad's words echo in his memory:

"Take your brother outside as fast as you can and don’t look back! Now, Dean, Go!"

"Yessir," Dean mutters. He shifts Sam into a fireman's carry and starts walking.

He doesn't look back once on the way to the car.

When he gets back to the road, the car is still there, but Dad's truck is nowhere to be seen. Dean's gut bottoms out at this, even though he wasn't looking forward to Dad tearing strips out of him over this latest fuckup.

He thinks for a moment, then manages to wrangle Sam into the Impala's back seat. Sam whimpers when Dean jostles his leg, and Dean is so relieved he doesn't even think to apologize. He gets the car started. Once the engine has warmed up some, he'll crank the heat.

"Try not to bleed on the seats. Dad'll kill you for that."

"Ha ha," Sam whispers. He's rallying a bit now that he's lying down. "Can you get me a blanket?"

"Lemme get that wrapped up, first," Dean says. There's part of him that wants to deal with this right now, see how bad it is, but it'll be easier to clean things out properly back in the warm and light of the motel.

One stack of gauze pads, a lashing of first aid tape, and the requested blanket later, and they're on their way. Dean realizes halfway to the motel that he didn't leave a sign for Dad to clue him in about where they'd gone, but then he shrugs.

Fuck it. He'll figure it out. May as well give him one more reason to be pissed at me, right?

Right now, the most important thing is Sam. Sam got hurt. Dean let Sam get hurt. Yeah, Sam's been dinged up on a hunt before, but that was all just band-aid and icepack stuff.

This is different. This is blood and dead weight and knowing that the worst might have happened. This is knowing that Dean could have, should have prevented this.

"You still alive back there?"

If there wasn't an answer, Dean would take Sam straight to a hospital, no matter that it would mean all kinds of questions about what happened, and why were you out in the woods at midnight on the longest night of the year, and where was your driver's license, kid, and where were your folks...

Sam grumbles something that almost sounds like words.

"Uh, I'll take that as a 'yes.' Just five more minutes, Sammy, okay?"

It's closer to ten, because they pass a cop car on the way into town and as bad as going to a hospital would be, getting pulled over would be much, much worse. So, he concentrates on the road and on his speed and on trying not to think about what he'll find when they get to the motel and he gets a good look at that wound.

He could have asked Sam what exactly caused the wound, but asking won't change anything. Asking will just make it real.

When they get to the motel, Dean tastes bile and hope when he sees the dark bulk of a pickup in the parking lot, but it's the wrong make and wrong color. At least the hassle of getting Sam out of the car and into their room distracts him from his thoughts for a few minutes. But then, Sam rallies enough to speak.

"Dean?"

Dean maneuvers him onto the bed and debates whether or not to make a crack about getting Sam's pants off. "What? You gotta take a leak or something? Can't you hold it for a few more minutes?"

"Dean... I don't know what happened. I know the werewolf almost caught me," Sam says, and he's not even trying to sound brave. "It got my leg. I don't know if it bit me or - "

"Shut up and let me take a look at it," Dean snaps. He doesn't want to hear his own fears voiced and be that much closer to real. Real will be real soon enough.

He takes longer than he should getting together the needle and floss and digging up a bottle of Jack. If Sam was bitten and not clawed, what would be the point of stitches, anyway? If Sam got himself bitten, then there's nothing Dean can do for him now except put a silver bullet in his heart.

And after that, a silver bullet in my own damned head. Dean stares at the open bottle in his hand. He thinks for a moment, then shrugs and takes a big swig.

He nearly gags at the taste and at the burn, but once he shudders it down, he feels a delicious warmth in his chest that starts to blunt the worst of the panic.

"Okay, champ. Pants off."

At first, Sam's leg is too bloodied for Dean to see the wound properly, but once he takes a wet washcloth to it, he sees four parallel lines - two deep gashes and two scratches. Claw marks.

He turns away for a moment, fist pressed to his mouth and willing himself not to vomit. He had braced so hard for the worst that a push in the opposite direction sends him reeling for a good minute.

"Good news is, you won't have to worry about any excess body hair for another year or two," Dean says once he gets his shit back together. Sam gives a shaky laugh in return. "Bad news is - stitches."

That gets him a whimper. Dean can sympathize all too well. The few times he's had to stitch up Dad, Dad took it without a complaint, but Dean remembers the winces Dad let slip each time the needle went in, and he knows this is going to be bad.

To Sam's credit, he only cries out when Dean sloshes the wound with whiskey. That's bad enough, though, and Dean tries not to think about the sound Sam would make when the bullet hit his chest.

Another slug of the whiskey helps drown out the gunshot echoing in his mind. The taste doesn't even seem so bad this time. His hands are steady enough as they thread and sterilize the needle, but they're shaking when he actually holds torn flesh together and pushes the needle through.

"Almost done," he says once the needle pulls free for the last time. He ties off the knot the way Dad showed him. Then he cleans the wounds one last time and puts on a new bandage. "Lemme see if we've got any of the good meds left - you're gonna need them."

Sam must be hurting, because he doesn't question Dean about what it is he's taking. He just washes the pills down with a mouthful of lukewarm soda like a good little boy. After, he doesn't even fight to stay awake, even though he's usually the one to insist on waiting up for Dad.

Dean watches him sleep for a while. Just watches. He does take another sip of the Jack when the warmth from earlier starts to die down and the panic starts to rise back up.

At last, he turns out the light and parks himself on the other bed, keeping himself squarely between Sam and the door.

He waits. He takes a cautious sip from the bottle every time another set of headlights sweeps past the window and he's once again wracked by hope and dread. But none of the lights suddenly flare bright as the driver turns into the parking lot. They all just go past and on into the cold winter night.

Dad's okay, he tells himself. He's been gone longer than this before. Things happen. But he's tough. He's smart. He'll be back any time now.

It doesn't matter so much now that Dad will go ballistic when he gets back. The whiskey helps with that. With the not mattering. More than that, what helps is knowing Sam is okay and sleeping soundly just a few feet away. That's worth any price Dean could ever pay. He won't have to explain to Dad why he had to kill Sam because he couldn't save him. That otherwise, Sam was going to become just another monster.

It could have all gone so much worse. So much.

But it didn't, Dean thinks as he takes one more (just one more) sip of the whiskey.

But one day it still could, he answers himself.

So, he waits quietly, patiently, thinking of what was and what still could be. He waits and he wonders, bottle in hand as he and Sam ride out the longest night of the year together, if this is what the rest of his life will be like.