Wow, here I go! It's been a while since I've posted anything, but since this is already mostly written I think I'm safe. Be careful, there are some descriptions of injuries in the next chapter, and some sort-of character death. And time travel, don't forget the time travel.

Dean had gotten there as soon as he could.

After his father had called him and said he'd needed help on a hunt, he'd gunned it all the way to Michigan, and got to the hotel around noon. His father hadn't said what was going on over the phone, just that things were behaving oddly and something was up, but his father would never ask for help on a hunt if it wasn't a big deal.

Room 023. First right, three doors down. That was it.

Dean knocked, waited half a second, then opened the door. It was unlocked and the hotel was evacuated.

John looked up from his journal as soon as Dean entered the room."Good, you're here. There's been a lot of demonic activity around here, spiking about a month ago, and then nothing until now. Something's coming."

Dean blinked, thrown for a moment by the transition—when John had told him to hurry, he'd envisioned something a little more immediate.

John raised an eyebrow at his son's lack of perceptiveness.

"It's arriving tonight, whatever it is. And it's big enough to scare off every demon in a ten-mile radius." He said.

"Ah." Dean replied. That sounded bad. "So, what is it? Demon? Some kind of spirit? Should we be getting out the holy water?"

His father just shook his head. "I'm not sure. There's nothing—anywhere—that references something like this happening. Whatever it is, it's never come around before."

That meant preparing for everything, then. At least there wasn't any research involved. Dean sat on one of the two beds in the sterile, white room. "Do we know when it's coming?"

"Should be about eight tonight, if the pattern holds. We'll have time to stock up on everything we need to, and get some rest besides, if we're lucky. For now, you stand guard here and I'll restock on ammo."

"Sir." Dean nodded his acquiescence and leaned back on the bed, preparing for a long wait. John walked out of the hotel room.

Not five minutes had passed before Dean's phone rang in his pocket. Pulling it out, he checked the caller I.D.

And promptly dropped his phone onto the mattress.

Sammy?

His stubborn, prideful little brother was calling him? On his own, without…well, anything?

Dean scrambled to scoop his phone up and fumbled with the talk button. He'd never thought he'd hear from him until Sammy was ready to come back home from college or Dean finally gave up on living without his brother, but if Sammy was calling now, he certainly wouldn't waste the chance.

"Sammy?" He asked, breathless.

"Dean! Are you alright?" Sam's voice came through the phone, tinny and worried but there.

"Sam! Did something happen? Why are you calling?" He demanded, sitting up on his bed. Sam's tone was borderline frantic and Dean didn't like it.

"I…no. Nothing. Tell me, are you alright? Are you hurt anywhere? Talk to me, Dean." Sam's voice was no less tense, but now Dean could practically feel the I shouldn't have called, I'm just gonna go, why did I think this was a good idea? creeping in.

"I'm fine, Sammy, I haven't been doing anything too dangerous lately. What's going on?"

Sam sighed. "It's nothing, I'm sure. I shouldn't have called. It was just a feeling. Look, I've got to go." And before Dean could say anything, his little brother hung up on him.

Dean frowned, thinking, even as he automatically moved to call Sam back. Sammy's instincts were uncanny—he couldn't remember the last time Sam had had a bad feeling about something that hadn't turned out to be completely deserved. For Sam to be concerned enough to call, despite practically disowning his family a year ago when he finally cut ties with Dean…it didn't bode well.

He cursed as his call was ignored and got up to pace the floor of the hotel room. He didn't like this. Some mysterious demonic activities, Sammy calling after months of silence for a bad feeling…and that wasn't all. Sam had sounded scared. Sam just wasn't afraid of many things—not after being trained as a hunter. Something rattling his brother that much was almost unheard of.

Dean called Sam one more time before giving it up as a lost cause. Obviously his brother had recovered his pride enough to remember that he wasn't talking to Dean and wanted nothing to do with supernatural anything.

He was still pacing the length of the hotel room, and still no closer to answers, when John came back in bearing weapons and ammunition of all kinds.

"Sammy just called me." Dean blurted out the instant his father crossed the threshold.

His father nearly dropped his load of weaponry before recovering his composure.

"I thought the two of you didn't talk anymore?" He asked.

Dean let out a frustrated huff of air. "That's just it—we don't. I didn't think I'd be hearing from him for a couple more years at least, but then he calls me and says he has a bad feeling. He kept asking if I was okay. He sounded scared, dad."

John's brow furrowed. He'd always put credence in Sam's instincts, sometimes even more than Dean. He knew immediately what Dean was worried about.

"You think this is related to what's going on here? Do you think Sam knows something we don't?"

But Dean shook his head. "He would have told me if he thought we were walking into danger and he could prevent it. He hasn't been answering my calls, so I'd say he's said all he's going to."

John's brow furrowed and he moved to set his armful of weapons down on the far bed.

"We'll have to be cautious about this, but we can't just ignore it. Something could happen tonight that puts everyone in this town in danger, and we need to be here to stop it. We'll set up salt lines and wait it out." Dean's father declared, checking one of the guns for ammunition.

Dean settled down to help him, and they waited for the night.

It happened suddenly. One minute there was nothing there, the next there was a solid weight pressing into Dean's back.

"Well, that was a pyrrhic victory," a familiar voice remarked in Dean's ear before he could feel a body slump over him and slide to the ground. He whipped around.

"Sammy?"

It hadn't occurred to him that Sam's bad feeling might not be for Dean at all—that something could happen to Sam. Sam was supposed to be safe and away at college, not slumped half-curled in a hotel room.

Dean saw blood begin spreading beneath his brother's body and his whole world tilted just a little before he was pushed to the side by a worried father.

"Sam. Look at me, Sam, look up. Sam!" John crouched down next to his youngest, carefully turning him over, and Dean's world went even a little more off-kilter when he registered what a bloody mess his brother was.

Sam had a deep stab wound going straight through his abdomen, and several cuts and scratched of varying depth all over him. One went straight across his lips on the left and Dean noted absently that it was going to scar before his father's voice snapped him out of his daze.

"Dean! First aid kit, now. I'm getting these clothes off of him."

Right. Get rid of the clothes, apply bandages, stop Sammy from bleeding out all over the hotel room. Dean scrambled to his feet—when had he stopped standing? And over to the bed where the first aid kit sat, just in case. He shoved it in his father's face just when John got done cutting Sam's shirt off of him. Some of the blood was old, because the shirt stuck and Sam flinched and groaned when they tore it off.

Immediately, Dean was handing his father a needle and thread while he got busy with disinfectant and bandages.

It was a tense half hour or hour or lifetime while they stitched his little brother back to life. Sammy was still too pale and not very responsive, but they got him into a bed and out of the danger zone. Dean and his father sat on the other bed, surrounded by weapons. Dean couldn't help noticing that despite how clearly he'd been in a fight—one with both guns and blades, not to mention claws, if the cuts all over Sam were any indication—Dean's baby brother had no weapons on him whatsoever.

A sitting duck.

Dean had let his brother get away from him and he'd been a sitting duck. Ready for anyone to half-kill him.

"He said it was a pyrrhic victory. Whatever was supposed to come here isn't coming." John's voice broke into his thoughts, sounding just as exhausted as Dean is.

Dean just kept staring at his little brother.

A pyrrhic victory. A victory that wasn't worth the price.

Dean couldn't agree more.

"Why Sammy?" He asked the room in general. "He quit hunting. He wanted a normal life—like a civilian."

His father just shook his head. "That's a question Sam'll have to answer. Maybe he figured out what was going on. Maybe he was just unlucky. We'll know as soon as he wakes up."

Well-intentioned as he might be, John Winchester wasn't made for long periods of inactivity any more than Dean was. Before long, he was moving through the room, keeping some weapons out and putting some in a pile to go back to the Impala. By the time an hour had passed and Sammy hadn't moved, he'd gone out and gotten coffee and food, along with more bandages and disinfectant to replenish the first aid kit.

Dean hadn't moved from his post on the side of the bed, watching his brother in unconsciousness.

Two hours passed and John gave up on trying to get Dean to eat anything, moving to guard the door.

Another hour and Sam woke up with a gasp.

Immediately, he struggled to sit up, coughing blood onto the sheets in the attempt. It was old blood, but Dean wondered if they shouldn't have brought him to the hospital.

"Sam. Sammy, it's me. You're safe. Calm down, there you go, Sammy. It's me." Dean murmured, smoothing his hands through his brother's ridiculous hair.

Sam mumbled something incoherent, eyes focusing on Dean, as he relaxed just a little and sat back against the headboard. He looked dazed for a moment before he shook it off.

"Dean," he murmured, "Dean, I'm sorry."

And damned if that didn't look like the saddest thing he's ever seen. Sam looked down and avoided Dean's eyes.

"What? What are you sorry for?" John asked him, crossing the room in a few short strides.

Sam jerked his head up to look at him, then seemed to reel a bit from the effort as he swayed against the headboard.

Then he broke out into a huge, painful smile. It has to be pulling on the cut across Sam's lips, but he doesn't seem to notice a thing.

"It worked," he murmured, "you're alive. You're alive."

John kept pressing, sitting on the side of the bed opposite Dean. "What worked, Sam? What happened there? What did you win, and how?"

Sam flinched, just a little, and Dean clamped down on the urge to defend his brother. They needed to know what was going on, and they needed Sam to tell them while he was still too out of it to avoid their questions.

"We won…I don't think we won. No, we didn't win. But he's dead now. He's dead. He's gone. He'll never hurt us again. We won." Now that Sam's words had started, they just didn't stop. "I'm so sorry, I wanted to tell you but you would have stopped me it was too dangerous Dean I'm sorry I think Cas is dead there was an explosion Dean I'm sorry they're dead I didn't want anyone to die I just wanted to not hurt anyone I don't want to be a monster he had to die Dean I-"

Just as suddenly as he'd started, Sam stopped, blinking at Dean with an eerie clarity.

"You're not Dean."

Dean recoiled, confused. "Yes, Sammy, I am Dean. Why wouldn't I be Dean?"

Sam shakes his head, then stopped as it pulls at his stitches.

"Dean wasn't at the battle. We were careful. He's only human and it was wrong but I needed him to be safe, he wasn't at the battle. Where am I?"

Great. So when Sam had called earlier, he'd been preparing for a battle. One that was too dangerous for Dean. Then, presumably, everything had gone to hell and Sam's ally (allies?) had been wounded or killed, but he'd managed to kill whatever nasty had been about to come.

John piped up again. "Sam, you appeared in a hotel room. There's been off-the-charts demonic activity around here for almost a year, and then nothing for a month. We were expecting a demon more powerful than anything we've ever seen, and you appeared. What was it that you fought?" He asked, leaning forward into the very edge of Sam's personal space.

Sam shrank back, just a little. Subtly. His eyes hardened as he made a decision.

"…I can't tell you that," he said flatly, tasting the words. "I need to go."

He began to move towards standing, but Dean gently put his hand on his brother's chest. Sam jerked away like he'd been shot, cringing.

"Dude, you're not going anywhere for another week. Someone stabbed you through. You're lucky you didn't die." He had to say those words out loud. What Dean wanted was to grab his brother by his shoulders and shake some sense into him, but for now he just needed his brother to stay safe and recover.

Sam made a distressed expression, somehow conveying betrayal and upset through his eyebrows, since his mouth was probably hurting like a bitch. "He wouldn't kill me. You may not like him—won't like him when you meet him—wouldn't like—whatever. He wouldn't kill me. Not if it would save the world."

And now Sammy'd got that stubborn look about him. They'd get no more out of him tonight, and he proved the point by carefully moving himself into a better position for sleeping and pointedly closed his eyes against his family.

Dean manages to convince John with a look and an eyebrow-tilt to let the kid sleep. He needed to heal. They'd gotten some information, enough to know if he changed his story too much, and that was all they needed for now.

John nodded silently and got up to join Dean on the other bed.

Dean shifted to make room. "Alright. We know that Sammy knew about someone, probably someone who hurt him in the past. Do you think this might be the demon that killed mom?"

John looked thoughtful. Keeping the conversation just above a whisper, he replied, "Could be. He mentioned several times that it had hurt someone and he didn't want anyone to die. Especially if he was calling you to say goodbye, just in case he didn't come back. If it was the demon that killed Mary, he probably wanted us to stay out of the whole thing until it was dead, if it was as powerful as it seems to have been."

"So he found out that it was coming here, and that we were here, and ran off half-cocked to kill it? That doesn't sound like Sam," Dean countered.

John nodded, stroking his chin. "Could be that he had a plan. He mentioned an ally, maybe more than one. He might have walked in thinking he knew what he was doing, underestimated his enemy, and gotten his ally killed. Or it could have just been a last resort—a sort of last-ditch effort to kill or weaken it before it got to us. That seems more like your brother," he suggested.

"So he knew he was screwed and fought the thing anyway. His ally got killed and he killed the demon, then whatever was bringing the demon here just grabbed Sam instead? Can that happen?"

John took his journal out of his coat pocket, flipping through it. "For some rituals. If Sam was directly the one to kill it, its power might have rubbed off on him enough that the ritual would activate using him instead. For some demons, they have to be killed the right way or they give you some nasty curses. Especially the older ones."

Dean glanced over at his brother, who was asleep or doing a very good job of pretending. "He was beat up, but I don't see any obvious curses. Hopefully this'll be the only consequence."

"You're right, and we'll see soon. Once he's recovered some, we'll ask him for the details." With that, John got up and started rummaging through his duffel in the corner. "In the meantime, we'll need to rest up. I'll take first watch."

Here's to hoping you liked it! Don't worry, the rest of Team Free Will should be showing up soon, depending on how I divide the chapters. After all, it's their story too.