When Dean once again regained conciseness, he was first aware of the change in light. It was darker- almost near dusk, it seemed at first blink, and a purpley-gray light swam around the boulders and soaked into the textured surface on which Dean lay. The second thing he noticed was the lack of pain- or at least the lack of excruciating pain- coming from his twisted arm.
Crap. That couldn't be good.
Had it finally given out? Crap.
He knew it was still stuck under the goddamn rock, and his shoulder was still pinned up against the ledge he couldn't quite will his neck to let him see. He was still lying on his stomach, his other arm somewhere along his side.
And that was about all he knew.
Dean tried to rack his brain for the last things he remembered and purple rock-dust flew in front of his eyes. Cas- they were walking. Things got fuzzy no- no. "The Rocks." That was right, the avalanche or whatever the hell it was. Was that natural? The had been walking to catch up with the party not ten steps ahead (Sam was there- he must have seen) when something dusty and large and hard came rolling down the side of the hill. Something slipped underfoot and they went down and fell hard.
Son of a bitch...
Turning his mind back to the present, he glanced around (mostly with his eyes- God, his neck was sore) and observed the small space in which he was enclosed. The rocks, large and crusted and old and ignorant and disgustingly familiar jutted up about two feet above his head, and one large, flat-sided boulder formed the opposite wall of the enclosure. Cas' body lay diagonally from it, his hairy, black head three feet away from Dean's and his torso turned at a 90-degree angle so he was perpendicular to Dean's upper body, though one of his feet lay pathetically near the corner- where the flat wall met a rougher jagged one that made up that corner of the pocket of space.
Before examining his friend's condition more thoroughly, Dean decided to bite the bit and look up; try to determine just how screwed over by Hades they were. He craned his neck as far up as it would go and squinted his eyes at the somehow painfully dull light bathing the boulders above his head. Several concaves of rock wove together further above his head, and, eventually, after passing jutting edges and what must have been the top of the flat-wall rock, gave their way into a tiny window of light- a small crack of opening, of sky. Thank God.
Well, they had air, and though Dean couldn't deny: it would be a total bitch to get them out of this goddamn cavern, at least they weren't screwed. The opening couldn't be more that ten feet above Dean's dirt-covered head.
He was contemplating just exactly how they were going to go about getting through it when he looked back at Cas's crumpled and dusty form and saw that his eyes were closed. The angel had his cheek smushed against the slanted and particularly dusty boulder that made up the floor on which they lay, and Dean winced with a slight smile at how utterly uncomfortable it looked, though he then realized he probably didn't look any more luxurious with his own heavy face and twisted shoulder. But he could see his friend's chest rising and falling, just barely against the rock, an decided to let him sleep.
He tried to find his other hand- his free hand, his right hand- and crammed his neck against his chest to look down his own body. The hand was laying peacefully, the back of it just touching his jeaned thigh, scratched and bruised and covered with dust and it was holding Cas' in an unrelenting fist.
Well. Crap.
He hadn't even realized he'd been doing that.
Dean vaguely remembered his companion reaching out to take his hand when his shoulder started killing him, and he was thankful for the break from the pain.
He began to (very urgently) coax his stiff finger muscles to let go of the white, asleep knuckles clenched under his own.
God. Kinda nice of Cas to offer up an appendage of his own to have the life squeezed out of.
And when Dean managed to gain some control over his hand he began to fear he had done literally just that: from where his head was lying he could just make out a dark prune spot spilling off the center of Cas' palm- not to mention the paleness that seeped over the whole hand and the dark indents of Dean's fingernails against the deprived skin.
Eesh that was going to be painful. And his angle-mojo wasn't even working. Dean winced again as he turned his eyes over the hand's corpse-like features, and brought his own shamefully up to his chest and tried to shake life back into his cold and clamped fingers.
He didn't feel bad (Of course that's what's going to happen if you give a man in agony a hand- he's going to squeeze the goddamn life out of it and bruise his friend in the process).
He sighed, and green eyes found there way to Cas' not-so-comfortable-looking face, and the pale evening light pooling in from the crack in the ceiling began to darken.