People I haven't written anything in a long time, and my Flagstaff story is still sitting unloved on my PC, it will get finished, just don't know when. This came to me as I was falling asleep and I had to get it out and onto paper before it drove me as crazy as the MOC has my Dean.

Spoilers for all of Season 10 and my take going forward from 10.14. Thank you Timothy O for finally inspiring me to write something. Will try and update as quickly as I can.

As always, enjoy the ride. Little warning...major Dean whumpage in this...even for me!

Sam is sitting in the library, the glass of scotch welded in his hand and it takes Cas three calls of his name and a dozen shakes of his shoulder to get the hunter to acknowledge him.

"What happened? " he asks, surveying the room as he does for signs of trouble. "Where's Dean?"

It's as if the sound of his brother's name is a trigger for the other man and he stands, drops the glass with a thud to the table and bolts for the door.

Taken by surprise all Cas can do is follow him, pursuing him down the bland corridor and stopping only when his target disappears into a room on the right. The sound of retching reaches him before he fully opens the door marked restroom.

Sam is on his knees, toilet bowl clutched as tightly as the glass of scotch had been, the contents of which now swirls in a mix of water and vomit in the pristine porcelain.

"Sam," the angel kneels beside him, rests a gentle hand on his back, "where's your brother?"

Bringing his arms up Sam rests them on the bowl, drops his head down onto them. Shivers wreck his frame and Cas realises that Sam is crying.

"Is he dead?" It's the only reason the angel can think for the state of the younger brother, the sense of defeat that seems to hang as an almost physical presence in the air above them.

"No."

Cas doesn't breathe but he lets the air held inside his vessel exhale in a sigh of relief anyway, the motion a sense memory from his time as a human. Dean is alive, so anything else he is confident that he can fix. "What then?"

Sam shrugs him off, puts a hand to the wall and one on the pipe behind the cistern and claws himself upright. He doesn't speak just heads drunkly for the door.

Cas follows.

He knows this corridor, it leads to the rooms the two hunters have claimed as the own and so he follows Sam down it lending a steadying hand to him when it seems as if he might crumple. He wants to help, could sober Sam up with a touch of his hand but he doesn't want to waste his reserves until he finds out what cause the hunter to get this way in the first place.

Sam bypasses his own room stopping at the door to his brother's and resting his head on it. "He's in here" he croaks and slowly pushes the door open. When Sam makes no attempt to enter Cas pushes gently by him.

The room is tidy and organised, Deans things sitting as they did for the weeks the hunter was missing except for the fact that the very man is lying on his back on the bed. Cas looks back to Sam who's still standing rooted to the spot at the room door and then turns his attention back to his friend. Dean is breathing, his chest slowly rising and falling in a steady rhythm which means that whatever has set Sam tailspinning into a bottle needs further investigation.

He walks towards the bed, the white bandage which covers the whole of Dean's right arm catching his attention for the first time. Something is wrong with the picture before him but he cannot for some reason understand what it is. He expected Dean to be dead, or a demon but he's breathing and Sam hasn't marked a trap on the floor or the ceiling. "Is it the mark? Has it done something else to him?," he asks of Sam finally reaching the side of bed and stopping.

"His...his...he..." The usually more articulate of the two brothers can't seemed to say the words Cas needs to put the pieces together. He stares down at dean's arm, down at the clean, white bandage. His eyes follow it down past where he knows the mark is, down the hunter's forearm and to his wrist. The pieces slot into place as Sam finally spits the words he is struggling over out. "He skinned his arm and then he...he...cut off his hand." The words finish on a sob. "Cas, he cut his own hand off, was babbling something about how he couldn't kill me if he couldn't...he..."

The obvious question springs to the Angels mind. "Why did you not take him to the hospital, they could have perhaps saved his hand, reattached it."

When there's no reply he turns. "Sam?"

Sam looks at him. "I couldn't find it Cas. It wasn't there."

"Dean hid it?" He looked down again away from the devastation in the other man's eyes.

"How?" Cas knew about being human, knew that Dean wouldn't have got far with his injury.

"I don't think he did. There was no trail of blood from the room, only the...only the pool that Dean was sitting in. Cas if I hadn't gone looking for him. If something hadn't made me wonder why he was so quiet...he could be dead! Again!"

"Show me."

Sam turned from his place at the door and motioned with his head. "This way."

The two walked in silence up to the library room and then down to the kitchen. There was blood spray over the wall and it became clear to Cas as it must have been to Sam that Dean didn't just cut his hand off, he'd chopped it off. Viciously. Three clear sprays of blood from the meat cleaver he'd used showed on the wall, the implement itself still lying next to the pool of blood on the floor. Cas looked round the room, the smell in it all to familiar to him. "He didn't just chop off his hand, did he Sam?"

The younger Winchester paled, raised a hand to his mouth and swallowed hard. "No, he tried to burn the mark off first." He motioned to the iron lying on its side on the counter. Cas could tell it was skin still stuck to its sole plate. There was Cain's bloody hunting knife lying next to it. "Then he...he tried to cut it off, skinned his arm and then he..." Sam didn't finish the sentence but Cas had already seen what Dean had done next with his own eyes.

"Are you sure that there wasn't someone else here? That someone didn't take his hand. I mean why would he do this now?"

Sam sat down heavily on the steps down into the kitchen and Cas knelt down in front of him. "I think he got the idea from when he killed Cain, he told me he had to chop his hand off to get the First Blade back. He said that Cain told him he would kill all of us eventually, Crowley, you, me. Dean cut off his hand so that he couldn't wield it against us." Tears trailed Sam's face. "The only thing that mattered to my brother was to keep going Cas. To keep being a hunter. How the hell does he do that now?"

Cas didn't have an answer.