Title: To End Your Suffering

Author: MissAnnThropic

Spoilers: Set in Season 1

LiveJournal: miss_annthropic(dot)livejournal(dot)com

Summary: The forest was bombarded with a blinding light. When it faded, Dean stared down at the body before him. It was Sam, Dean knew, but only because Dean remembered what Sam had looked like at four years old.

Disclaimer: None of it's mine. I'm just a sad little fangirl that spends her days writing fanfic and watching DVDs of her favorite shows :(

Author's Note: I know, I know… Sam/Dean gets turned into a kid – done to death. I have no excuse beyond that the Muse wanted to do it, and I am slave to her whims.

Dean Winchester saw crazy crap on a daily basis. Between poltergeists, ghosts, demons, werewolves, vampires, and wendigos, to name but a few, there wasn't much that made him bat an eye. In his vast experience, as far as he was concerned, he'd seen it all.

And then something really crazy would find the Winchester boys and Dean would think 'what the hell?!'

At that very moment, Dean was wondering just what the hell was going on.

It had seemed like an easy enough case of dark magic, if there was such a thing as 'easy' when it came to dark magic. The signs were pretty typical. A normal town turned funky town when some local yokels got their hands on all the right plants and one wrong book of spells. Sure, these locals had seemed unusually proficient and potent for newbies, but nothing Dean and Sam couldn't handle.

Dean and Sam had tracked the practitioners into the forest in the dead of night. The scene was all just a little too cliché. There was a bonfire burning in the blackness, a full moon beyond the bare tree branches, and three men gathered around the flames.

Man witches. The only thing Dean hated more than witches were man witches. Sam pressed that 'they're called warlocks' crap, but Dean thought the word sounded too cool for dudes doing the work of haggish broads.

Dean and Sam snuck up on the midnight meeting with guns drawn. Dean knew he'd have to be the one to waste these guys if it got ugly. Witches and 'warlocks' were still humans, and Sam had a real moral problem wasting people. Even bad people. Dean knew that going in, and he was ready. Dean didn't like killing humans, per se, but he could do what had to be done. The needs of the many and all that good Spockian stuff.

When they got closer, Dean and Sam were both jolted by a new factor in the situation. A scream, high-pitched and panicked. It sounded like a woman or child. The brothers looked at each other. They hadn't counted on human sacrifice. Now they had to take the victim into consideration.

The man witches were struggling with their victim, dragging it closer to the fire, and Dean and Sam kicked it up to double time. The brothers couldn't see who the man witches had, the men themselves were blocking the view, but the cries were enough. Someone was in trouble.

Dean's entire grasp on the situation shifted when he and Sam, crouched near the treeline, got a look at the victim when one of man witches moved aside.

It wasn't a person at all. At first, Dean thought it was a horse. A pure white horse lying on its side bound with rope. That was weird enough, but when one of the man witches touched it, the horse screamed and thrashed its head… a head with a conspicuous single horn sprouting from its forehead.

"What the…?" Dean whispered to Sam.

Sam looked, bewildered, at his brother.

"Dude… is that a freaking unicorn?" Dean hissed.

Sam gaped and searched for words without success.

Dean was ready to call a retreat and regroup. People they saved, but what the hell were they supposed to do with a freaking unicorn?

But then something even weirder happened. The unicorn flailed, saw the Winchesters, and froze. Even Dean was chilled by it. A sky blue eye fixed on them, reflecting the ominous firelight, and there was something penetrating and captivating about that gaze.

Dean thought it was bordering on freaky, but something happened to Sam that took Dean's attention completely off the freaking unicorn. Dean still wasn't sure what happened, but his little brother went rigid. When Dean looked in his eyes, they were a thousand miles away.

Then it all went to hell in a hand basket. Before Dean could do anything about it, Sam leapt out with his weapon aimed. "Let her go!"

The man witches weren't going to be as accommodating as that, and Dean didn't have time to think. The man witches weren't so old school as to rely on their magic to be their weapons, and more guns entered the battle. Dean went on autopilot. At the start of the fray, with a single-mindedness that scared the hell out of Dean, Sam made his way to the unicorn, drew his knife, and cut her free. The unicorn leapt to her feet, white body orange and cobalt in the shadow and firelight.

Dean didn't see much of what was going on with Sam after that; two of the man witches went after Dean. He'd made enough of a ruckus to ensure it. That left one for Sam to handle, which was how Dean wanted it.

Dean shot one man witch at the outset. He had no compunction about it. They'd drawn guns on his little brother, and at that moment they proved their need to die. The second guy got the jump on him while Dean was shooting his buddy. It turned into a fist-fight. Dean heard gunshots, more than one, and it made him worry about Sam, but he had his own guy to deal with first.

Suddenly the man witch trading body shots with Dean went down. Dean hadn't touched him. Rearing in the place where the man had stood was the freaking unicorn, hooves lashing out, though the first hoof strike to the head had dropped the guy.

Dean flinched back. The single horn was coated in blood, staining white fur and forelock, as though it had been used as a spear. The freaking unicorn came down and when she did, Dean stood, mouth open incredulously. Sam was riding the damn thing. There was his younger brother, curled over the unicorn's neck, hands in her silvery mane.

"What the…" Dean asked of no on in particular, looking around to see three bodies on the forest floor.

The unicorn swung around to give Dean a broadside and Sam held out a hand. "Come on, Dean."

Dean blinked. "Excuse me? You don't actually think I'm going to get on that thing, do you?"

Dean couldn't see Sam's face in the shadow from the fire backlit behind him, but Sam's silence said it all.

"Come on, man. What are you doing up on that? Get down before it kills you."

"She's not going to hurt us."

"How do you know that?"

"She told me, all right?"

"Told you? What, are you Doctor Doolittle now?"

Sam shook his extended hand insistently. "Just come on!"

Dean didn't see the need for urgency, but before he could argue further with Sam the freaking unicorn turned her head to Dean and the look… it had a reproach Dean couldn't explain. And an urging that mirrored Sam's. It left Dean clearly outnumbered.

With a curse under his breath, Dean took Sam's hand and swung up on to the unicorn's back behind his brother. The animal crab stepped and flicked her tail. Dean slid in behind Sam and griped, "You know, if anyone should be the bitch on back…"

"Shut up, Dean," Sam rasped.

The unicorn took off into the woods at a breakneck gallop. Dean had no choice but to hang on like a sissy to his little brother, pressed all up on him like a girl while they rode a freaking unicorn through the night.

Which left him on perhaps the weirdest night of his life, riding double with his brother on a freaking unicorn and still wondering what in the holy hell was going on.

Dean had to admit, though, that freaking unicorn could run.

They had not gone far when Sam hunched closer over the unicorn's mane and croaked tightly, "… stop..."

Unicorn forgotten, Dean's instincts screamed at the tone in Sam's voice.

Something was wrong.

At once, the unicorn slowed to a halt. The second it did, Sam slid to the ground and collapsed. Dean's heart stopped. In front of him where Sam had been sitting, the unicorn's mane, shoulders, and back were red with blood.

"SAM?!" Dean jumped off the unicorn and knelt at his brother's side. Sam was curled around his midsection, holding his abdomen. "Hold on, Sam," Dean said as he fished into his pocket for his flashlight. When turned it on and got his first good look at Sam, he cursed. Sam's hands were covered in blood and his clothes around his stomach were darkened by it.

"Shit, Sam… what happened?" Dean thought at once of the unicorn's bloody horn.

"Warlock… shot me…" Sam hissed.

"Damnit," Dean wedged the flashlight between his elbow and thigh and pried Sam's hands away from the wound and pulled up the shirt. It was bad. Very bad. 'Even a Winchester would take this one to the hospital' bad.

"It's not too bad," Dean tried to sound reassuring.

Sam didn't answer as his eyes slipped shut. His silence was deafening.

"Sam?" Dean reached up to his brother's face. His skin was cold. Shock. Blood loss. Dean knew what followed quickly on their heels.

"Sam!" Dean pressed his hands down hard against his brother's wound, trying to staunch the flow of blood. He had already lost so much, though… too much.

Sam grumbled in pain but his muscles were growing lax, melting him limply into the damp foliage of the forest floor.

"No! Don't do this, Sam." They needed an emergency room. A doctor.

They were in the middle of nowhere and not about to get to either any time soon.

Sam's breathing started to catch weakly.

Dean panicked. "Sam! Come on, man, you stay with me! This is not how you die, Sammy. Not by some damn man witch! Now, come on!"

Sam went still beneath him.

Dean only knew Sam was still alive by the fresh trickle of blood coming up between his fingers. A stream of red that was growing less and less by the second.

Dean's heart was racing. He was losing his brother. Dean didn't know how to stop it. He couldn't, for the life of him, figure out how he could save Sam. Stuck in the middle of the woods in the middle of the night, he couldn't think of a way to get Sam help in time.

'Would you like me to take away his suffering?'

Shocked by the melodic voice that sprung from deep inside his mind, because his ears definitely didn't hear it, Dean's eyes shot up. The unicorn was standing before him, watching him with those creepy blue eyes.

He had heard a voice, hadn't he? He wasn't so sure. He thought he must have, but the only other creature in sight was that freaking unicorn.

Dean blinked, wondering if he was losing his mind.

The unicorn took one step closer. 'Would you like me to take away his suffering?'

It was her. Dean couldn't believe it… it was the freaking unicorn talking to him in his head.

He'd boggle about that later. Right now, Sam was dying.

"Take away his suffering?" Dean repeated sharply.

The unicorn dipped her head faintly in what looked a lot like a nod.

Could it save Sam?

But unicorns belonged with the myths of leprechauns and goblins, neither of which Dean would trust as far as he could throw. He stared at the animal's bloody horn and shivered.

"You mean, like, take away the suffering of a horse with a broken leg? No thanks," Dean's fingers clenched tighter around Sam's seeping wound. Desperation and despair cracked his voice. "Get the hell away from us."

The unicorn looked sad. 'I can heal him. You and he saved me. Let me take away his suffering.'

Sam's bleeding had slowed to almost nothing. Dean couldn't even tell if his little brother was breathing anymore.

At this point, Dean saw little choice. He stiffly nodded and leaned reluctantly away from Sam.

The unicorn stepped delicately up to Sam's sprawled body. She dipped her head further, closed her eyes, and touched the tip of her horn to Sam's forehead.

The forest was bombarded with a blinding light. Dean couldn't stop himself from looking away.

It seemed to last a heartbeat and a lifetime.

Dean looked back toward his brother and the brilliant light faded.

The unicorn stepped back.

Dean stared down at the body before him.

It was Sam, Dean knew, but only because Dean remembered what Sam had looked like at four years old. For that's what lay before him. A child. A little boy, little Sam Winchester, swimming in the bloody clothes of adult Sam and lying still as death with his eyes closed.

Dean gaped. He leaned down and felt a pulse in the little boy's neck. Dean pulled back the oversized clothes enough to see the abdominal wound had vanished.

Just when the night could not get any weirder…

Dean looked up at the unicorn. Suddenly, he drew his gun, aimed it at the animal, and screamed, "This is what you call fixing this?! What have you done to him??"

The unicorn looked confused by the gun aimed at it. 'I took away his suffering. He is better now.'

Dean looked down at the small boy lying where he brother had been just seconds ago.

"He's practically a baby! How do you call this 'better'?"

The unicorn looked long at Dean. Dean felt uneasily like the freaking unicorn expected him to already know the answer to that question. 'I sought to take his pain. There were pains in his life beyond his wound. They are gone now. He is better.'

Dean got the feeling it was the kind of conversation one would have arguing philosophy with a turtle.

Sam began to stir. Dean leaned closer and, for the moment, ignored the freaking unicorn. He held his gun in the general direction of the animal with one hand and touched Sam's cheek with the other. "Sam?" The boy groaned at his name. "Hey, open your eyes for me."

Sam did. He gazed up blearily at Dean. Dean managed a weak, harried smile for his especially little brother. Sam frowned in puzzlement at Dean, his eyes widened, and then he started to scream.

"Whoa! Hey, it's okay," Dean frantically tried to calm the boy, abandoning his weapon on the forest floor to hold up both hands in a non-threatening gesture at Sam.

The gesture was lost on the apoplectic little boy. He struggled against the voluminous clothes to sit up and attempt to back away from Dean. "Who are you?" Sam cried. Sam looked around desperately and began to wail harder. "Where am I? What's going on? Where's Dean? I want Dean! DEAN!!"

"Sam, it's me. I'm Dean."

The boy emphatically shook his head, dark blond hair flopping over his forehead. "You're not my brother! You're old!" Sam began to shake. "Where's Dean?" he whimpered. Then Sam was reduced to inconsolable sobs.

At a loss for how to deal with his de-aged little brother, Dean almost didn't see the unicorn stepping closer. He had half a mind to shoot her, but instead he watched as she came up to Sam and gently pressed her velvet-soft muzzle against Sam's wet face. Sam immediately hiccupped, quieted, and gazed up at her in almost drunken, stupefied awe. She blinked at him then gently licked away the smear of blood on his forehead left by her transforming horn. Sam's eyes fluttered closed, then he swayed and sank to the ground in a deep sleep.

Dean rushed to his brother and checked his breathing and pulse again. Normal.

Sam seemed unhurt, merely asleep.

"What did you do?" Dean demanded.

'I gave him peace.'

"Well, while you're handing stuff out, how about giving me a freaking clue? What am I supposed to do with him now? Is he going to go back to his old self?"

The unicorn puzzled at him. 'I took his pain. I cannot give it back to him. I would not. He is free now.'

"What the hell does that mean? So you mean I'm stuck with four-year-old Sam? Damnit, what am I supposed to do with that?! Why am I asking you? I can't believe I'm talking to a freaking unicorn!"

The unicorn, as though content that her job was done, turned and walked away, beginning to melt back into the forest. Dean watched her go, flabbergasted.

Just before she disappeared, the unicorn looked back once at Dean.

'Take care of him. Give him joy where there had been suffering.'

Then she was gone and Dean was alone with his unconscious brother who had been reduced to a small child.

Dean would give his left arm for cell phone coverage right about now. Surely Dad or Bobby would have some idea what to do, because Dean was fresh out.

Dean had no idea what to do about what had happened to Sam, but what Dean did know how to do was take care of Sam.

While his brother slept peacefully, Dean extricated his tiny brother from the gargantuan clothes of six foot four Sam and used clean bits of Sam's old shirt to wipe the remaining blood off the miniature body of his brother. Then Dean shed his jacket, peeled out of his own t-shirt, and wrapped Sam in the black cotton. He put his jacket back on over his bare torso, feeling quite the man-whore from some kind of calendar shoot.

Dean gathered Sam up, tucked the sleeping child against his shoulder, and began to long walk out of the forest.

To Be Continued…