Dean's head was pounding like a miniature timpani player had crawled its way inside his head while he had been sleeping. He scrunched up his face in irritation and rubbed a hand over his eyes, trying to crack open his eyelids without causing any more pain. The light that struck his blurred vision was much brighter than it should have been, and he quickly shut his eyes again. Hadn't he been on an airplane? Why the hell were the overhead lights all on in the middle of the night? Damn planes—

No, no… something was wrong. Dean opened his eyes again. His headache was subsiding, and the timpani player was getting tired. Fortunately, that meant that he could hear everything that much better.

Unfortunately, that meant that he could hear everything that much better, because what he heard confirmed that what he was seeing was real. There was no plane around him. Dean was lying flat on his back in the sand. He was on a beach. A fucking beach. The sounds of eater crashing in the waves against the shore was not all that he heard, though. There was screaming…shouting…crying…

What the hell happened here?

Dean sat up and patted his arms, head, torso, and legs to make sure everything was in fact still there and in one relatively moveable piece. He sighed in relief as he managed to move his toes and bend his knees as normal. On wobbling legs, he stood up and surveyed the entire surrounding area.

The first thing he saw was pointing, yelling, and general running around. There had to have been between thirty and fifty people all trying to either help others get up or getting out of the way of other people who were trying to do so, themselves.

The second thing he noticed was the plane. Scratch that – it was maybe a third of the damn plane that he should have still been inside. When it was intact, it had been an Oceanic Airlines jet, according to the magazines and cocktail napkins he had studied during the flight. He'd been terrified to look out of the window or up the aisle to see the other passengers seated in front of him. The middle of the freaking Apocalypse and he still couldn't handle commercial flights.

Planes crash, he remembered himself saying to his brother all those months ago on the Indy flight. Dean usually didn't mind having the right to say "I told you so", but this time was a bit different.

Then came the third thing Dean saw; a man shouted for someone to get away from the plane, then the explosion. The roar of the turbine stuttered for a moment, and he ducked and covered his ears in anticipation of the blast. The remaining fragments of the plane burst into a fireball that sent a shockwave over the beach. That snapped his brain out of its remaining haze. A jolt of adrenaline shot through the hunter as he realized the most worrisome part of all this.

Sam and Castiel were nowhere to be seen.

Of course, Dean's first instinct was to run to the most dangerous place. He hurried across the beach to the smoldering wreckage, dodging the fiery debris that had rained down moments before and still were smoking at his feet. He passed a blonde woman, shrieking in pure panic and, probably, for a lack of enough collected thought to do anything else. A man, balding and bleeding from a gash over his eyebrow and under his cheekbone, looked like he was surprised at his own ability to still move.

Sam, Sam, Sam –where the hell are you? The thought echoed over and over in Dean's head.

"Dean!" a voice shouted, just a few yards behind him. Dean whirled around to see his brother carrying a dazed but conscious young woman in his arms.

"You okay, Sammy?" Dean called, unable to stop the scared crack in his voice and not bothering to care.

"Fine," Sam shouted back over the commotion. "You seen Cas?"

"Not yet."

"Find him."

Dean didn't need to be told twice. As Sam carried the woman towards the tree line at the edge of the beach, Dean turned and continued running towards the wreckage. The closer he got, the more bodies he saw. There were so many, and he couldn't tell if they were alive or not. He couldn't tell if they were Cas or not. The plane was still burning and where the hell were they and-

Dean forced himself to stop and take a few deep breaths. Maybe he pulled one of his disappearing acts and just poofed out of here, Dean thought. He almost hoped that the angel had. Sure, the guy healed at a ridiculous rate and basically nothing normal killed him, but that didn't mean that the guy was completely invincible.

Dean stumbled onward, helping people up and away from the debris, all the while keeping a desperate eye out for a familiar, tan trench coat and mop of brown hair.

"Hey, mister!" Dean looked up towards the tree line to see a blonde man with arms full of supplies.

"Me?"

"Yeah, you." The man shifted things around in his arms as he tried to snatch one more thing up off the ground. He coughed from the smoke in the air before making eye contact with Dean.

"Could you pick up that book by your foot?"

Dean glanced down in time to see a soggy copy of Watership Down at his heels, floating pathetically in the shallow, lapping waves. He picked up the bedraggled paperback and offered it up to the other man.

"Could you just stick that on top of the stack? Right there, yeah. Thanks, man."

"Hey," Dean blurted as the man turned around to leave, "have you seen a guy about so tall"—he gestured a couple of inches below the top of his own head – "and wearing a suit and a trench coat?"

The man smiled grimly. "Yeah, the guy's about twenty yards over that way." He nodded in the direction of a pile of rubble halfway to the tree line.

"He's not awake," the man added. "I think he's alive, but I figured it was best not to move the fella. He was far enough from the working parts of the plane, anyway."

Dean thanked him quickly, already rushing off towards the small cluster of metal and luggage the blonde had gestured towards.

"Thanks for saving my book!" the man called after the hunter.

As he approached the area, Dean quickly spotted the familiar figure he had been looking for in the wreckage and picked up his pace, trying to reach the rebel angel as quickly as possible. Castiel was somehow still upright in his seat and even buckled in, almost like he'd never dropped with the rest of the aircraft. A light groan escaped him when Dean reached him, as if reacting to the hunter's presence. Suddenly, Dean wasn't sure what to do. Did the rules about not moving an unconscious person after a violent accident still apply to angels? The fact that Cas was unconscious in the first place meant something was obviously wrong.

He hesitated, looking the angel over, checking for any signs of serious injury. Other than a scrape on his forehead, nothing seemed to be wrong. Dean knelt next to the airplane seat. He reached out to unbuckle the belt, but then changed his mind; if something was wrong…best to not let him fall out. Even with his angel mojo, Dean wasn't sure how Cas would handle a vessel with a broken spine or something.

"Hey, Cas?" he tried, lightly tapping the angel's shoulder. "Cas? Hey, buddy, wake up." The angel murmured something under his breath and grimaced slightly.

"Come on, Cas," Dean breathed, resting his hand firmly on the angel's shoulder. A pair of familiar blue eyes slid open; Dean let out a breath of relief that he hadn't realized he'd been holding.

"Hey there, Cas," he said as calmly as he could manage. "You scared me there for a bit."

"Dean?" Castiel blinked and sat up straight, wincing a bit as he did so. "What…"

"The plane went down," Dean explained, withdrawing his hand. "The front and back broke off. We're…somewhere. I'm not sure where, exactly. Do you think you can move?"

Castiel squinted and looked down at himself, then around at the beach and the burning fragments of the plane. His eyes lost focus for a moment, staring at nothing in particular, like he was listening to some distant noise that no one else could hear. Breaking his odd trance, the angel fumbled with his seatbelt and slid forward in his seat. His jaw was set and his movements were tense.

"You okay, man?" Dean asked, surprised by the clear discomfort in Castiel's posture and expression. He still didn't know much about angels, but he was pretty sure he'd never seen Cas look so… pained, physically. That couldn't possibly be a good sign.

"I will be fine," Cas replied dismissively. He pushed himself into a standing position and stared out over the ocean towards the horizon.

"Did anyone else survive the crash?" he asked. "Is Sam alright?"

"Sammy's off by the rest of the plane, moving people to safety. He's okay. There's a good number of people who made it, I think. It's chaos, though."

"We ought to join the others." Cas started walking quickly across the sand, towards the smoke from the earlier explosion. Dean glanced around and grabbed a familiar-looking duffel bag from under a piece of what at one point must have been the overhead compartment, before hurrying off after Cas.

"Hey, so, uh, do you have any way of knowing where we are?" Dean called out to his companion. "Like, some angel GPS thing?"

"…I cannot tell where we are," Castiel replied, slowing so the hunter could catch up with him. "We are in the Pacific Ocean, obviously on an island. That is as much as I know."

"Okay," Dean said, trying to get the gears turning in his head. "Any way we can just zap outta here and get help?"

"You are willing to leave these people behind?" the angel countered.

"No, I'm saying that if we get coordinates for this place somehow and then just jump over to the nearest civilization on the mainland, maybe we can send a boat or something to get these folks to safety."

Castiel stopped in his tracks as they finally reached the main part of the wrecked plane. He furrowed his brow after a few seconds' pause. His confused frown turned into a wide-eyed look of nervous surprise.

"Something wrong there, Cas?"

"I cannot leave."

"You what?" It was Dean's turn to frown.

"I cannot leave," Castiel repeated. "Something is preventing me. I cannot sense the others' presences, either."

"And you usually just can on a dime, right?"

"Yes."

"So something's drained your batteries, then?" Dean asked. "We're stuck here?"

"That appears to be the situation. I can still feel my Grace, but I cannot seem to access it."

"Well," the hunter said, starting forward again, "we'd better see how we can help out, then."

Castiel's expression returned to its usual deadpan and he nodded, following Dean as they made their way towards the broken aircraft. All that they could do now was lend a hand, and they intended on doing whatever they could to quell the current chaos.

Hours passed before Dean got the chance to finally sit down and rest. There were about fifty other people still breathing. Most of them had been fixed up by a medical doctor who happened to have been on board, but some of them… well, saying they were "worse for wear" was probably an understatement. There was a man with a piece of shrapnel imbedded in his body, painfully sticking out like a third, unwanted arm. Dean hadn't seen the blonde guy after their earlier run-in, but he'd looked like he had been in okay condition then. The doctor guy had a gash on his side that he'd managed to disinfect and get stitched up right away. Hopefully it stayed disinfected and stitched up, for everyone's sake. Dean and Sam had experience patching up injuries, but they weren't doctors by any means.

The sun was going to set within the next couple of hours, and Dean couldn't even fathom the idea of sleep. Even though the chaos around him had died down, his mind was still racing. How the hell were they going to get off the island? And speaking of hell, how was the rest of the world going to handle the Apocalypse while Team Free Will was stranded somewhere seemingly inescapable? What about Lucifer?

Dean swatted that last thought aside. It wouldn't help to worry when he, Sam, and Castiel couldn't do anything about it. The Apocalypse would have to wait until heaven's only active rebel got enough mojo back to zap them out of here.

"Hey, you, sir," said a voice behind Dean. The hunter looked over his shoulder to see two men carrying wood and kindling in their arms. One of them was muscular, with hair about the same length as Sam's and a dark, Middle-Eastern-looking skin tone; the other was skinny, blonde, and pale.

"Who, me?"

"What is your name?" the darker-skinned man asked.

"Dean."

"Dean, do you have a lighter?" The two men dropped their supplies on the sand as Dean nodded a "yes".

"Good," the man said. "Will you assist us in lighting the signal fire?"

"Sure thing." The hunter stood and approached the firewood. "What's your name?"

"I am Sayid," the man explained, "and that is Charlie." He nodded at the skinny guy, who smiled half-heartedly at Dean before stepping back and fiddling with bandage tape wrapped around the fingers of his left hand.

"Well, wish I could say it's good to meet you, but these aren't really the best circumstances," Dean said. Sayid nodded in agreement. The two of them began setting up the wood and kindling as Charlie watched, deep in thought. Three minutes and a few splinters later, Dean lit the fire. A cloud of thick, dark smoke began billowing directly upwards. Dean almost laughed at the sight; mysterious forces and thick black smoke – it was sad how comfortably familiar they were by now. Maybe he could get lucky for once. Maybe there wouldn't be any demons on this one, solitary island. Maybe.

But who was he kidding? Even if there were no demons, there would always be something else. There was always something unnatural about any and every location he and Sam found themselves in. No matter how much he wished, he knew that there was no escaping the things he and Sam hunted. Dean could already feel something extremely off about this island; he knew their problems were far from over.

"So," Charlie said, breaking the silence, "where're you from, Dean? Anyone with you on the flight?" Sayid shot the young man a warning glance.

"I travel a lot," Dean answered easily. "I'm from Kansas, originally. My brother and a…friend of ours were on the flight in the seats by me. They made it, though." Not sure whether to thank God or not, he added silently.

"That's lucky," Charlie said. "Flying home, then?"

"Not exactly," Dean replied. "We weren't supposed to be on the plane in the first place. Flight change and stuff, you know?"

"I see." The three stared into the fire for a moment. The only noise breaking through the air were the crackling of the flames in front of them, the rushing of waves at the end of the beach, the wind in the trees, and the soft sound of someone crying in the distance. Dean didn't like all of this time that he suddenly had, left alone in his own thoughts. Especially not when the nearest booze was probably hundreds of miles away.

"I'm from all the way back in England." It almost sounded like a humorous comment, but Charlie said it in such a bleak manner that it kept Dean and Sayid from cracking a smile; both grimaced instead.

"I was trying to get my band out to L.A. for a gig," Charlie continued. "I was the only one on that plane, course."

"What's your band's name?" Dean asked, trying to keep the conversation from dying.

"Ever heard of Driveshaft?"

"Sure, I have," the hunter laughed. "My dad left one of your CDs in our car when he left the old girl with us." He turned to look Charlie up and down and said, "So you're the bassist, right?"

"Yeah, I am!" The guy's mood visibly brightened, a proud smile spreading across his face.

"You guys are pretty cool," Dean admitted. "I thought you broke up, though."

"Nah," Charlie said. "We were on a hiatus of sorts."

"Nice."

"The sun will be setting soon," Sayid said suddenly. "I will watch the fire for a while. You two should go back and eat something while we still have food pre-prepared."

"Want us to bring you something?" Charlie offered.

"No, no," Sayid said. "I will eat later." Dean nodded to him.

"See you back at camp, then, Sayid." Dean stuck his hand out for the man to shake. After a moment's hesitation, the Middle-Eastern man returned the gesture with a tight smile… or a grimace – Dean couldn't tell. He didn't really care to think about it too much, either, as his stomach protested his few-second delay in returning to camp.

Food sounded really, really good.

Castiel opened his eyes to meet the sight of a blurry Dean Winchester kneeling beside him. The angel blinked a few times to adjust his vision. He had been unconscious, he immediately assessed…and he had been dreaming...or hearing something. It hardly mattered, seeing as how he couldn't remember what it had been about. Confusion. Castiel found himself confused more often in the past several months than he had for centuries. After dazedly looking over his surroundings through heavy eyelids, he opened them wide in the purest state of confusion he had experienced yet.

Dean was talking. Castiel made eye contact with him, his vessel's brain trying and failing to process what he was seeing. It took a few moments to register what the human was saying.

"...scared me there for a bit."

"Dean?" Castiel managed to grate out, voice rougher than usual. He pushed off the back of the airplane seat to sit up straight. A sharp pain lanced up his side and back, and he very nearly dropped back into the seat.

"What..." he started to ask, looking behind Dean momentarily. There was rubble, small piles of flaming, twisted metal with a backdrop made up of sand and a great body of salt water.

"The plane went down. The front and back broke off," Dean explained. "We're... somewhere. I'm not sure where, exactly. You think you can move?"

Dean was clearly worried, and even Castiel was a beginning to sense a similar feeling wash over him. What had sent the plane down? He couldn't remember sensing anything strange before drifting off to sleep beside Dean. He hadn't needed to sleep, but, once the nervous human had drifted out of consciousness, the thought of slumber had become strangely appealing. But, then…

Then, Castiel had woken up here.

He listened hard, trying to pick up anything from his brothers and sisters, hoping he could hear something of some help to him in his disoriented state. He met only silence, not a hint of chatter. Strange – he had expected the angels to be screaming now that Lucifer had risen…They must all be busy, Castiel assumed.

He focused, then, on the matter at hand. He had read over the safety guide that Sam had been skimming through shortly after…appearing on the plane, and he attempted to imitate the diagram showing how to unbuckle the seat's safety belt. There was a click, and the angel allowed himself a moment of triumphant satisfaction before sliding forward in the tipped seat. The pain in his side immediately shot through him again as he leaned against the edge of the seat. His shoes touched the sand.

"You okay, man?" Dean was looking at Castiel from every angle, it seemed. It was as though he had thought that Castiel would break as easily as a human in the plane crash. The angel refrained from telling Dean that he likely would have been dead, if not for his healing abilities. Maybe he didn't need to hear that.

"I will be fine," he replied. He set his jaw and stood up, ignoring another flare of pain. "Did anyone else survive the crash? Is Sam alright?"

"Sammy's off by the rest of the plane, moving people to safety," Dean explained. "There's a good number of people who made it out, I think. It's chaos, though."

"We ought to join the others," Cas told him, and set forward to find the other Winchester. Dean hurried after him.

"Hey," Dean said. The angel slowed down, and the hunter fell into step beside him. "So, uh, do you have any way of knowing where we are? Like, some angel GPS thing?"

Castiel hesitated, taking a moment to remember what "GPS" stood for, and tried reaching out with his senses. Like his earlier attempt at hearing the angels, he found nothing: no reference points, no location, no anything. The water looked dark and cold, however, and smelled very distinct.

"…I cannot tell where we are," the angel replied. "We are in the Pacific Ocean, obviously on an island. That is as much as I know."

"Okay…any way we can just zap outta here and get help?"

"You are willing to leave these people behind?" the angel wondered aloud. That wasn't very Winchester-like behavior.

"No –" Castiel tuned Dean out temporarily, reassured enough by that one word to return his focus to the wrecked middle section of the aircraft on the beach ahead. Once again, he tried to reach out with his Grace, to unfurl his wings into a physical dimension and fly to safety.

The angel stopped in his tracks.

Nothing. Again, he was met with nothing. His Grace was still there, he could feel it, but it eluded his grasp. For the first time since he woke up on the island, Cas felt a flash of true panic. His ability to take off and find help was somehow dampened; he was lost and trapped and suddenly felt so small.

"Something wrong there, Cas?" Dean snapped the angel out of his racing thoughts.

"I cannot leave." Castiel managed to keep his voice level.

"You what?"

"I cannot leave. Something is preventing me." The angel reached out with his mind and could not sense a single other person's soul on the island for more than a second at a time. Each one flashed through like voices on a high-speed radio scanner. It made him dizzy just trying to count the number of different ones he could pick up.

"I cannot sense the others' presences, either."

"And you usually just can on a dime, right?"

"Yes."

"So something's drained your batteries, then?" Dean asked. "We're stuck here?"

"That appears to be the situation. I can still feel my Grace, but I cannot seem to access it."

"Well," the hunter said, continuing onwards, towards the smoking wreckage ahead, "we'd better see how we can help out, then."

Castiel nodded and resisted the urge to wince in pain as he followed the hunter. Help. Yes, he could still help. There was always that. The Winchesters must have rubbed off on him already, the angel realized, smiling a little as he walked into dangerous territory once again because of them. For some reason, he didn't entirely mind. Maybe the growing empathy inside him was a good thing.

So he helped. He entered the chaos behind Dean and immediately found a man trapped under a large piece of debris. He lifted the metal and helped the man up with his free hand. The man hadn't noticed Castiel's superior strength as he scrambled to safety, to the angel's relief. The brothers would want him to hold his identity back from the other survivors, or so he assumed. The angel did his best to help as many others as possible, until his own body's pain became unbearable. He leaned against a makeshift shelter—one of several which had been assembled since the crash—to rest and inspect his vessel. The tan coat was shrugged off along with his suit jacket, and he carefully un-tucked his shirt. The white material was stained red all along his right side, and he hissed as he pulled the fabric away from his skin. His vessel's flesh was bruised black and blue and sickly shades of yellow-gray. There was an odd gash along his ribcage, too, which was still bleeding sluggishly. What could have caused that? Castiel placed his hand on the skin on either side of the wound and focused his healing energy onto it.

His weakness startled him. He dropped his arm, suddenly exhausted and out of breath. The wound had shrunk substantially, but it was still there, bleeding and angry and, above all things, painful. A shaking sigh escaped him. Right then, Castiel felt extremely mortal…human, even. It was unsettling, to say the least, and he had no idea what to do about it. He needed one of the Winchesters there to look at it and make sure it could be taken care of. His vision was swimming, and he closed his eyes to quell a sudden rush of nausea.

"That's a nasty wound you've got there," said a calm, amiable voice from above the angel. Castiel's eyes shot open again. He hadn't heard anyone walking through the sand and rocks to reach him.

"It is not… pleasant, no," Castiel admitted, looking up to see the man towering above him. He had black, short hair and dark eyes. His skin was lightly tanned and his face was clearly in need of a shave, giving him a neglected appearance.

"May I look at it?"

Castiel tilted his head, squinting against the glare of the setting sun.

"Do you know how to treat it?" the angel asked.

"I'm a doctor," the man explained, and Castiel nodded in return.

"Then I consent to letting you examine it. Just…please do be careful." The doctor man nodded and kneeled down to look at the angel.

"My name is Jack," the man supplied.

"I am Castiel."

The doctor poked lightly at parts of the bruised skin, and received a pained hiss in response. He studied the angel's side for a moment longer before he sighed and pulled back.

"Well, Castiel," Jack sighed, rocking back on his heels, "it's not as scary as it could be"–or as it was, Castiel supplied internally–"so I'm going to find something to bandage it up with. There should be something around here…"

He trailed off, rummaging through an open suitcase. He produced a washcloth and two long neckties and tied a makeshift bandage around the angel's torso.

"I don't have antiseptic on me," he apologized while he secured the ties. "Maybe we can dig some supplies out of the plane, but in the meantime, do your best to keep this clean. I saw you helping out earlier." He gave one last tug and moved his hands away, apparently satisfied. "You had to have irritated this thing quite a bit, lifting and dragging and carrying people and plane parts around like that."

"Yes, I suppose that that is true," Castiel replied with a half-shrug-half-wince.

"Take it easy now, okay?" The doctor stood up and held out his hand to help Castiel to his feet. The angel bit back a groan as he rose again. He still couldn't understand his sudden weakness.

"No more helping out like that tonight, Castiel. You've done a great job already. You deserve some rest."

Castiel nodded. Yes. Yes, that sounded like a good plan.