The Four Corners Monument, Four Corners, United States – 7:43AM, Mountain Standard Time
The world is filled the essence of death. The rain is dry - ash and cinder, the blackened cast-off of a toxic blizzard. It's early, still morning. Somewhere in the tar-thick darkness the sun crawls blindly along its path. The air is poison. A single breath makes the lungs sootier than a mineworker of twenty-some years.Cooked flesh, mine—no, Jimmy's. Charred to perfection. The flame fattens and coils, licking a hot stripe across everything it touches. It makes Castiel aware of the heat in a way he would not have been were he not bound to his vessel's flesh and bones.I can taste your souls in my lungs. I'll pray for you. The demons writhe in the flames: wild, free, flowing around each other, through each other. It is a bacchanalian dance set to the music of howls and screams. They draw vitality from death, inhaling the ash that is to them the cleanest of air.To who? To me? Even so, his very nature seeks to join his brothers' and sisters' war song. Come brother, come sister! To victory we march!Dean's fingernails. Dean's fingers.So many, so many, here, and here, and broken, broken, broken.I've gotten used to Jimmy's voice, my voice, his voice… Mine. He presses his lips to Dean's ear and whispers desperately. "Please, Dean, wake up." Part of him is shocked to see that his vessel's hands tremble, as he clutches Dean's broken body against him. Part of him is not.Please wake up, you need to wake up. He lifts his head and looks again at Dean's slack, bruised face. "Please," Castiel whispers. "Please, Dean."I need you.
Castiel sticks out his tongue, tasting soot and the aftertaste of cooked flesh. It coats the inside of his mouth, already damp with blood, his lips cracked and scorched by the heat that washed across the landscape moments ago when Hellfire burst forth from the earth and lashed out at anyone unfortunate enough to bear witness.
Hellfire continues to spout from the cracked Four Corners Monument, a geyser of flame miles high. It licks at the air, a burning tongue that bubbles his vessel's flesh whenever he draws too near.
From as far as the eye can see, demon-possessed bodies converged on the Four Corners monument, carrying the souls of the innocent with them. Like a river, the demons cast themselves into the Hellfire - vessels cast aside, burned away to ash. Castiel can feel the souls of the innocents beneath the demons' malice; scared, shriveled things that scream as they're burned away in the Hellfire. Briefly, he feels regret for the souls that the demons have taken and destroyed.
And in the center of it all, his fingers sliding through the fire, is the piper of the damned: Lucifer, wearing Sam Winchester's skin.
Lucifer's laughter is a demented soundtrack in the background, a hum in Castiel's ears that means little as he searches through the rubble of the destroyed Four Corners monument with a single goal: Find Dean. He searches, looking for that needle in the haystack; steadfast, though urgent. The light of his Grace streams through the cracks of his skin in response to Lucifer's presence. His back itches; he wishes to fight.
Castiel keeps searching, knuckles white, hands cramped into fists.
He can't risk shedding Jimmy Novak's skin and revealing his true form. He can't risk drawing Lucifer's attention, currently occupied by the twists of light that spiral down from a sudden opening in the darkness. Angels, their true forms signatures of awesome energy that resonates in their own key, streak towards the ground, falling stars with teeth and razor-sharp wings.
Part of Castiel sings out, notes struck along each of his ribs, responding the call to arms. He ignores it, though it pains him to do so. Finding Dean is simply more important.
The angels streak towards Lucifer and crash against the demons surrounding him in a coalescence of darkness and light. They fuse together into indistinguishable shapes and forms, slide apart, Hellfire and Holy Light, oil and water.
Castiel keeps searching through the rubble with persistent single-mindedness, looking for Dean, a hunter in a sooty coat torn and hanging off him in strips, singed around the hem, blackened by soot and debris.
He sees what he's searching for when he stumbles over his own feet, his slowly fracturing self-control and the pull to battle dragging him in too many directions at once. A ragged cry escapes him, yanked from the bottom of his chest, when he sees the bit of bone and flesh sticking up through the dirt – part of a hand. The fingernails are broken and bloodied, fingers twisted and bent.
Castiel pulls himself atop the rubble and begins digging through dirt and stone, his bare hands turned into shovels that tear and bleed. His vessel's flesh rips in strips. The nails of his fingers crack and split off. His palms sting, the rapidly appearing cuts soon gritty with blood and sand.
He smells Dean's burnt flesh in his nostrils. He feels Dean's pain in his soul. Castiel keeps digging.
His hands seem heavy and clumsy, knuckles too swollen, palms too slick, but Castiel manages to move enough dirt and broken concrete to grasp Dean's arm in one hand. He pulls. Dean is dead weight, but Castiel pulls him from the earth with ease as if Dean's nothing but skin and hollow bones. His face is littered with cuts and bruises that mar his features in red, black, and blue. Castiel cradles him gingerly, soft and gentle, as he catalogs Dean's numerous injuries with a light graze of bloody fingers across his body. He smears crimson across Dean's cheek, a stripe of ink bleeding off the pages of a wrecked tome.
"Dean," he says. His voice is an urgent hum, smothered by the sounds of open war that swirl around them. An explosion rocks the air, sending shock waves of energy outwards for miles. Beneath the explosion is the sound of broken glass. There is discordance in the song. An angel has fallen.
Shards of broken Grace, sharp as needles and hotter than lava, rain down as the angel is dispersed by the demon horde. Castiel barely notices. His attention is solely for Dean, lying in his arms, as limp and lifeless as a ragdoll. Right now, his world holds nothing else, though the battle rages on.
"DEAN!" Castiel yells this time, his true voice coating the human vocal chords of his vessel. His speech is warped, a tuning fork dipped in liquid silver and struck against granite, more his own and not his own all at once.
A buzz rumbles beneath the burnt desert landscape, barely noticeable at first, covered by the cacophony of the battle. It grows stronger, until Castiel is not the only one to notice it. A murmur runs through the angelic song even as the demons loose a single, long yowl of anticipation.
Lucifer has called Beelzebub to him – his Chief Lieutenant, one of the princes of Hell. Without Michael here the battle could easily turn in the demons' favor, but Castiel can't seem to bring himself to care. Not when Dean is lying broken in his arms and won't wake up.
Castiel presses his face into Dean's neck. His lips move, tattooing a prayer against Dean's skin.
Dean opens his eyes.