A.N. - before you read this, I don't want you to be able to say I didn't warn you. I wrote this when I couldn't sleep, was in a very dark place, and it's the first thing I've been able to finish in a while. If you're touchy about torture and rape and, well, Dean's hell, I would suggest pressing the red x in the top right hand corner of your screen. If for whatever reason you still wanna read this, here it is.
My skin is gone.
They didn't go through the whole tearing flesh off piece by piece until there's nothing but blood vessels and bone and muscles and tendons left. A snap of their fingers and the pale, soft, oh-so-fragile casing is simply... gone.
Everywhere I am exposed in the most literal of ways. Not a centimeter of my skin is left, and not a drop of blood spills.
Well, maybe they didn't take all off my wrapping off. And as soon as I realize that my favorite appendage is still completely intact, I know what's coming next.
I know that they'll take me dry and hard without even the mercy of blood for lubricant. I know the shame and humiliation that will come when soft heat envelops me with skill built through countless centuries of practice. Know that tongue will take me to the brink and hold me there. It won't surprise me when fingers dig into my ribcage and slide into the pliable meat.
I know even before I try and blink that they've taken my eyelids so I can't sink into the dark, have secured my head so I have to watch the same thing being done to my father.
When they're finished, when they're finally, finally finished I can't even work myself to a close. Instead they wash the horrors away with boiling water, and I stay so impossibly hard and make it stop.
I know every sensation of what's going to happen, know the agony that now sears my nerve endings is just the beginning to what is approaching.
This intimate knowledge and surety I have are what makes the light so ludicrous, so unbelievable. If I was allowed to hallucinate, that is what I would have written it off as.
It's too brilliant to be described by human words. It radiates a sense of warmth and safety and comfort and forgiveness that I have not felt in... that I have never felt, not even when my mother was alive and the worst punishment I could receive was having my favorite blanket taken away.
The light replaces the unbearable heat with a cool, soothing temperature. My skin doesn't bother to regrow in the same way it had never bothered to have been removed – it's just there when the light makes contact. And it's so many things at once, so hot hot hot where it clutches my arm but I can't care. I feel the light spreading through that touch, its purity healing and saving and rebuilding what they had spent years tearing down.
I close my eyes and focus on the mere sensation of it, of hoping that this isn't a new form of torture. That this being will be torn away from me and replace with Alistair's cruel smile, with my father's skinless and shrieking face.
But it isn't, or they're just dragging it out. It doesn't leave me. When I work up the courage and will to open my eyes again I'm somewhere dim and warm, someone holding me close and singing in soft tones. I don't know the language, don't recognize the words or their meanings, but it just does not matter.
I want to say something, anything, any words that can begin to describe what I'm experiencing. I think of angels and their halos of white light, and I'll be damned (again) if it isn't the closest explanation I can grasp.
"Angel. My – angel." My voice is coarse and quiet and barely there, but I know my angel hears it. The hands wrapped around me tug me closer, stroking and restoring and healing where they touched.
We stay like that for an eternity or a second and I can't tell which one it is. At some point I feel my eyes begin to drift closed and I fight sleep I've been held from since I died.
The angel holds me, and I drift into an oblivion far too good to be true.
My eyes blink open and my angel is still with me.
Its face is human, its hair is black and its eyes are blue and its lips are chapped, but I know the light inside of the shell. Something in me vaguely registers that my angel's shell is male, but it seems such an insignificant detail.
What this angel did for me I have no way of repaying. I know few things, and of those few know nearly nothing of how to express gratitude. How to even in the slightest way return the peace I'd received. I search for something, for the best thing I can offer but there's nothing.
And then I realize. I know how to give the human equivalent on heaven on earth, know it could never begin to compare, but that was the best thing I'd ever had before this... contentment.
Even as my hand grasps the back of my angel's neck, even as my lips press to his and I trail fingers down the ridges of his spine, even as I lick the hollow under his ear and his eyes dilate and his mouth opens in a strangled groan – even then I know I'm missing something, missing something I knew, missing his name.
But then I have it, and I breath it into the smooth skin of his neck, growl it into the line of his jaw, scream it as he grips-
"Dean!"
A yell breaks through the dream and I jerk upright before my mind has even realized I was asleep. Everything is white static and gray fog for a beautiful moment, and then the memories crash into me.
"Seriously dude, snoring is one thing, but I can-fucking-not sleep through your wet dreams." Sam's voice is tired, irritated. I pray to anyone who's listening that I didn't say Cas' name out loud.
"Then get another fucking room, Sammy." I grumble, faking a drowsiness that is rapidly evaporating. I flip onto my left side and curl around my pillow.
Something soft thumps against the back of my skull and I respond as eloquently as I could have ever hoped. "Bitch."
Sam lets out an exhausted snort and mumbles something that might have been 'jerk'.
As I drift back into the darkness, eyes suddenly once again heavy with sleep, I send out a silent prayer.
Please, please God – if Cas heard any, any, of that just – just wipe it out of his memories.
On the other side of the country an angel sits on a park bench in the middle of a deserted park. The angel prays that Dean doesn't remember what he had dreamed in the morning. The angel prays that the alcohol that allows him to sleep will lock his memories in an impenetrable haze.
The angel prays that the next time he takes Dean out of his nightmares, the man won't make him fall that little bit farther from heaven. That Dean will allow him to pretend that he doesn't grasp the concept of personal space. To pretend that he can't see into thoughts Dean barely acknowledges, that the angel doesn't hold their reflection under layers of things he never wants to think about.
Somewhere Carver Edlund laughs quietly to himself as his fingers type the final words in a scene that will never be published.
He may uphold this charade of a prophet writing horrible prose to pay the bills, and as amusing as it would be to see Dean and Castiel's reaction, he would prefer to avoid the fallout of Dean trying to insert a silver bullet into poor Carver's brain.