Chapter Text
The cabin door hits the wall hard enough to splinter.
Sam is through it before the echo dies, Dean half a step behind him, and then you. You've been doing this long enough now that the three of you have a shape to it, a choreography that doesn't need words.
What you haven't gotten used to is how fast it can go wrong.
The couple is strung up against the far wall, arms pulled overhead and lashed tight, bodies sagging with the weight of however many days they've been hanging there. You see it in the first second. They're alive, conscious enough to register you're not another werewolf, but too far gone to do much else. The woman's head lifts. The man's eyes track you.
You go for them. That's your job. You grab a chair to stand on.
The cabin erupts.
Sam takes the first werewolf high and fast. You hear the crash of the table before you see it, wood splintering under the impact of Sam's body, and you don't turn to look because you can't, because Dean is already in it with the second one and the room is nothing but sound and movement and the kind of violence that comes with a fight that was always going to happen.
You reach the couple. Their wrists are cuffed to an iron hook bolted into the overhead beam, not rope. Metal, and your lock picks go in by feel because they're way above your head, but more importantly because you can't stop tracking movement in your peripheral vision.
The woman's head lolls toward you. Her lips are cracked.
"Hey," you say quietly. "Hey, look at me. We've got you."
She doesn't answer. You keep working.
The fight is loud and close and every few seconds something crashes, the table, a body against the wall, Dean's grunt when he takes a fist, and you run through the lock by touch, feeling for the give, hands above your head and shoulders burning with it. The woman's cuffs release first. She crumples when the weight comes off and you catch her by the arm, lower her as fast as you can, and reach back up for the man.
That's when you hear it.
Just the crack of a gunshot and then, a beat later, the dull impact of knees on wood.
You turn.
Sam is on his knees four feet away from you, looking down at his own stomach with an expression that hasn't caught up to the situation yet, the way a person looks when the pain is still incoming and the body is still trying to decide what to do about it. His hands come up slow, pressing in. Dark and spreading.
"No!"
You're moving before you decide to move. Dean turns on the werewolf who pulled the trigger, drives the knife home, already turning toward Sam.
Sam's knees hit the floor. Then his back.
A small sound leaves him, more breath than voice.
"Sam!"