Not on my watch

1. The bet

Brother, let me be your fortress

When the night winds are driving on

I'll be the one to light the way

Bring you home

(Brother, NEEDTOBREATH feat. Gavin DeGraw)

Dean stopped the car just in time not to crash into the gate of the porch. The hard braking was like a shriek, able to lacerate the serenity of the night like a dagger with a silk voile, and the boy cursed himself not to have looked before leaping. He could have thought about it. Be cautious. Park faraway, so he would racket less.

- Shit - he whispered, as if a single word could make up for the mistake, tearing the keys away from the car before glancing at the house, troubled.

If someone had been there, he thought, by then the harsh slamming on the brakes of the Impala would have woken them up. But no light had been turned on, everything stayed still despite the fact that Dean felt his heart beat madly against a ribcage that threatened an explosion. Maybe the habitation was really still empty.

- Okay - he murmured, more to reassure himself than his passenger. - Okay, let's go.

With a remarkable leap, if you considered his training as a hunter, he got out of the Impala, closed the car door with all the gracefulness he was capable of and reached the passenger car door with few rapid steps, never ceasing to throw agitated glances at the silent house.

When he opened the Impala, he allowed himself a moment to observe how Sam had messed it up and he sighed, dejected: his brother was soaked to the skin from head to toe. Under the thick wool blanket that a firefighter had wrapped him in, his summer clothes were dripping as much as his hair locks and the teenager was shaking badly because of the bitter cold that had leaked in his bones. His hands, purple, were holding on tight to the edges of the blanket; his feet, covered only by socks that by then looked like chewed seaweed, had never stopped rubbing against each other in a useless attempt to retrieve at least a glint of heat.

We fed him for sixteen years for nothing, Dean had thought implacably when, not an hour before, he had understood in what kind of trouble Sam had got into.

But the instant his brother had fallen in front of him, drenched and without his shoes, although fresh from a dive in the deepest and most dangerous stretch of the river, his heart had softened to the point that Dean could not do anything but hug him. The look of terror with which Sam had accompanied the firefighter's story, thanks to whom Dean had got to know everything, had persuaded the older to discern his priority. And surprisingly this was not all about slapping Sam in the face until he forgot his own name.

Once he got to know about the party and about the alcohol level that had been found in Sam's blood as well as in his friends' - his fellows in suicidal attempts into the freezing current, they should have been called -, Dean had given his younger brother an exasperated glance. But then he had begged the firefighter to let the troublemaker go back home with him without going through the police station. Both Dean and Sam knew what that would have meant: Sam would not have been authorized to leave if not in the company of a guardian, and Dean could not have looked like one in front of a suspicious police officer. They would have had to wait for John to be located and to deign to go get his younger son.

If he believes it's worth it, had pondered Dean, remembering that time when his father had been able to leave him in the hands of the authorities for two months in order to punish him for stealing food.