Title: An Impala and a Wendigo
Author: AlexJanna
Fandom: Supernatural
Pairing: Sam(12)/Dean(16)
Series: Ignorance is Bliss Verse
Rating: PG
Genre: Pre-Series AU
Word Count: 2, 811
Warning: wincest, established relationship, pre-slash(pre-sex), teen!chesters, underage, hurt!Sam, protective!Dean, maybe-not-so-much-in-denial!John
Summary: There's blood and pain and his oldest son begging his little brother to open his eyes in the back seat and John just steps on the gas and hopes he makes it in time.
A/N: This is the second one-shot I wrote for my Ignorance is Bliss verse. Not all of it is in John's POV, but I think it works.

There are few times in John Winchester's life that he is well and truly scared.

And one of those times is now. While he's driving at ungodly speeds through downtown Somewheresville and his youngest son is bleeding to death in the back seat.

He presses the pedal to the Impala's sheet metal under his feet and prays the cops don't pull them over. He doesn't think Sam will survive the explanation time that would take.

"Put pressure on it, Dean!" He snaps as he glances in the rearview mirror and sees his oldest son white faced and panicked crouched in the back on the floor between the seats and covered in his little brother's blood.

"I am!" Dean snaps back, not taking any heed for respect as he normally does. He doesn't really feel the need with his baby brother's guts nearly falling into his hands. "Just fucking drive, yeah!"

John lets that slide seeing as he's about two shakes from hyperventilation himself. He should have never let Sam come with them, never. Fucking wendigos and their fucking scalpel sharp claws.

"Sammy?" He hears Dean ask as he tries to cut some poor shmuck off just before the light turns red. "Sammy, baby, open your eyes."

Sam can hear his voice, John can tell by the way his brow scrunches in pain and a whimper falls past his lips, but other than that he's utterly, freakishly still.

Dean looks a little like his guts are spilling out onto the Impala's floor just then. His throat audibly tightens up and his hands shake as they press harder down on the blood soaked towel holding his brother together. "God, Sammy. Come on, baby. Open your eyes." He begs under the guise of keeping Sam lucid.

It's not really working, but Sam's eyelids flutter anyway and small slivers of hazel peak out from under them. He groans then coughs and there's blood at the corner of his lips.

Dean exhales in a high pitched whimper before lifting one hand up and cradling Sam's deathly pale cheek in his palm. "That's it, baby. Perfect. Sam, tell me how old you are?"

There's a whimper and keening sound then a garbled, "t'lve," before his eyes open again and lock onto Dean's like a life line.

Thank God, John thinks his eyes flicking back and forth from the road to the rearview mirror as Dean's whole body starts shaking with relief and adrenaline and panic. "That's good, baby. Good. Can you tell me where you are?"

John looks back then to see his bloody, spilt open kid give his brother a look that says, I–may-be-dying-but-I'm-not-stupid and answers, "'mpala," with less tongue and lips than would really make the word understandable.

He feels himself breathe again for the first time since he'd seen Sam go flying in a spray of blood. Sam can't be that bad off if he's mouthing off to his older brother. Even if he looks like he's got one foot in Death's doorway.

Dean seems to have had the same revelation since he lets out a sobbing laugh and presses shaking kisses to Sam's sweaty, dirt-covered, blood-smeared forehead. He doesn't draw away after that either, just stays hunched over, eyes locked with Sam's and breathing heavy and thick as if he could breathe for him.

John's all at once achingly glad that Dean's back there with Sam to hold him in this plane and positively terrified that if Sam stops breathing, Dean will too.

He doesn't think he could survive that.

Pulling up to the emergency dock was a nightmare all over again. Nurses and doctors converge on his dusty car and rip open doors with no respect to the classic vehicle. John doesn't particularly care at that moment as long as they fix his Sam; fix him right and make him keep on living.

He doesn't care about the rush and confusion until Dean lets out such a cry that you would think they were tearing him apart with their bare hands.

"No! No! Don't take him away! I have to be with him! I have to help him!" Dean screams at the top of his pubescent lungs and lunges past a couple of bouncer sized security guards in an attempt to follow Sam's gurney.

John is frozen in place as he watches his son put down three men nearly twice his sixteen year-old size with little care of injury to himself or them all the while screaming. "He'll die! He'll die!"

It's just about then that a strong warm breeze unfreezes his body and John jumps into the fray putting his son on the ground with a knee in the small of his back and an arm wrenched painfully back without much effort. It wouldn't have been that easy if Dean hadn't been covered Sam's blood and half wild and rabid in panic.

"Enough, Dean! Enough!" He shouts in Dean's ear until the boy finally realizes that his father is straining, actually hurting him to keep him in place. Then he just goes limp and collapses fully against the tile of the E.R. floor.

John nearly joins him, but he knows they're being watched by nearly everyone in the emergency room at that point and one of the nurses looks frightened and dangerously close to calling the police.

"Enough." He repeats once more, his hands shaking as he releases Dean and helps them both climb to their feet. "They're going to help him, son." He says, cause it's true. "Sammy's going to be fine. He's going to be fine."

Dean watches his lips move as if he's stone cold deaf and has to read them. His head nods, but his chest is heaving like he can't breathe. Maybe he can't, he did get thrown into a tree just before Sam was nearly gutted.

"Breathe, boy." He orders, voice gruff and commanding. "Breathe. You can't help Sam if you pass out, now breathe!"

"Yes, sir." Finally slips from his bloodless lips. He nods and straightens and his hands shake as they flutter around his stomach and chest as if looking for something. He looks down and all he sees is blood.

The watching EMTs, nurses, and the guards Dean beat the shit out of are picking themselves up and edging around them like they're wild animals. John doesn't care, but he instantly has a grudging respect for a weathered and seasoned nurse with a stern mouth and an unimpressed scowl that marches up to them and demands their information.

It's almost a relief to hand over a fake ID and jot down a stolen social security number then pass over a scammed credit card.

They sit in a waiting room looking like escapees covered in blood and gore and dirt. Sam's been in surgery for three hours and Dean's about ready to tear his own hair out. John's right along with him.

Suddenly, Dean pops up from his seat and starts pacing like a caged animal. John watches him with an unseeing stare and notes that he's limping on his right leg and favoring his ribs on the same side. He wants to sigh.

Dean won't hear about getting himself treated until they know Sammy's alright. John doesn't' even bother trying to convince him and gets a glare from the weathered nurse for his lack of effort. He returns it with a pointed look and she concedes the point. She's seen this type of thing before.

They wait.

"Mr. Goldstein?"

He and Dean jump and their gazes narrow down to the salt and pepper no-nonsense doctor in a white coat with a stern face.

Before Dean can jump him and start torturing information out of him, John stands up and clamps a warning hand on his shoulder. "Yes, that's me. Is my son alright?" He almost doesn't want to ask.

The doctor looks them both up and down taking everything in with a stoicism that John would have admired if one of his babies wasn't dying somewhere in the bowels of this hospital.

He doesn't comment on what he sees, just gives a sharp nod and begins to talk.

He's Doctor Rogers; he oversaw the surgery on Sam; he sewed him back together like the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz; he says that Sam's going to be just fine.

Dean's knees buckle under him and he might have hit the floor as all the tension and fear and panic and terror and adrenaline rushed out of him if John hadn't clamped a painfully tight hand around his elbow and held on.

"Thank you." He said around the tightness in his throat as he struggled to keep Dean from either collapsing into a shaking ball of tears, running through those god awful doors to find his brother, or launching himself at the doc and hugging him.

Sammy's been dosed with more painkillers than would sink a battleship and he's pale and tiny and fragile and Dean couldn't be torn away from his side once they'd let them in to see him.

"He won't be awake for a while yet." Doc Rogers said. "But you can sit with him for a few minutes."

John gives up that privilege to Dean. He knows that any other way, Dean would break down in front of God and half the hospital if he was torn away from Sam's side just then. Instead, John follows the doc to a quieter place to listen in painful detail about everything they'd done to save Sam's life and what needed to be done to ensure he stayed that way.

Sitting inside that hospital room, Dean stares at the rise and fall of his baby brother's chest.

There's an IV trailing from his right hand, oxygen tubes stuck up his nose, and a heart monitor strapped to his index finger that fills the room with a quiet beep, beep, beep. Dean thinks it's quite possibly the most beautiful sound he's ever heard.

Sammy had almost died. They'd almost lost him. His middle had been bisected like a frog in a junior high science class and Dean still reeked of his blood, covered in gore and dirt. It was a fucking miracle they'd all survived. A bloody fucking miracle.

Dean's hands sneak away from his lap for the first time in twenty minutes, one to his amulet around his neck, and the other to shakily stroke Sammy's tiny bruised fingers. Gentle and soft, cause they might break under his touch, they might break because Sam nearly broke and took Dean with him.

He wouldn't be able to live without Sam, and if he did it wouldn't have been a life at all.

In all his sixteen years, Dean had never been so frightened in his life. Never. He'd really thought that somewhere between that wendigo infested national forest and that rust bucket Toyota they almost creamed at that one stop light that he was going to lose his Sammy.

He was positive that the drive with Sam bleeding out under his hands and nearly incoherent had been the longest forty-five minutes of his life. As he sat there watching Sam breathe, listening to his heart beat, Dean felt close to tears.

That also might have something to do with the nauseating pain radiating from his cracked –possibly broken- ribs and his dislocated-then-relocated right hip. It made him feel old and definitely exhausted.

His head was aching, screaming from when he'd slammed it into the tree and he thought that he might actually have a concussion. If he hadn't passed out, slipped into a coma, or started hemorrhaging yet, he figured he wasn't going to so it would keep until either Sam woke up or his dad physically dragged him away.

You know, whichever came first.

Luckily for all those involved, Sam started to fight the drugs right about then and began drifting up from his medicated haze.

He blinked blurry unfocused hazel eyes up at the white ceiling before he groaned low in his throat and winced as he tried to move his limbs. They didn't particularly want to obey him.

"D'n." Sam whimpered when he realized that he couldn't move and that he was in some pretty immense pain. "Dean!" He forced it past the cotton and cobwebs in his mouth and throat.

Jumping out of his chair as fast as lightning and agitating his already pretty debilitating injuries, Dean paid his body's warning no heed as he almost collapsed against the side of Sam's hospital bed.

"Sammy! I'm here, Sammy." He said, watching in awe and relief as his little brother started squinting up at him, trying to focus on his face.

"Hey, baby." He smiled down at him weakly and lifted a hand to stroke over Sam's blood crusted hair. "How're you feeling?"

Sam closed his eyes and savored the tiny reprieve Dean's touch gave him from the pain before forcing them open once again and trying to force his brain into forming words. "Like shit." He slurred and tried to lift the hand with the IV stuck in it to grasp at Dean.

"Hey, now." Dean admonished lightly with a strained chuckle. "Don't move around, Sammy. They just sewed your guts back in your body. You gotta rest."

The memory of being torn open by razor sharp claws came back to him and Sam groaned, his head lolling groggily from side to side. Even thinking about his injury made the wound throb and scream in anger.

He felt close to tears. From the pain, the confusion, the aching need to just be held; he couldn't pinpoint which one, but he felt like a little kid again wanting nothing more than for Dean to wrap him up and keep him safe.

"Dean." He whimpered again finally catching the crunchy, dirty hem of Dean's t-shirt in a death grip. "You 'n Dad okay?" He asked worriedly.

His big brother just grinned tiredly, strained at him and nodded. "Sure, kiddo. We're fine. Just-" his breath caught in his throat, "just worried about you. You scared the shit out of us."

Sam could see that. It was painfully obvious just how close to death he'd come by the completely wrecked look on his brother's face.

"Sorry." He whispered, his throat finally deciding that it was too dry to talk normally. "Didn' mean to..."

"I know." Dean said stroking a hand through Sam's hair soothingly and giving his shoulder a comforting squeeze with the other. "I know, baby. Just get some rest." He said as he leaned forward and pressed a trembling kiss to Sam's cheek just bellow his eye.

"I'll be here when you wake up." Dean assured him when it looked like Sam was going to protest. "Me and Dad will be right here."

Sam seemed to deflate finally. The last of the strength he'd been clutching at finally slipping away. "Mkay." He slurred, his hazel eyes barely open and already cloudy with pain and painkillers and exhaustion.

"Love you." He whispered just before his eyes closed the rest of the way he slipped deep into sleep.

Dean's breath caught in his chest achingly, his vision blurred with a sudden onslaught of relieved tears as he pressed another painfully tender kiss to his baby brother's sleep slackened lips. "God," he gasped near silently, "Love you, too, Sammy. So fucking much."

John watched silently from the doorway as his oldest remained standing over his brother's bedside, one hand grasping Sam's fingers in a desperate, but gentle hold, the other stroking over Sam's hair soothingly.

Dean was hurting. That much John could see and not just emotionally, not just from having the most terrifying night of his life just as John had, but physically too. He wouldn't be pulled away from Sam soon though, John knew that. Even through his ribs were making it increasingly harder for him to breathe and his hip was threatening to give out on him if he didn't sit the fuck down already.

Despite this, John couldn't bring himself to tear Dean away from Sam just yet. The memory of the anguish and fear bleeding from Dean's every pore as he watched his brother get wheeled into the OR kept John from moving just yet. He would give Dean these quiet moments of relief and vigil over Sam's still breathing, still alive, sleeping body.

He can't help, but thank God, and Mary, and whoever was listening that he hadn't lost Sam tonight. That he hadn't lost both his boys. Because, as he stood in the shadows watching Dean stare as his brother's peacefully sleeping figure hooked up to machines and wrapped in so much gauze he could pass off as a mummy, John knew that his boys were so wrapped up in one another that no matter where one went the other would follow. Even into the afterlife.

End.