Chapter Text
Of all the things to be fearful of in his line of work, Dean Winchester was scared of flying. Honestly, one would think that somebody who parachutes into two-thousand plus degree wildfires on a regular basis wouldn’t be scared of something so… Well, his little brother Sammy would call it a trivial fear. He would probably break off into some rant about aerodynamics and lift, and how the chances of the plane crashing were slim to none– but what did he know anyway? He was just a seventeen-year-old kid who hadn’t been on a plane since their family took a trip to Disney Land when he was five. Besides, Dean would be too busy hyperventilating to hear anything he was ranting about anyway.
Like now. He was supposed to be debriefing with the foreman and the rest of his team about the uncontrollable wildfire they were about to parachute into, but instead he was sitting in the back of the plane’s cabin puffing into a paper bag and trying not to hurl every time they hit a little bit of turbulence.
“Y’okay, brother?” Benny drawled by his side, knocking their shoulders together and handing Dean his parachute pack. He did his best to nod while still breathing into the paper bag, taking the pack roughly and slinging it over his shoulders. He started to buckle himself in mindlessly, having memorized the routine after years of being a smokejumper.
“Never seen a blaze like this before,” Benny noted almost conversationally, and Dean glanced over at his friend who was peering out the window of the plane, his face illuminated with orange light from the fire below them, even from this high elevation. They were flying over Ouachita National Forest in Arkansas, an estimated seven minutes away from their jump zone. The cabin was bustling with activity, all of the men preparing themselves for the jump and strapping on their heavy equipment. As he forced himself to his feet unsteadily and began to prepare as well, Dean couldn’t decide if he was more nervous about jumping into the flames or more excited to finally get off of the plane.
They hit another pocket of turbulence, sending half of the men in the cabin (including Dean) toppling into each other, and he decided that it was the latter statement that was true.
“Winchester, Lafitte, you two are going down first,” their foreman commanded, ushering the two of them forward so that they were standing right near the plane’s door. Hot air from below blew in Dean’s face and he squinted against the wind, adjusting his oxygen mask to make it tighter. The foreman gave him a skeptical look. “You alright there, Dean?”
He grinned back. “Never been better, Bobby.”
The older man snorted, shaking his head and reaching out to clap Dean on the shoulder. “Alright, ya idgit. Be safe down there,” he said, then turned away from Dean, addressing all of the men. “All of you. This is a big blaze, but it isn’t anything you all can’t handle. You’re the best of the best for a reason.”
There was a loud chorus of ‘yes sir’s, and then with one last glance at the plane’s radar, Bobby was nudging Dean and Benny closer to the edge of the plane. “Whenever you boys are ready,” he shouted. Dean nodded, turning to Benny and giving his best impression of a confident smile.
“You done your check of threes, brother?” He asked. Benny grinned back at him and nodded.
“Got my straps, my handles and my cords all in order. Only one thing left to do!” he shouted back, and with a loud WHOOP! he dove right out of the plane, disappearing into a cloud of smoke almost as soon as he stepped off the side. Dean watched him go; watched him fall away into the clouds, and after only a moment’s hesitation he joined him, soaring through the sky and down towards the blaze that had become of the Ouachita Forest.
Billows of gray and white smoke immediately clouded his vision, and for what was not the first time in his life Dean was grateful for his oxygen mask. If he didn’t have it right now he would probably be dead already from suffocation, the air was so heavy with it.
He counted the seconds as he fell, heart pounding rapidly in his chest as wind whistling in his ears. It never ceased to amaze him, the things that he found himself thinking during these times. Of all of the things to think about during freefall, when your body and sometimes even your mind could trick you into believing you were dying, Dean always chose to think of the oddest things. For instance, today, it was math. How his mass, combined with the height of his jump, could affect his velocity and therefore the speed of his inevitable impact with the earth below.
He supposed that in the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t the oddest subject to think about while you were falling. When you knew that you were plummeting towards the earth, it was only instinctual for one’s brain to conjure up survival techniques. Of course, the silly thing about it all was that Bobby had already told them how many seconds they each needed to wait before deploying their parachute, so there was really nothing for Dean to worry about in that aspect. He probably would have been better off thinking of something entirely random, like Greek Mythology or maybe even Busty Asian Beauties (the porno magazine he kept on high supply under his mattress back home). At least he could probably get some entertainment thinking about those things.
From a thirteen-thousand-foot drop, which had been the elevation of the plane, and with Dean weighing in at 175 pounds, he was free falling at approximately 500 meters per second. This gave him twenty seconds to wait until he deployed his parachute at 2500 feet, from which point he would safely float down to the ground and spring into action. So he waited his twenty seconds, and then with expert movements he reached behind himself to pull the cord on his parachute. He yanked hard, jerking his elbow forward and–
Nothing happened.
Shit. Shit shit shit. Dean’s blood rushed in his ears as he continued to fall fast towards the earth, the deployment cord of his parachute held aloft in his hand. He tried yanking it again, because he must have done it wrong– he must have– his parachute wouldn’t just fail on him like that. His hands flew to his back, reaching blindly for something, anything that could be wrong.
I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die, I’m gonna–
Dean grunted as he dislodged the front end of the cord from where it had become wedged between two separate straps, yanking the rope with all of his might and gasping with relief when the parachute finally deployed, lifting him up into the smoky air and slowing his decline significantly.
But he was still too low, he knew, even without being able to see the earth through the cloud of smoke. At least three or four seconds had passed in the time it took for him to dislodge the cord from where it had been stuck, and even with his tarp billowing behind him he would be moving too fast once he reached the ground to land safely.
At least I’m alive.
Dean guided the parachute ropes off course and to the left, towards where he thought there might be a clearing (or, at least, towards where there appeared to be a smaller number of flames) and squeezed his eyes shut, waiting for impact. It came mere seconds later– a bit faster than Dean had been expecting it, if he was being honest– and with the painful crunch or his left leg bending awkwardly beneath him. He screamed into his oxygen mask, pain blinding his vision momentarily, as his parachute continued to drag him along the ground for an indiscernible amount of time.
“Oh God, fuck, fuck, motherfuck–!” Dean screamed, head thrown back and tears blurring his vision as his mangled leg scraped against the charred earth beneath him, pain throbbing in places he honestly never knew could hurt so much. By the time he finally stopped moving, his parachute giving up on the nonexistent wind and falling into a heap of fabric someplace behind him, he found himself lying in the middle of a clearing surrounded by charred oaks and blazing treetops. He groaned in pain, shifting, digging in the pocket of his suit for his radio.
Chest heaving, Dean yanked the small radio from his pants pocket and began to fumble awkwardly with the dials, tuning into the frequency he knew he would find his teammates on. Then he pressed his record button, checking in and sending a distress signal.
But all that greeted his message was a static reply, and though Dean was sure his transmission had gone through, he wasn’t entirely sure if the smoke and fire surrounding him weren’t interfering with the radio waves. The smokejumpers’ equipment was supposed to be resistant to that kind of interference, but Dean had heard of malfunctions before. Heard horror stories before. He moaned pitifully, dropping his radio onto the floor beside him and clutching at his left leg as a sudden pain shot through his limb. One look down at himself told him why; his bone protruded gruesomely from the flesh, blood spilling out onto the ground beneath him, and it occurred to Dean with morbid realization that he was going to bleed out soon if he didn’t get any help.
When did it become so hard to breathe?
His radio continued to buzz uselessly beside him as Dean lay there, his body aching and heart pounding rapidly in his chest. With each beat of his heart, he knew, more blood was being pumped towards his wound and bled out onto the ground. Suddenly he was reminded of the math problem he’d been thinking of on his freefall towards the ground, and he wondered just how long he had before he would run out of blood.
An hour? Two? Or would be here for days; starving, bleeding out so slowly…
Dean had never realized before how freaking hot it was in the middle of a forest fire. His suit was sticking to his sweaty skin now, and as he looked around, he saw that the blaze had grown thicker around him. He was surrounded by a literal wall of fire, and the only tree surviving appeared to be a tall oak tree standing proudly a few feet away. He grunted as he moved towards it, happy to find something to lean against, somewhere to sit and try to relax as he perished.
His mind jumped to thoughts of his brother, and he felt fresh tears in his eyes as he imagined what Sam was doing at that instant. Sam, so young and with such a bright future ahead of him, applying to colleges already and destined for Stanford. The kid wanted to be a lawyer in the army; wanted to do ROTC at college and go into the JAG Core. Dean had been helping him study for the ASVAB merely a few days ago.
What would he say if he saw Dean now? What would he say at his funeral? Would he cry over his corpse? Would there even be a corpse for him to cry over?
The heat was incessant now, and it felt like he was being burned even through his fire retardant suit. His leg throbbed, exposed wound seeming to sizzle in the heat. He wasn’t even being touched by fire and he was already burning alive.
Oh, what a painful way to die.
With nimble fingers Dean reached up, feeling the heat against his rosy cheeks. If he was going to die, he decided, he wasn’t going to let himself suffer through it. He was going to make it happen quickly, or at least make himself fall unconscious for it, so that the worst of the pain he wouldn’t be able to feel. He may have been a self-hating bastard sometimes, but even he knew that he didn’t deserve to die a slow and painful death. Not after all the good he had done the world.
The oxygen mask slipped off of his face easier than he had thought that it would, falling away without a fight and hanging limply around his neck. Like me, he thought, and on his next inhale he choked, lungs flooding with thick, disgusting smoke. He hacked, coughing with every breath, his lungs unable to filter the soot and ash from the air.
The arms of death were locked around his neck in a visceral choke hold, holding him underwater in a pit of molten lava. He was burning, choking, falling… he hit the forest floor with a soft thud, clutching his hands to his chest. Where had the tree he was leaning on gone? Had it moved away? Dean laughed ludicrously around a lungful of smoky air, his foggy mind conjuring up an image of the Ents from Lord of the Rings, and Dean thought that it was a pleasant thought to have just before death.
His eyes slipped closed just as strong arms lifted him up from the forest floor, and Dean imagined that this probably wasn’t the worst way for a smokejumper to go out.