It's nearly dawn when Dean shakes himself awake, numb with cold and suddenly terrified. There's a taste of copper in his mouth and an echoing din in his ears, a heaviness in his limbs that he instantly recognizes as he tries to move, dammit Cas, no.
He struggles weakly for what feels like an eternity before he manages to get up on his hands and knees, locates the still form on the ground just two feet away. Sam fell first, going down like a ton of bricks, hitting the ground hard. And he isn't moving.
Maybe he cracked his skull. That would be a fitting end for this fiasco of a night.
"S- - Sammy, hey. Wake up."
Dean crawls toward the motionless figure, grips a limp hand, its fingers uncurled. Sam gives him nothing, not a single groan or a flinch, just his chest rising and falling minutely. Cas didn't hold back this time, at least not like he usually does; didn't quite measure out the force of the blow. Dean feels it in the way his muscles refuse to cooperate, the weakness in his core that lingers more than it should, like a persistent bruise.
He shakes Sam's shoulder, but he can tell it's utterly useless.
"Man, he clocked you good."
Dean rolls the unconscious man carefully so that he's lying on his back. There's no blood, at least, no goose egg when he feels his scalp. A comfort. But Sam's face is pale and his features are lax, lips parted, eyelashes not even fluttering to suggest that he has any intention of coming to. He just lies there, oblivious to the icy wind blowing his jacket open, to betrayal, to the fact that they're exposed out here (that Cas left them exposed out here), that the world is hurtling towards yet another catastrophe they are somehow tasked with preventing. Again.
Always.
Dean suddenly aches to drop back down to the hard ground, fade back into the solace of unconsciousness. To lie there in the cold dark beside his brother between the sandbox and the swings in the abandoned set of a childhood they never had and to not know, not care. Let them come .
Instead he pulls himself closer, slides one arm under Sam's back and another under his bent knees.
"Time to go."
He tries to push up to a shaky stand, but finds himself hitting the stony ground with a dull thud that he's sure he'll be feeling later, Sam dropping bonelessly along with him and hitting the dirt again. Wonderful. Whatever Cas – if that was still Cas – did to them, Dean is nowhere near okay enough to carry Sam's giant ass back to the car. Even these days, his brother's no lightweight.
Shit.
"Sorry, Sammy," he says as he shifts his hold, gripping Sam under his uncooperative arms and shuffling backwards towards the Impala, dragging him as carefully as he can. He hates doing that, knows from experience that it means Sam will be waking up bruised as hell and it's not like they have Cas to - -
He has to stop for a moment, and he tells himself it's only because he needs to catch his breath, not because the memory of the radioactive glow of those golden orbs in the angel's eyes makes him taste bile.
"Almost there," he says to no one in particular.
Sam is silent and heavy in his hold throughout their slow progress, head falling back and mouth open, arms hanging limply in the air. He won't be waking up any time soon, Dean thinks, and is surprised by the sting of resentment. Wake up so that I can pretend this is all still reversible, wake up so that you can tell me it is and I can call you a moron, wake up so that we can lose our shit.
He forces himself to move, keeps his eyes on the sandbox as he stumbles backwards, wonders how long he and Sam were lying there and how it is that no angel was sent to guard the portal after… after.
They need to get back to the bunker before that happens, before something worse comes their way.
He breathes a sigh of relief when his back hits the side of the Impala , sets Sam down, leaning him against one of the wheels.
He watches his brother for a second, frowning.
"Really, man? Come on. Wake up, I'm starting to worry here."
Sam remains unresponsive, flopping in his grip as he finally gives in and hauls him up to his feet. It takes some creative maneuvering before Dean manages to get him in the passenger seat, leaning him against the door to stop him from falling forward like he seems adamant on doing and shit, this is getting serious, Sam has never been under like this just from one of Cas' whammies before.
Dean slams the car door maybe a little harder than he means to as he gets in, and he'd drive at around 90 except he's too worried about Sam's head bouncing against the glass. Getting pulled over wouldn't help, either, not with an unconscious Sasquatch riding shotgun.
He tells Sam that, loudly, and it's his plan to keep talking at him until they reach the bunker, because he has to if he wants to keep from thinking about the possibilities. Like Sam silently occupying a bed in the bunker the way he did in Bobby's panic room (Cas rolling down his sleeve as he walks out through the iron door, looking at him like he murdered Sam but Sam was already gone, might be gone now).
He can't think about Cas.
Or about whether he's awake and coherent and driving because Cas went easier on him, even with Lucifer's juice running through his veins.
He falls silent after that thought occurs to him, though.
He doesn't know how long he's been driving when Sam finally groans, his voice faint and pained but real. Dean almost veers off the road, relieved and worried in equal measure.
"Hey, easy - - easy," he says, and then "whoa, it's okay, take a breath, we're good," when Sam gasps and sits up, adrenaline hitting him all at once, or maybe just memory.
Sam nods shakily, runs his hand over his face, looks out the window at the speeding landscape for a long moment.
"'m not - - did Cas – " he slurs, "you okay?"
Dean watches his knuckles on the steering wheel, the bones grinding together under the skin.
"Fine," he lies.
"You good?"