Author Notes: If you think the title is a little on the nose, you're right. But after I started referring to it as this in my head, I couldn't think of another title.

The following has a lot of cameos and spans the entire series, with pit stops in Pre-Series, S3, S4, S7, S9, and the upcoming S11. That scene will be proven AU on October 7, and there are some small liberties taken in some scenes, but for the most part I tried to keep this as close to canon and screen as possible, while telling my kooky little story in which the Winchesters enjoy a short string of good luck every time Dean dislocates his shoulder, leading the boys to their eventual annual vacation in Las Vegas.

Dislocation, Dislocation, Dislocation

1982

It's obvious by the time he's three years old that Dean Winchester is destined be a reckless ham who will do just about anything to win a smile from a pretty girl.

John takes his son for a walk down to the park, because Mary was starting to get one of those looks, like she'd strangle him if he didn't do something soon that was outside of the house. A pair of girls, maybe middle-school aged, giggle and coo over his boy, and Dean grins big, hops up onto one of the cement blocks lining the park and starts to show off for them, sauntering about like no three-year-old should have the capacity for.

John follows closely, and when Dean totters on the narrow edge and starts to go over, reflexes grab the wheel and he reaches out to grasp his son tightly around his tiny left wrist, hauling him back onto solid ground with a thwop that turns John's stomach. Dean's bawling when his feet touch down, arm hanging limply.

It's a common enough injury among toddlers that even though John feels like a horrible father and complete asshole, no eyebrows are raised. The nurse even seems to feel bad for him, and as soon as the boy's shoulder is reduced, before the tears are even dry on his cheeks, Dean's back to laughing and hamming and sucking greedily on a red lollipop, like nothing had even happened.

This will be the last time he hauls a broken or bleeding son into an emergency room without having to answer a line of questioning by a stern, matronly CPS worker, or keep a wary eye on the Good Samaritan at the nurses' station with the local PD on standby.

John goes out to pick up a carton of milk the next day and, on a whim, he buys a lottery ticket. One of the overindulgent five dollar scratchers that Mary would never have allowed if she'd been with him. He wins twelve hundred dollars, puts all of it into Dean's small college fund.

After Mary dies and the future becomes null, the fund will be used for procuring a vast array of weapons. Money from this win, in particular, will buy a KA-Bar knife. Steel, seven-inch, twenty-degree angled blade.

That knife will later be passed down to Dean, and on more than one occasion, it will save his life.

1995

Of the three, Sam is the only one to come out of this hunt unscathed. Though that was to be expected, he supposes, since he hadn't been permitted to move from the backseat of the Impala, even when the shooting and yelling started. Especially when the shooting and yelling starts, according to Dad. Despite this fact, he's feeling as shaky as though he had been on the receiving end of those claws, instead his big brother.

John Winchester takes a no-nonsense approach to a lot of things. Cleaning up his boys is, and always has been, one of those things, be it Sam's skinned knees from the toppling bicycle incident of '89 or the pair of trenches that have just been clawed into Dean's back from the werewolf Dad had sworn was under control. Or that's how it's supposed to be, anyway. Something about this time feels different from the jump, and Dad doesn't seem to have himself completely pulled together.

The cuts alone over his shoulder blade are bad enough, but Dean's hurt more than that, grabbed and slashed and jerked around like some kind of fuckin' doggy play toy, Dean himself will later tell Sam. The shoulder was back in place before they dropped into the car, and Sam will have bruises on his own shoulder from how hard Dean had hung onto him, after he leapt from the confines of the Impala at the mere sight of Dad having to drag Dean back across the lot.

Dad's muttering under his breath now as he wrestles Dean into the motel room and guides him to the nearest of the two beds. Dean makes a few sounds, but all of them are in pain, and none are close enough to words to translate.

Sam's worried enough about his brother that he can't stop the single, selfish thought from leeching in, that he'd really been hoping to talk Dean into trading his nice, big bed for the springy, uncomfortable pullout tonight. Between the dislocated shoulder and blood and the stitches that are on the way, that's not gonna happen.

There are a set of four neat scratches cutting the meat of Dad's cheek – though nothing near as deep as Dean's – and he looks so, so tired as he drops into a crouch next to the bed, big rough hand ghosting cautiously around Dean's arm. "Gonna need to make him some kinda sling…"

Dean, face whiter than the sheets his sweaty hand is clutching, exhales and only sort of looks back at him. Dad had gotten some sort of pill down his throat back in the car, and he's been sluggish and nothing more than a shade of himself since then. It's like he isn't even really in the room with them.

"I can do it," Sam volunteers quietly from the foot of the bed, arms crossed and sneakers bouncing nervously atop the short carpet.

"Gotta sew 'im up first," Dad mumbles, eyes darting around the room as he runs scenarios in his head. "This ain't gonna be easy."

"Yeah, no shit," Sam blurts.

Dad is rocking back on his heels and leveling a glare over Dean's dropped head before Sam realizes he's just cussed in front of his father for the first time. The reaction is delayed, but the slap to the back of his head hurts just the same.

Sam winces and bites his tongue, but it's not fair. He's heard Dean say way worse.

"Okay," Dad says once he's decided, and the no-nonsense finally takes over. "Get over here and hold him up, but watch that shoulder."

"I know, Dad. I get it."

Dean is loose-limbed and HEAVY, and it takes the both of them to get him propped up properly against Sam's side, exposing that injured shoulder for Dad to stitch up.

Sam locates items one-handed from the first aid kit as his father barks for them, hands over each roll of thread or patch of gauze wordlessly as he steadily loses the feeling in his right arm.

"Okay," Dad says finally, wiping the back of a shaky, bloodied hand across his face. "Tape."

Dean's beginning to feel like a sack of stones against his side and Sam breathes a small sigh of relief as he rummages through the now-sparse contents of the kit settled against his thigh, plastic crinkling under his searching fingers. His relief is short-lived. "We're out."

"What do you mean we're out?"

"I mean there's no tape in here, Dad," Sam says, voice rising in volume and pitch.

Dean stirs and his father shoots Sam a glare.

"Want me to – "

"No," Dad says, dragging a hand through his hair. "There's someplace across the street. I'll run over and see what I can find."

Sam shifts from under Dean's weight and they work in tandem to allow him to fall as gently as possible to the bedspread. There's no such thing as gentle enough, and he groans when his shoulder touches down, still uncharacteristically quiet and pliant but not ever actually out completely.

Dad isn't gone long; just enough for Sam to fret uselessly around the room for a moment, gathering bundles of discarded gauze and cramming them into the trash can next to the door. The door swings open suddenly, and Sam startles, straightens to see his father wide-eyed on the threshold, hand gripping the knob.

Sam rises slowly, and Dean's eyes sluggishly track his movements from his prone position on the bedspread. "Dad?"

"Forgot my wallet," he mumbles.

Sam's eyes shift to the top of the tall bureau, and he spots the worn, folded leather billfold there next to the television.

Dad slowly shuts the door, but stays standing there across the room. "Jesus," he breathes, running a rough hand the length of his face, wincing as his fingertip slide over the torn skin of his cheek.

"What is it, Dad?"

His gaze drifts to where Dean is staring up at him with the exact same question in his bright eyes. Always watching. "Just…your damn brother, Samuel."

Sam's brow wrinkles in confusion. "What?"

Dad doesn't answer. He finishes the patch job, fetches the tape and affixes fresh gauze, fashions a sling and makes sure Dean is finally sleeping. After all of that, it takes a full glass of whiskey down the hatch before Sam gets the story from his father.

He'd been stepping into the street when he realized he didn't have his wallet, and backed onto the curb just in time to miss being swiped by an erratically swerving tractor trailer that would most likely have left him dead, and Sam and Dean truly orphaned.

2001

Dad grabs his arm just as the shaky bastard was about to give out on him, and begins to haul Dean back into the ramshackle third-floor apartment with a groan.

That could've been bad, Dean thinks wildly, gaze shifting to the concrete below his dangling feet. And then, OW, because his shoulder suddenly pops with a sound he can feel in his teeth.

Dad drags him fully over the wide windowsill and lets him fall to the floor. "That one might be on me, kid," He says with a pant, patting Dean lightly on the back. "But it's better than a crushed skull."

"Yessir," Dean breathes with a nod and moves instinctively to stabilize his left arm, which is flopping painfully in his lap as he leans against the wall next to the open window. "Ghost?"

"Gone," Dad answers curtly.

Dean nods now with understanding, and only a smidge of hurt feelings. It was the right play to make, taking care of the poltergeist first, despite the fact his son was in danger of plummeting thirty or so feet and was at the mercy of his slipping fingertips.

Dad lets him get his sea legs before gripping Dean's right hand and bringing him swiftly to his feet. "All right. On three."

Dean sticks his right palm flush against the moldy wall and bobs his head, biting his lip and steeling himself.

A glint from the edge of the curb catches Dean's eye on the walk back to the car. "Hey, look." Holding his left arm tightly, he stoops awkwardly in the street and snatches up his finding, a wad of dirty bills secured with a gold money clip. Big bills, and the clip looks like real gold, too. "Score."

Dad stares at him a long moment over the roof of the Impala before jerking open his door. "That's it. We're going to Vegas."

"What? Why?"

"Because we're close by, you're twenty-one…and I want to test out a theory."

Dean's almost twenty-three, actually, and Dad's been sneaking him into bars with a fake ID for close to four years now, but he's not in the business of correcting John Winchester, especially not when the man's talking about hitting up the strip.

"Hell, yeah!" he exclaims, a grin spreading across his face as he drops carefully onto the bench seat.

Dad jams the key into the ignition and shoots him a quick glare, and Dean tentatively adds, "Sir?"

The next morning, two states over in bright, sunny Palo Alto, Sam is woken abruptly by a thunk against the windowpane over his head. He jerks upright from where he'd studied himself into a coma for the day's upcoming exam, slumped at his desk with a face full of Statistics notes now transferred onto his cheek. He squints down at where a pair of guys are tossing a Frisbee in the quad below. Then he glances at his watch and nearly falls out of his chair in his haste to get his ass moving.

He'd been woken with exactly enough time to spare to scrub the ink from his face, pull on fresh clothes and sprint across campus to make the test.

2007

Sam has a morbid sense of curiosity, and he knows they should test out the extent of the effects of the rabbit's foot. He's just not really on board with the plan Dean and his sick sense of humor have come up with.

As they're making their way back to the car from the walk-up, Dean extends his left arm, cuff riding up, and waggles his eyebrows. "Here. Pull my arm out and we'll go twenty-four hours. See who's luckier."

Sam turns to level a glare at his asshole brother. At least the dumbass had to wherewithal to extend his non-dominant arm. "That's not funny." He leaves Dean gaping on the curb, cuts an aggressive line across the street and toward the waiting Impala.

"Come on, Sam," Dean calls after him, but Sam refuses to turn back. "It's a little funny."

2008

Dean drops the stack of folded towels to the carpet. There's a smear of blood across the topmost one from where his gore-streaked button-down has brushed, bright and stark against the crisp white linen. He brings his right hand up slowly to rub at a line of tension in his forehead, glancing back to the door through which Ruby – or some form of her – has just exited stage left.

"Do not pass GO," she had warned, but Sam can't help looking around for his drink. "So," he says when the glass is finally back in hand. "Vegas, huh?"

Dean shrugs, then winces and wraps his right arm across his body, holding tightly to his sore left arm. "Don't knock it til you try it, Sammy."

It becomes a game, of sorts. Inadvertently, and in a sick, twisted, whatever it takes to get from one crappy day to the next without going completely batshit kind of way.

The shoulder comes out, and as soon as their chaotic lives allow for it, they spend a weekend in Vegas, taking advantage of the short-lived and unexplainable run of good luck that seems to befall them afterward the injury.

It makes sense in a way only Winchesters can make sense of, and, hey, it never hurts to have a little cash lying around.

2011

Sam's got his own boatload of crap to deal with at the moment: Hellfire in his head and the world seemingly crumbling down around him, but when he comes upon the crushed, overturned Impala, he has to find the strength inside to push it all away.

He's coming late to the party, and what a party it was.

The lab room and its occupants are thoroughly thrashed, and there will be damage all around to assess later, a quick round of Show and Tell that Sam is sure to win, despite the fact he can't really follow through on the SHOW part. His injury, his HELL, literally, is inside, burning him up.

Sam's having a hard time seeing anything in the small room with clarity, and he fears what he IS seeing clearly is just in his head. Cas is there, and Sam knows there's even more hell to come, because he just tried to kill the angel to save the others, but through the fire and flames he knows it's not really CAS anymore.

The voices around him are familiar but warbled, and it can't be real because suddenly Bobby – BOBBY – is sinking to his knees, asking the two of them to follow suit. Dean's got a pinched, pained expression on his face as he does so and he's holding his left arm close to his body in an all-too familiar way, right hand supporting the seemingly burdensome weight of the limb.

More voices, thumping bass and hissing flames and then Castiel, clear as a bell: "Not doing so well, are you, Sam?"

"I'm fine," he tries, in an automatic denial of pain that comes from being raised a Winchester. "I'm…fine." The repetition is more for himself than the others, and works to reassure none. The flames rise up, throwing shadows around the room and he wobbles on his feet. Dean is yelling, angry and hurt in so many ways.

There's a brief moment of complete, cooling lucidity when Castiel vanishes from the room, like Sam's soul is a rubber band that had been stretched to its max and snapped back into shape. He sees the room, sees his brother seeing him.

But it's a very, very brief moment.

When Sam drops to his hands on the floor amidst the shattered glass, he feels the cut, like razor wire drawn across his palm, and the warmth of blood pooling below. Twin shadows fall overhead as Bobby and Dean descend on him with the scuffle of hasty, panicked footsteps.

He wants to be Dean-strong here, so Sam shoves off of the cement, ignoring the sting in his palm, and throws his head back, tries to focus on the two men through the Hell flames that seemingly surround them. "I got it," he gasps.

"My ass you do," Bobby spits, but his eyes are wide.

Dean reaches for Sam one-handed and hauls him to his feet. The flames, the racks, the screaming coming from all around disorient Sam, and he trips trying to sidestep a shrieking, charred body at his feet. When he slams into Dean and sends them both sideways into a wall, he realizes the image was only in his head.

Dean's cry of pain, however, is not.

"Let me see it," Bobby demands, voice suddenly very close to Sam's head as Dean releases him and he slides back to the cool floor.

"It can wait," Dean snaps back, panting, immediately fisting Sam's jacket and working to get the both them upright once more.

"How many times you been through this, boy? You really want it to wait?"

"You're right. This, I've done before. And I can deal with it. But, Sam, what he's going through right now?" The pressure of Dean's hold on Sam's coat increases as he goes on. "That's brand new fucking territory, Bobby. So, yeah, my damn shoulder can wait til we get him taken care of."

Sam wants to shake his brother and tell him to stop being such a stoic, stubborn asshole and let Bobby help him. But Sam is well beyond putting such a thought into coherent speech. All he manages to force out is a singular, pathetically strained, "Dean," but it does the trick.

"Fine," Dean growls. "But make it quick."

"Only way this works, in my experience."

"I'm laughing on the – mmmmmm, you son of a bitch."

Bobby knows what he's doing, distracting Dean not with a bad count, like Sam's always done, but with bad jokes while he forces the shoulder into place.

The crunch of bone snapping back where it belongs blends seamlessly into the images of demonic torture that seem to surround Sam. He falls into the sound and far away from his own pain, in his bleeding hand and in his broken soul.

He knows at some point he's either moving or being moved, but isn't aware of much else for a while.

The work on the car is coming along nicely enough, pain in the ass that it is to have to keep doing this. He's gotten her back into shape, and she'll be road-worthy once more in the next day or so. Sam, on the other hand…

Well, Dean would rather not think about that right now.

He flips on the stereo on the gravel next to the tire to drown out his thoughts and worries, and works on his wounded girl until the sun is gone and the pain in his own wounded shoulder bops him in the back of the head and says, enough already, jackass.

Dean draws out of the car and rotates his left arm with his wince. Bobby had tsked and stepped too easily into Sam's role as incessant worrywart, wanting to strap it up for a day or so and keep him from moving it, but this sort of thing has never stopped Dean before. Hell if he's going to be incapacitated right now, but damn if it doesn't hurt like a bitch when Dean moves his arm just right. Or at all.

He opened the screened door to the house and moves mechanically to the kitchen, where he opens the fridge and withdraws a beer, twisting off the cap and sending it skipping across the countertop with a tinny metallic clatter. Bobby will bitch good-naturedly about him making a mess, but a few stray bottle caps is at the bottom of Dean's list of concerns at the moment. He drags a hand down his face without washing up first, feels and smells a slick of grease as he smears it the length of his nose. It's just as well. He's due for a shower anyway, as Bobby, the apparent activities coordinator for this brief respite, is sure to bring to his attention whenever he next appears from his dark, book-laden corner.

Wash up.

Eat something.

Put ice on that.

Nag, nag, nag.

Standing in front of the open refrigerator, Dean cocks his head. The man's not wrong about the ice, though Dean would never say so out loud. He jerks open the freezer compartment and yanks out a molded blue pack, knocking both doors shut with his elbow as he turns and points himself in the direction of his brother.

He wanders to the cot in the study and settles in a chair beside a fitfully sleeping Sam, setting the beer aside on the hardwood and placing the cool relief of the pack on his sore, stiff shoulder joint. He lets his head fall back a long moment, before leaning forward and leveling a loaded gaze at Sam's pale, pained face.

Dean swallows roughly, adjusting the compress on his shoulder. "When you're feelin' better, and the world's a little less batshit, we're beelining for Vegas, man," he says softly. "Gonna hit it big this year, Sammy. I can feel it."

He's not wrong.

Roughly six months later, Dean wins twenty-three hundred dollars at the roulette wheel, betting on black, waiting for Sam to pull his loose cannon head out of his ass and come back from his hippie hike.

For a few days, he also wins a crazy-ass sister-in-law and a confrontation with Crowley, and he vaguely thinks that maybe they waited too long to cash in, or maybe this good luck thing has just finally run its course.

Until he realizes he has something to rib Sammy about, pretty much for the rest of his life.

Yeah. He struck goddamn GOLD this time.

2014

"Dean Winchester, you are doing the right thing."

It looks like a Sam and it talks like a Sam, but it's an Ezekiel.

Dean wets his bottom lip and doesn't say anything, gaze dropping to the knife of the Kurds shaking in his right hand. With the bolster of adrenaline wearing off, the limb is nearing a state of uselessness, twisted into a brand-new shape by that ginger demon bitch.

"You are wounded," says Sam's voice coming from Sam's mouth, but the timbre is all wrong. When Ezekiel speaks through him, it's almost like when Sam used to razz Dean about his grammar. Almost, but not quite, because Sammy still uses contractions.

Dean straightens as well as he can around the bruised ribs and the trembling arm hanging at his side. He orders his fingers to tighten around the hilt of the knife, and fire erupts in a couple of them. "I'm fine," he says, shaking glass from his hair. "You're sure Sam's okay?"

"I told you. He is unconscious, but unhurt."

"Good," Dean says, nodding and releasing the breath he'd been holding.

"It will not cost me much to heal you. Nor will it cost your brother," the angel adds after a pause, sensing Dean's hesitance.

"No – no, that's okay."

"A show of good faith," Zeke insists. "To prove to you that I am one of the good guys." He steps forward, extending Sam's hand to rest on Dean's forehead.

As many times as it's happened in the past, he will NEVER be accustomed to the sensation of his body shifting from broken to whole in the blink of an eye. The wrenched shoulder, the screaming ribs, and the couple of crushed fingers. If only Sam would heal so quickly and make the choice to jettison this stranger.

Dean rolls his shoulder, brings his arm up over his head. "That's, uh, that's actually kind of…awesome." He squints, swallows. "Really wasn't lookin' forward to shootin' southpaw. Thanks." Ezekiel wrinkles Sam's brow in a way too close to SAM, and Dean looks away. "Kid gonna wake up soon?"

"Yes. I shall return this body to where it was when I took over control."

"Yeah, okay," Dean says. "Good." What he means is, Don't DO that anymore.

Later in the car, Sam chuffs out a disbelieving laugh and starts to shake his head.

Dean swallows guiltily and shoots a glance across the seat at his brother. "What?"

Sam stretches his legs against the floor mat and sighs. "You remember the first time we went out to Vegas, after Alistair? It was, like, midnight and you were pretty…"

"Drunk?" It's nice of the kid to take Dean's feelings into account, but he's not so sure he deserves it, and he's so far beyond being hurt hearing Sam say it. "Obviously. It was Vegas, Sam."

"Yeah. Well, remember when we stood on the strip and watched them sink the ship outside of Treasure Island? And the whole time, you were bitching about the way the ship was going down, saying it wasn't structurally accurate?" Sam shakes his head. "Like you were some kind of expert on sinking pirate ships. Or physics." He laughs, light and good-naturedly.

Dean grins in return. "I told you. I'm awesome. I know things."

"Yeah." Sam props his elbow on the window ledge. "I don't know what made me think of that."

Dean bobs his chin and purses his lips around his ongoing deception, directing his gaze steadily out of the windshield. The steering wheel feels cold within his hands, and a phantom pain rips through his right shoulder. "I don't know, Sammy," he says. "I stopped trying to figure out how your giant head works a long-ass time ago."

He flips on the radio, which Sam recognizes as the cue to not talk for a while, even he doesn't exactly know why.

2015

Sam's not sure he really loses consciousness completely, but he's certainly missing a chunk of time he's aware has since passed.

He's lying just upside-down enough, settled uncomfortably against his shoulder blades, to know he's lucky he's not waking up with a broken neck. He groans, shifting gingerly and allowing his limbs to fall the rest of the way to the roof of the overturned Impala. Everything hurts, but nothing feels broken. He's got enough experience in the bag to know that feeling right off the bat.

He shifts around, working for a few moments to extricate his long legs from where they're tucked under the dash. Glass crinkles under Sam's arms when he rolls with a grunt, turning to check on the suspiciously silent Dean.

His brother's legs are tangled up and hooked in the steering wheel, pinned in place and hanging just as nearly upside-down as Sam was when he came back to himself. His face is turned away, cheek sprinkled with smashed pieces of the windshield, and his left arm is twisted beneath his body.

Sam has to crane his neck to see over Dean's chest, but, yep, there's an unnatural bulge there at the shoulder joint. The car had flipped only once, and not even all that roughly, but sometimes he swears he could squint at Dean's left shoulder and knock it out of place. This roll of the Impala was a little more than a squint.

Sam sucks in a breath and grips Dean's right shoulder, gives his brother a timid shake. "Dean."

Dean must not have gone completely out, either. He jerks immediately and hisses, folding his body over the best he can.

"Yeah, careful," Sam belatedly warns. "Shoulder's out again."

Dean makes a face and rolls toward Sam just enough to disentangle his trapped arm. He grips the shoulder and kicks the floorboards over his head. "Son of a bitch."

Sam peers out the gap of window behind his right shoulder. "Light out now. Where do think it all went?"

"Hopefully to a galaxy far, far away," Dean grits.

Sam squints, and it hurts the bruises and contusions on his face but he can't let it show, because he's just gotten Dean back, and he's not about to drive him into that black hole of guilt right off the bat. He flips the switch to control mode, shifts carefully onto his hands and knees. "Okay. We're gonna get out of the car, then I'm gonna put that back in," he says with a chin jerked in the direction of Dean's limp arm. "And then…"

"And then WHAT, Sam?" Dean's eyes are bright with the pain, but wide with questions there aren't answers to yet.

Sam grins, knowing this is the calm before the storm. "I'm just saying, if that cloud didn't take it out, we gotta hit up Vegas now, man."

Dean rolls his eyes with exhaustion and exasperation, but almost smiles, himself. "Shut up, Sam."

And now I hold my breath in giddy fangirl glee for the upcoming season premiere!