Fic: "If I Had A Gun"
Title (shamelessly lifted from Noel Gallagher‘s High Flying Birds song with the same title) : If I had A Gun
Genre/Characters: Gen, Dean mostly, Jo, peripheral Sam -- basically all hurt with nil comfort.
Warnings: Language. And I imagine there will be errors.
Word Count: approx. 3500
Spoilers: Episode 2x14 - I think -- “Born Under A Bad Sign.”
Disclaimer: Supernatural, the characters of Sam and Dean Winchester and anything involving the show do not belong to me, nor do I profit from anything I write. No harm intended on my part.
Summary: Missing scene to BUABS. In which I even manage to have Dean struggling to breathe!
A/N: Thank you to the forever-and-always awesome and talented kj_svala who did the beautiful artwork for my Big Bang in 2010, and who heard that I was writing this particular piece and made some perfect gifs for it, and that just made me write this like a crazy-writery person. So, thank you luv, they are marvelous and totally inspired me to keep at this &hearts.
“So who are you?” Dean asks. He doesn’t expect the demon to necessarily answer, but he needs to hear Sam’s voice, to pinpoint where he’s at.
“I got lots of names,” the Sam-thing taunts, and fuck, even the voice doesn’t sound like him, not the tone or the lilt of it or anything. Dean curses himself for not catching on sooner. A lot sooner.
“You've been in Sam since he disappeared, haven't you?”
“You should have seen your face when you thought he murdered that guy. Pathetic.”
Dean winces -- not so much at the words but how this is so obviously not Sam, and he doesn’t know if he can keep this up much longer.
You have to. You have to free him. Now fucking do it.
“Why didn't you kill me?” Dean calls out. “You had a dozen chances.” Which, that's at least true -- he can’t believe Sam -- this Sam -- wouldn’t have wasted him long before this.
“No,” Sam says. “That would have been too easy. Where's the fun in that? See, this was a test. Wanted to see if I could push you far enough to waste Sam. Should have known you wouldn't have the sac. Anyway. Fun's over now.
His -- its -- voice is close by, so Sam is close by -- Dean can tell, but he can’t be sure how close to make a move just yet. “Well, I hope you got your kicks. Because you're gonna pay hell for this, I'm gonna make sure of that.” And goddamn it, if that isn’t the full truth. Dean will spend the rest of his days walking the earth, hunting that damn thing down if that’s what it comes to.
But first things first. He has to find Sam.
“How? You can't hurt me. Not without hurting your little brother. See, I think you're gonna die, Dean. You and every other hunter I can find. One look as Sam's dewy, sensitive eyes? They'll let me right in their door.”
This could go on forever, this goddamn cat-and-mouse game they're playing and Dean steps out from the crates he’s been hiding behind. He's somewhat at a loss as to what he should do next, how to lure Sam out, and yet his mind is going a mile a minute, can’t stay focused on any one thing for more than a second. This isn’t him, this isn’t Sam and he’s going to kill me, if he doesn’t get me to kill him first. None of these thoughts are helpful, but Dean can’t help them, can’t stop them like he normally can in this kind of situation, where he’s hunting something -- something not Sam -- something that's a threat to either him or someone else.
Watch out for your brother, Dean.
You might have to kill him.
It's the last thought Dean has -- Sam is suddenly in front of him, arm raised, gun aimed and the next thing that fills Dean is an explosion as Sam pulls the trigger, a blast of noise and pain as the bullet tears somewhere into Dean’s shoulder, driving everything else out of his head as he loses his footing and tumbles off the dock into the water below.
The water is ice, so if Dean does lose consciousness, it isn't for very long, the sharp cold of Lake Superior not allowing him to completely pass out. It digs its liquid icicles into him immediately, makes every fiber in him stiffen and tense, shoves every ounce of warmth and air right out of him so that he can’t think of anything -- being shot, Sam being possessed, trying not to drown -- except how goddamn fucking frigid this water is and how it's squeezing the will to live right out of him.
There's a definite current, and while Dean has swam in stronger ones in both oceans, this one is plenty to deal with, especially since his left arm is useless, is both numb and on fire at the same time, and it becomes apparent very quickly that he isn’t swimming so much as flailing about -- and doing a pretty piss-poor job of it. He tries to push himself upward but the combination of the current and his fucked shoulder thwarts his attempts almost immediately, and he feels himself being helplessly pulled along in the water, unable to even get a handle on where he's at, where the surface is at or how deep the water is.
Sam shot me, Sam did this --
Not Sam, that’s not Sam --
His chest is beginning to ache, his lungs tight and full. I need to get out -- and he tries to move his left arm again, to make some sort of swimming motion, but he can’t do it, at least not in any significant way, and the water pulls him further under, the cold piercing into him even deeper, hampering his efforts all the more.
For the first time, Dean forgets about the cold, forgets about Sam, forgets about the bullet Sam unflinchingly fired into him, and focuses on the very real possibility that, in the scheme of things, none of that is going to matter because he's going to end up drowning in the next couple of minutes.
You can’t leave Sam that way--
Dean tries again, tries to claw his way through the icy water and up to the surface, but he's still being pushed by the current, is still too disoriented by the darkness to even try and get his bearings. The ache in his chest is a full blown fire, and Dean forgets everything except the need to breathe. One more time he pushes his arms into some kind of swimming motion but even as he does it, he can feel how tired his body is, how any strength he might’ve had is pretty much gone. He feels himself sinking even further down, and the flow of the water rolls him over onto his back, the force of it pulling him deeper down, further away from the surface -- or what should be the damn surface -- further away from air and light and --
Sam
He's beginning to lose it, as the water continues to rush around him, and it's only going to be a matter of moments before he gives in, his lungs feeling as though they're about to burst, and there's nothing he'll be able to do about it, not one damn thing, and just before he goes completely out and lets the water rush into him, Dean unthinkingly gropes for something -- any damn thing at all -- and his shoulder -- the one Sam put a bullet through without a blink of an eye -- knocks into something solid, something hard enough to jolt a flash of pain through his arm and all the way down his side and into his hip.
It's enough to pull him out of his disoriented stupor, and Dean wildly grabs at the -- object -- with his other hand, the pain from his shoulder and his air-starved lungs momentarily forgotten as he tries to grab onto whatever lifeline he’s managed to run into. It's a post or pole of some kind -- something wooden and thick -- and while it's too large for him to grab all the way around, Dean keeps his hands on it nonetheless, nails frantically scraping at the sides trying to find a handhold of some kind, anything so that he can pull himself up. He scrambles and claws as best he can but it seems fruitless -- whatever the post thing is attached to doesn’t seem to be anything Dean can use to save himself from goddamn drowning because Sam shot him, but just a big piece of wood out in the fucking middle of Lake Superior. Dean holds onto it anyway, still fighting the current, can’t seem to let go of it even though he's going to drown if he stays clinging to the damn thing, knows he can’t hold his breath another second, and just as he unwillingly tries to pull in air where there isn’t any, his hand catches onto a piece of metal -- Dean has no idea what it is, what it means other than it's coming out of the wooden post-thing horizontally and he somehow manages to grasp it with both hands and pull himself through the water in a half-assed upward motion. He's trying to hurry but the injured shoulder and the cold depth of the water and the fact that he's swallowing water because he can’t hold his breath any longer is making it that much more difficult in an already impossible situation. He keeps groping along the metal anyway, even though there's nothing left, he's going to drown, and just as huge black spots begin pulsing in his vision, he feels his arm break through the water and hit air, and he's so surprised that Dean can hardly think, hardly respond. Safe is the one word that flits through his mind as he flings himself toward the cold air and breaks the water’s surface, pulls himself onto the metal -- thing -- he's holding until his head is up and the blessed cold air is rushing over him.
He instinctively takes in a breath but to his shock he really can’t pull in any air -- not as much as he should be able to, anyway, and without even thinking about it, tries to cough out the water he’s just swallowed, get it out of his windpipe or the back of his throat or his lungs or wherever the hell it's sitting, but even that seems to be too much to ask, the sound he’s making barely a whistling grunt, and isn’t this just a big fucking joke, Dean thinks, as he tried to pull in another breath, getting out of the water and still not being able to breathe, and his second attempt to breathe is perhaps marginally better than his first, but it still isn’t good enough, and this time Dean gives it all he has, and somehow manages to cough up some of the water stuck inside him, and the flood gates open at last and he gags up another mouthful of Lake Superior water, takes his first real breath in at least two minutes, and then finally, finally actually coughs and gasps, coughs and gasps, in some kind of rhythm that allowes him to keep breathing in a half-assed sort of fashion.
And it's good enough -- enough to allow him to pull himself up along the metal thing -- a roller of some kind, Dean realizes -- that leads up to some wooden ramp. Some kind of thing that loads and unloads ships or something Dean thinks, as he pulls himself onto the ramp. Duluth is, after all, a port city on Lake Superior and Dean has, after all, just taken a dive into that very lake.
A dive courtesy of something that’s -- not Sam -- pulling the trigger on you --
Dean's exhausted, is still doing more coughing and wheezing than actual breathing but that's beginning taking a back seat to the fiery pain in his shoulder as his fingers search for the entrance wound, the blood leaking through as he tries to stop the flow. He’s nearly forgotten about it, about being shot by the thing that isn’t Sam, in his efforts not to drown, but now it's impossible to ignore, the pain and the blood and the realization that he’s actually been shot.
He rolls over, his back against the wooden planking, for just a minute, too done in to even lift his legs out of the water. He's only going to stay this way for a couple seconds at most, just long enough to catch his breath and stop all the hacking and choking, maybe find something to wrap the shoulder but that's all -- he has more important things to take care of at the moment.
Namely, finding Sam.
But he's so cold, so tired and he's bleeding, and he can’t even get his legs out of the water, much less get to his feet, and Dean doesn’t even feel it when his eyes close and he drifts into unconsciousness.
“Dean!”
It's not Sam’s voice, but a familiar one all the same -- Dean feels like he's still underwater, the only part of him that isn’t numb with cold being his shoulder, which is burning in pain. He can’t seem to get his eyes to open, and feels himself beginning to fall back to sleep despite the pain and the cold. “Dean!”
Again, but this time someone is pushing on him and Dean forces his eyes open. Jo.
Everything comes back to him then -- the water, the bullet, Sam --
Sam.
Jo is pulling him upright, babbling his name, saying some other stuff that Dean isn’t paying attention to. He can’t talk anyway, not with all the water he’s swallowed -- all he can gasp out is, “Where’s Sam?” and that's it, the pain from his shoulder and trying to breathe win out and Dean has to give his attention to that for the moment.
“I don’t know,” Jo says. “I was looking for you.” She's trying to pull him up, and Dean has no choice but to let her -- she's certainly persistent enough, and he needs to get up, get his ass out of this motherfucking water, get moving so he can find Sam --
Sam
He's shocked at how his legs don’t seem to want to work, how Jo's pretty much having to drag him -- hell, practically carry him, tiny thing that she is, up the road and back to the bar.
But, fuck it, he almost drowned. Another minute and Dean knows it would’ve been over, he would’ve either been taken by the current, swept out into the deep of Lake Superior or silently rolled over and lain down right there in the harbor -- whichever, it doesn’t matter, he’d been moments away from drowning --
And Sam would’ve never even looked back, never given you another thought --
So, it really shouldn’t be a surprise that he can barely walk, can hardly support his own weight, but Dean doesn’t have time for this shit, not when Sam -- or whatever this Sam-thing is -- is still walking around out there. Every second that ticks away means he's getting further and further away from Dean, and given what he’s shown he's capable of -- well, this shit had end pretty damn fast, before Sam actually hurts someone, hurts himself.
It's not that far of a walk back to the bar, but it seems to take forever. It doesn’t help that Jo's supporting a great deal of his weight so he can limp along, but it's slowing them down some, not to mention how he has to keep stopping every few feet to cough up more of the lake water he’d nearly drowned in, forcing them into a pace akin to a snail’s crawl.
“I don’t know, Dean,” Jo says, when they halt for a third time so Dean can hack up some more -- crap -- onto the ground. “Maybe I should just drive you to the nearest emergency room.”
“I’m -- okay.” He turns from her and sneezes out what feels like an impressively huge amount of lake water and snot, but which he can feel more of sloshing around inside him, and he sneezes twice more, before dissolving into another soggy coughing fit. Christ, he can still taste the cold, murky fishiness of that water in his nose and throat. “Just -- too much water.” He spits out whatever he’s just coughed up, and then sneezes again, tries to wipe his streaming nose on his sleeve but that's soaked -- and why the fuck wouldn’t it be, Dean thinks, before settling for swiping his hand across his nose and dealing with it that way.
“That’s what I’m saying,” Jo says. She's still holding onto his arm, and Dean can feel her trembling, hear the shakiness in her voice. “You were in that cold water for who knows how long, and you nearly drowned. That’s nothing to fool around with. You could end up with pneumonia.”
This is why she shouldn’t be out here doing this by herself yet, Dean thinks. He takes hold of her hand, roughly shoves it under his jacket and up to his shoulder, presses it to the still-bleeding wound. “I’ll be all right,” he says. He sounds harsh, he knows he does, he sounds downright pissed, but Dean doesn’t have time for this, time to baby her through everything right now, not with Sam running around out there, doing God-knows-what. “But I can’t go waltzing into some emergency room with this, and every second we stand here debating, Sam’s getting further and further away. Now, c’mon, I need you to keep it together here, and use you head a little.”
Her face grows still as she feels the wound with her fingers, but something changes with her then, her anxiety sliding into something -- hard. “Okay, I -- I can take care of that,” she says. “Come on, we’re not that far.”
At least that's something. And true to her word, once she pulls it together, Jo's able take care of the business at hand, rather efficiently if Dean's honest about it. She brings him a bottle of whiskey first thing, finds a blanket and throws it over his shoulders, gathers the stuff she needs to take out the bullet once they determine it's still lodged in Dean’s shoulder.
It doesn’t take her long to get it out, and as the whiskey takes hold, the shivering lets up, and Dean, despite how full of water his sinuses and lungs still feel, finds himself actually able to breathe in a somewhat normal fashion. She's going as quick as she can, but Dean is antsy, can feel Sam getting further away by the second. “Okay, are we about done?” he demands, as soon as she’s pulled the bullet out and dropped it into the glass. His voice sounds like shit, rough and jagged, but he supposes that's bound to happen when you swallow enough water to damn near drown. He takes another hit of the whiskey to try and get the raggedness out of his voice.
“Would you give me a minute to patch you up?” Jo says. She quickly tapes some gauze to the wound. “You can’t help Sam if you’re bleeding to death.”
She wants to talk, has questions about the demon in Sam, and while Dean does his best to answer them, his mind is already gone, is on Sam and where he might go next, what he might do next. But the moment she says she's coming with him, that gets his full attention. He almost laughs at that -- would laugh except it would’ve made him cough and he doesn’t want to hear another ER lecture from her, has already spent too much time on this as it is. “You’re not coming.”
“The hell I’m not. I’m a part of this now.”
She's right, in a sense -- she's worried about him, worried about Sam, even after what he’d almost done to her. And Dean does owe her -- he knows he does, she’d just had a hand in saving his life.
But he can’t mess with this right now -- can’t mess with her right now. “I can’t say it more plain than this. You try and follow me and I’ll tie you right back to that post and leave you there. This is my fight. I’m not getting your blood on my hands. That’s just how it’s gonna be.”
He means it, and he can tell that she knows he means it. Her face changes again, is still hard and determined but there's something else there as well, something Dean can’t name. “I’ll call you later,” he promises, a way of appeasing her, and even as he knows he means it while he says it, he also knows, ten seconds later when he's out the door, that he won’t call her. She wants to talk, wants to know what's happening and she deserves to know -- the last time Dean had seen her, it had ended so badly between them -- the three of them -- and then this, Sam ready to kill her at fucking knifepoint -- really, Dean knows he needs to talk to her, clear things up if he can, at least try and come to some sort of -- something -- about this whole fucked up mess that's just played out between all of them.
But it isn’t a conversation Dean can get into right now. It would take too much time, too much explanation -- two things he can't afford to indulge in at the moment.
He has to find Sam.
It isn’t until he's driving toward Bobby‘s, waiting for the heat to kick in so he can warm up -- though there isn’t much chance of that, given how soaked his clothes are -- and coughing up the latest round of lake water he's swallowed, that it becomes clear to him. You could end up with pneumonia Jo had said. I’ll be damn lucky if I don’t end up with pneumonia when this is all over with, Dean tells himself, spitting the shit he's hacked up out his open window and wishing he’d at least brought the whiskey with him.
I’m pretty fucking sure pneumonia’s going to be the least of your problems once you catch up to Sam.
And then he knows, knows what the look on Jo’s face had been, the one Dean hadn’t been able to place before, the glimpse he'd gotten through her misguided determination to go along, that flash that had lifted into her eyes when he'd told her she couldn't come with.
It had been defeat.
Genre/Characters: Gen, Dean mostly, Jo, peripheral Sam -- basically all hurt with nil comfort.
Warnings: Language. And I imagine there will be errors.
Word Count: approx. 3500
Spoilers: Episode 2x14 - I think -- “Born Under A Bad Sign.”
Disclaimer: Supernatural, the characters of Sam and Dean Winchester and anything involving the show do not belong to me, nor do I profit from anything I write. No harm intended on my part.
Summary: Missing scene to BUABS. In which I even manage to have Dean struggling to breathe!
A/N: Thank you to the forever-and-always awesome and talented kj_svala who did the beautiful artwork for my Big Bang in 2010, and who heard that I was writing this particular piece and made some perfect gifs for it, and that just made me write this like a crazy-writery person. So, thank you luv, they are marvelous and totally inspired me to keep at this &hearts.
“So who are you?” Dean asks. He doesn’t expect the demon to necessarily answer, but he needs to hear Sam’s voice, to pinpoint where he’s at.
“I got lots of names,” the Sam-thing taunts, and fuck, even the voice doesn’t sound like him, not the tone or the lilt of it or anything. Dean curses himself for not catching on sooner. A lot sooner.
“You've been in Sam since he disappeared, haven't you?”
“You should have seen your face when you thought he murdered that guy. Pathetic.”
Dean winces -- not so much at the words but how this is so obviously not Sam, and he doesn’t know if he can keep this up much longer.
You have to. You have to free him. Now fucking do it.
“Why didn't you kill me?” Dean calls out. “You had a dozen chances.” Which, that's at least true -- he can’t believe Sam -- this Sam -- wouldn’t have wasted him long before this.
“No,” Sam says. “That would have been too easy. Where's the fun in that? See, this was a test. Wanted to see if I could push you far enough to waste Sam. Should have known you wouldn't have the sac. Anyway. Fun's over now.
His -- its -- voice is close by, so Sam is close by -- Dean can tell, but he can’t be sure how close to make a move just yet. “Well, I hope you got your kicks. Because you're gonna pay hell for this, I'm gonna make sure of that.” And goddamn it, if that isn’t the full truth. Dean will spend the rest of his days walking the earth, hunting that damn thing down if that’s what it comes to.
But first things first. He has to find Sam.
“How? You can't hurt me. Not without hurting your little brother. See, I think you're gonna die, Dean. You and every other hunter I can find. One look as Sam's dewy, sensitive eyes? They'll let me right in their door.”
This could go on forever, this goddamn cat-and-mouse game they're playing and Dean steps out from the crates he’s been hiding behind. He's somewhat at a loss as to what he should do next, how to lure Sam out, and yet his mind is going a mile a minute, can’t stay focused on any one thing for more than a second. This isn’t him, this isn’t Sam and he’s going to kill me, if he doesn’t get me to kill him first. None of these thoughts are helpful, but Dean can’t help them, can’t stop them like he normally can in this kind of situation, where he’s hunting something -- something not Sam -- something that's a threat to either him or someone else.
Watch out for your brother, Dean.
You might have to kill him.
It's the last thought Dean has -- Sam is suddenly in front of him, arm raised, gun aimed and the next thing that fills Dean is an explosion as Sam pulls the trigger, a blast of noise and pain as the bullet tears somewhere into Dean’s shoulder, driving everything else out of his head as he loses his footing and tumbles off the dock into the water below.
The water is ice, so if Dean does lose consciousness, it isn't for very long, the sharp cold of Lake Superior not allowing him to completely pass out. It digs its liquid icicles into him immediately, makes every fiber in him stiffen and tense, shoves every ounce of warmth and air right out of him so that he can’t think of anything -- being shot, Sam being possessed, trying not to drown -- except how goddamn fucking frigid this water is and how it's squeezing the will to live right out of him.
There's a definite current, and while Dean has swam in stronger ones in both oceans, this one is plenty to deal with, especially since his left arm is useless, is both numb and on fire at the same time, and it becomes apparent very quickly that he isn’t swimming so much as flailing about -- and doing a pretty piss-poor job of it. He tries to push himself upward but the combination of the current and his fucked shoulder thwarts his attempts almost immediately, and he feels himself being helplessly pulled along in the water, unable to even get a handle on where he's at, where the surface is at or how deep the water is.
Sam shot me, Sam did this --
Not Sam, that’s not Sam --
His chest is beginning to ache, his lungs tight and full. I need to get out -- and he tries to move his left arm again, to make some sort of swimming motion, but he can’t do it, at least not in any significant way, and the water pulls him further under, the cold piercing into him even deeper, hampering his efforts all the more.
For the first time, Dean forgets about the cold, forgets about Sam, forgets about the bullet Sam unflinchingly fired into him, and focuses on the very real possibility that, in the scheme of things, none of that is going to matter because he's going to end up drowning in the next couple of minutes.
You can’t leave Sam that way--
Dean tries again, tries to claw his way through the icy water and up to the surface, but he's still being pushed by the current, is still too disoriented by the darkness to even try and get his bearings. The ache in his chest is a full blown fire, and Dean forgets everything except the need to breathe. One more time he pushes his arms into some kind of swimming motion but even as he does it, he can feel how tired his body is, how any strength he might’ve had is pretty much gone. He feels himself sinking even further down, and the flow of the water rolls him over onto his back, the force of it pulling him deeper down, further away from the surface -- or what should be the damn surface -- further away from air and light and --
Sam
He's beginning to lose it, as the water continues to rush around him, and it's only going to be a matter of moments before he gives in, his lungs feeling as though they're about to burst, and there's nothing he'll be able to do about it, not one damn thing, and just before he goes completely out and lets the water rush into him, Dean unthinkingly gropes for something -- any damn thing at all -- and his shoulder -- the one Sam put a bullet through without a blink of an eye -- knocks into something solid, something hard enough to jolt a flash of pain through his arm and all the way down his side and into his hip.
It's enough to pull him out of his disoriented stupor, and Dean wildly grabs at the -- object -- with his other hand, the pain from his shoulder and his air-starved lungs momentarily forgotten as he tries to grab onto whatever lifeline he’s managed to run into. It's a post or pole of some kind -- something wooden and thick -- and while it's too large for him to grab all the way around, Dean keeps his hands on it nonetheless, nails frantically scraping at the sides trying to find a handhold of some kind, anything so that he can pull himself up. He scrambles and claws as best he can but it seems fruitless -- whatever the post thing is attached to doesn’t seem to be anything Dean can use to save himself from goddamn drowning because Sam shot him, but just a big piece of wood out in the fucking middle of Lake Superior. Dean holds onto it anyway, still fighting the current, can’t seem to let go of it even though he's going to drown if he stays clinging to the damn thing, knows he can’t hold his breath another second, and just as he unwillingly tries to pull in air where there isn’t any, his hand catches onto a piece of metal -- Dean has no idea what it is, what it means other than it's coming out of the wooden post-thing horizontally and he somehow manages to grasp it with both hands and pull himself through the water in a half-assed upward motion. He's trying to hurry but the injured shoulder and the cold depth of the water and the fact that he's swallowing water because he can’t hold his breath any longer is making it that much more difficult in an already impossible situation. He keeps groping along the metal anyway, even though there's nothing left, he's going to drown, and just as huge black spots begin pulsing in his vision, he feels his arm break through the water and hit air, and he's so surprised that Dean can hardly think, hardly respond. Safe is the one word that flits through his mind as he flings himself toward the cold air and breaks the water’s surface, pulls himself onto the metal -- thing -- he's holding until his head is up and the blessed cold air is rushing over him.
He instinctively takes in a breath but to his shock he really can’t pull in any air -- not as much as he should be able to, anyway, and without even thinking about it, tries to cough out the water he’s just swallowed, get it out of his windpipe or the back of his throat or his lungs or wherever the hell it's sitting, but even that seems to be too much to ask, the sound he’s making barely a whistling grunt, and isn’t this just a big fucking joke, Dean thinks, as he tried to pull in another breath, getting out of the water and still not being able to breathe, and his second attempt to breathe is perhaps marginally better than his first, but it still isn’t good enough, and this time Dean gives it all he has, and somehow manages to cough up some of the water stuck inside him, and the flood gates open at last and he gags up another mouthful of Lake Superior water, takes his first real breath in at least two minutes, and then finally, finally actually coughs and gasps, coughs and gasps, in some kind of rhythm that allowes him to keep breathing in a half-assed sort of fashion.
And it's good enough -- enough to allow him to pull himself up along the metal thing -- a roller of some kind, Dean realizes -- that leads up to some wooden ramp. Some kind of thing that loads and unloads ships or something Dean thinks, as he pulls himself onto the ramp. Duluth is, after all, a port city on Lake Superior and Dean has, after all, just taken a dive into that very lake.
A dive courtesy of something that’s -- not Sam -- pulling the trigger on you --
Dean's exhausted, is still doing more coughing and wheezing than actual breathing but that's beginning taking a back seat to the fiery pain in his shoulder as his fingers search for the entrance wound, the blood leaking through as he tries to stop the flow. He’s nearly forgotten about it, about being shot by the thing that isn’t Sam, in his efforts not to drown, but now it's impossible to ignore, the pain and the blood and the realization that he’s actually been shot.
He rolls over, his back against the wooden planking, for just a minute, too done in to even lift his legs out of the water. He's only going to stay this way for a couple seconds at most, just long enough to catch his breath and stop all the hacking and choking, maybe find something to wrap the shoulder but that's all -- he has more important things to take care of at the moment.
Namely, finding Sam.
But he's so cold, so tired and he's bleeding, and he can’t even get his legs out of the water, much less get to his feet, and Dean doesn’t even feel it when his eyes close and he drifts into unconsciousness.
“Dean!”
It's not Sam’s voice, but a familiar one all the same -- Dean feels like he's still underwater, the only part of him that isn’t numb with cold being his shoulder, which is burning in pain. He can’t seem to get his eyes to open, and feels himself beginning to fall back to sleep despite the pain and the cold. “Dean!”
Again, but this time someone is pushing on him and Dean forces his eyes open. Jo.
Everything comes back to him then -- the water, the bullet, Sam --
Sam.
Jo is pulling him upright, babbling his name, saying some other stuff that Dean isn’t paying attention to. He can’t talk anyway, not with all the water he’s swallowed -- all he can gasp out is, “Where’s Sam?” and that's it, the pain from his shoulder and trying to breathe win out and Dean has to give his attention to that for the moment.
“I don’t know,” Jo says. “I was looking for you.” She's trying to pull him up, and Dean has no choice but to let her -- she's certainly persistent enough, and he needs to get up, get his ass out of this motherfucking water, get moving so he can find Sam --
Sam
He's shocked at how his legs don’t seem to want to work, how Jo's pretty much having to drag him -- hell, practically carry him, tiny thing that she is, up the road and back to the bar.
But, fuck it, he almost drowned. Another minute and Dean knows it would’ve been over, he would’ve either been taken by the current, swept out into the deep of Lake Superior or silently rolled over and lain down right there in the harbor -- whichever, it doesn’t matter, he’d been moments away from drowning --
And Sam would’ve never even looked back, never given you another thought --
So, it really shouldn’t be a surprise that he can barely walk, can hardly support his own weight, but Dean doesn’t have time for this shit, not when Sam -- or whatever this Sam-thing is -- is still walking around out there. Every second that ticks away means he's getting further and further away from Dean, and given what he’s shown he's capable of -- well, this shit had end pretty damn fast, before Sam actually hurts someone, hurts himself.
It's not that far of a walk back to the bar, but it seems to take forever. It doesn’t help that Jo's supporting a great deal of his weight so he can limp along, but it's slowing them down some, not to mention how he has to keep stopping every few feet to cough up more of the lake water he’d nearly drowned in, forcing them into a pace akin to a snail’s crawl.
“I don’t know, Dean,” Jo says, when they halt for a third time so Dean can hack up some more -- crap -- onto the ground. “Maybe I should just drive you to the nearest emergency room.”
“I’m -- okay.” He turns from her and sneezes out what feels like an impressively huge amount of lake water and snot, but which he can feel more of sloshing around inside him, and he sneezes twice more, before dissolving into another soggy coughing fit. Christ, he can still taste the cold, murky fishiness of that water in his nose and throat. “Just -- too much water.” He spits out whatever he’s just coughed up, and then sneezes again, tries to wipe his streaming nose on his sleeve but that's soaked -- and why the fuck wouldn’t it be, Dean thinks, before settling for swiping his hand across his nose and dealing with it that way.
“That’s what I’m saying,” Jo says. She's still holding onto his arm, and Dean can feel her trembling, hear the shakiness in her voice. “You were in that cold water for who knows how long, and you nearly drowned. That’s nothing to fool around with. You could end up with pneumonia.”
This is why she shouldn’t be out here doing this by herself yet, Dean thinks. He takes hold of her hand, roughly shoves it under his jacket and up to his shoulder, presses it to the still-bleeding wound. “I’ll be all right,” he says. He sounds harsh, he knows he does, he sounds downright pissed, but Dean doesn’t have time for this, time to baby her through everything right now, not with Sam running around out there, doing God-knows-what. “But I can’t go waltzing into some emergency room with this, and every second we stand here debating, Sam’s getting further and further away. Now, c’mon, I need you to keep it together here, and use you head a little.”
Her face grows still as she feels the wound with her fingers, but something changes with her then, her anxiety sliding into something -- hard. “Okay, I -- I can take care of that,” she says. “Come on, we’re not that far.”
At least that's something. And true to her word, once she pulls it together, Jo's able take care of the business at hand, rather efficiently if Dean's honest about it. She brings him a bottle of whiskey first thing, finds a blanket and throws it over his shoulders, gathers the stuff she needs to take out the bullet once they determine it's still lodged in Dean’s shoulder.
It doesn’t take her long to get it out, and as the whiskey takes hold, the shivering lets up, and Dean, despite how full of water his sinuses and lungs still feel, finds himself actually able to breathe in a somewhat normal fashion. She's going as quick as she can, but Dean is antsy, can feel Sam getting further away by the second. “Okay, are we about done?” he demands, as soon as she’s pulled the bullet out and dropped it into the glass. His voice sounds like shit, rough and jagged, but he supposes that's bound to happen when you swallow enough water to damn near drown. He takes another hit of the whiskey to try and get the raggedness out of his voice.
“Would you give me a minute to patch you up?” Jo says. She quickly tapes some gauze to the wound. “You can’t help Sam if you’re bleeding to death.”
She wants to talk, has questions about the demon in Sam, and while Dean does his best to answer them, his mind is already gone, is on Sam and where he might go next, what he might do next. But the moment she says she's coming with him, that gets his full attention. He almost laughs at that -- would laugh except it would’ve made him cough and he doesn’t want to hear another ER lecture from her, has already spent too much time on this as it is. “You’re not coming.”
“The hell I’m not. I’m a part of this now.”
She's right, in a sense -- she's worried about him, worried about Sam, even after what he’d almost done to her. And Dean does owe her -- he knows he does, she’d just had a hand in saving his life.
But he can’t mess with this right now -- can’t mess with her right now. “I can’t say it more plain than this. You try and follow me and I’ll tie you right back to that post and leave you there. This is my fight. I’m not getting your blood on my hands. That’s just how it’s gonna be.”
He means it, and he can tell that she knows he means it. Her face changes again, is still hard and determined but there's something else there as well, something Dean can’t name. “I’ll call you later,” he promises, a way of appeasing her, and even as he knows he means it while he says it, he also knows, ten seconds later when he's out the door, that he won’t call her. She wants to talk, wants to know what's happening and she deserves to know -- the last time Dean had seen her, it had ended so badly between them -- the three of them -- and then this, Sam ready to kill her at fucking knifepoint -- really, Dean knows he needs to talk to her, clear things up if he can, at least try and come to some sort of -- something -- about this whole fucked up mess that's just played out between all of them.
But it isn’t a conversation Dean can get into right now. It would take too much time, too much explanation -- two things he can't afford to indulge in at the moment.
He has to find Sam.
It isn’t until he's driving toward Bobby‘s, waiting for the heat to kick in so he can warm up -- though there isn’t much chance of that, given how soaked his clothes are -- and coughing up the latest round of lake water he's swallowed, that it becomes clear to him. You could end up with pneumonia Jo had said. I’ll be damn lucky if I don’t end up with pneumonia when this is all over with, Dean tells himself, spitting the shit he's hacked up out his open window and wishing he’d at least brought the whiskey with him.
I’m pretty fucking sure pneumonia’s going to be the least of your problems once you catch up to Sam.
And then he knows, knows what the look on Jo’s face had been, the one Dean hadn’t been able to place before, the glimpse he'd gotten through her misguided determination to go along, that flash that had lifted into her eyes when he'd told her she couldn't come with.
It had been defeat.