Fire, flickering. Burning.

The smell of burning hair, the stench of bubbling flesh. Overwhelming. Suffocating.

He watched as she burned alive, felt the heat of the flames on his own skin. Looked down.

He started screaming when his own flesh began to sizzle and burn, when the fire caught, roaring around him.

Agony. The flames seared his very mind with their intensity. The world narrowed to nothing but the fire and the pain.

"Dean!"

Dean awoke abruptly to find an unfamiliar face above him. He lashed out defensively, and Castiel backed up immediately. Dean groaned, pressing his palms over his eyes. Feeling the coolness opposing the image of fire still etched into his minds' eye.

"You were making a lot of noise." Castiel offered, shifting uncertainly where he crouched a safe distance away.

Dean cleared his throat – momentarily confused by how easy it was, when it should be sore from coughing in dense smoke – and shook his head. "S'nightmare. Doesn't matter." He muttered, pushing himself upright. "Where's Sammy?"

"Outside."

Dean emerged from the abandoned house they were using as shelter for the night, blinking till his eyes adjusted to the darkness outside. There was no moon to light the way as he cautiously made his way towards the impala, turning the world into something alien and frightening. The dark was alive with demons, usually. That was forefront in his mind when he finally reached the car and leaned into comforting cold metal. "Hey, Sammy."

"Dean. Cas wake you up?" His brother greeted him in a subdued tone, sitting sprawled hazardously across the bonnet.

"Mmm. I guess I got too loud." Dean pulled a half hearted smirk, trying to make a joke of it.

"You should see someone about that, you know." Sam started, tone indifferent. Dean wouldn't do it. He'd suggested it before many times – and Dean would always steer the conversation away masterfully.

"It's fine. What are you doing up?" Dean countered, as always turning the conversation to his brother instead.
"Couldn't sleep." Sam's tone said it all. Couldn't sleep because of the waiting nightmares. Nightmares of squealing tyres, the crunch of metal. The impact. The absent pain where there should have been pain.

"I nearly died today. If it hadn't been for Castiel..." He spoke quietly, clearly humbled by the very thought.

"Don't dwell on it, Sam." Dean responded a little more sharply than intended, then softened. "Cas was there and he saved you. There's no point dwelling on what could have happened."

"...How do we protect an Angel, Dean? He's this ancient divine creature and we're... We're just people. We know what demons can do, and they want him. What do we do?" Sam sighed, his mind running through it all repeatedly. Useless. Useless. They couldn't do it. This was too much for them, too big. They'd spent their lives avoiding demons and campaigning against demon ownership and now, here they were, facing hordes of the blasted creatures.

Demons were foul. They were shaped like grotesquely formed humans, nightmare fuel in their own right. Elongated, clawed feet. Long slender legs, perfect for hunting. They ran on all fours, their longer hind legs bunched behind them, full of bounding power. Beneath the shoulders connected another set of arms, smaller and built for holding things. Their faces were flat like a humans, but the mouths were too wide, the eyes too large and black. Behind them stretched a sinewy, slender tail ending in a spade. Their skin was soft, but key areas were scaled – shoulders, spine, forehead, knees and elbows.

Some people found them appealing and wanted them for aesthetic reasons. Neither Sam nor Dean could see it, personally. Whenever they saw a demon, all they saw was the wicked glint in those evil eyes, the curve of claws meant for rending flesh from bone. Soft, human flesh.

Demons were not pets. Not even close.

He was torn from his thoughts by his brother speaking to him, his voice too loud in the night.

"I know this is big, Sammy. Bigger than anything we've ever done before. But we already owe this Angel – owe Cas – so much. Hell, I ran the dude over and he still chose to save your life. That kind of selflessness ain't common. We gotta help him out of this, Sam. Sure, it's dangerous, and we'll be tangling with the demons we wanted to avoid... But hey, any thing that pisses them off is a good thing in my book." Dean smirked his way, watching him closely.

"We do owe him. And we'll help him, God knows we'll help him, but Dean... How? His flock is gone. He doesn't have a home to go back to any more. He said it himself, his brother was the last one of his flock with him and he's gone too." Sam sighed, looking up at the sky as if to find the answers there. All he found above were heavy storm clouds, waiting to burst open. "If these demons want his wings so bad, they won't hesitate to kill us to get them. Hell, we're trying to ruin their hunting parties already, they probably don't need any other reasons to try and kill us."

"Don't think I don't know that Sammy. But we gotta try, at the very least. We can do that much. We-" Dean's head snapped round, his eyes scanning the dark for something.

"...Dean?" Sam sat up straighter, looking to his brother and trying to follow his gaze. "What is it?"

"...Thought I heard something moving..."

A few tense minutes passed before he relaxed again, shaking his head with a frown. "Must have been a rat or something. C'mon Sammy, we should go back inside. Cas is probably wondering if we've upped and left without him by now."

~X~

Pain. So much pain.

It ran bone deep, a terrible ache that seared down his back and into his arms, set his teeth on edge. He tried to endure it, but small sounds kept escaping from him. Whines and sobs that only made it feel worse. He didn't care about the humiliation of being seen this way by his captors. His whole world was focused on the pain. He was barely even aware of their presence any more, until cruel fingers curved around the arch of a wing once again. There was the sensation of something tugging at the inside, and then fresh pain washed over him. He tried to curl up into a tighter ball to escape it, but his chains prevented it. His wrists were manacled to either side of him, attached to the edges of the table he was trapped on.

Dimly, he knew what was happening. This was the fifth time he had gone through this now. The first time, it had been so much worse. He had screamed until his voice was gone, battered himself against his chains in his attempts to escape the pain. They had beaten him once it was over, shouted at him for ruining their goods. The feathers were torn more than necessary due to his frantic escape attempts, streaked red with his blood.

Despite having gone through the process four times prior to now, it never got any easier. It was agony, pure and simple. His wings were taking longer and longer to recover after each shear. That was how it worked, after all. To begin with, it would only take roughly four days for an Angel's wings to regrow its feathers out as if nothing had ever happened. But the more shears an Angel went through, the longer the length of time it took to regrow their wings. It was as if their very wings were deeply traumatised by each shearing – something he could well believe. This being his fifth shear, his wings had only just finished regrowing. It had taken them a month and four days. All for nothing, as they took from him once again his gift of flight. He hated them.

He hated them.

One of his smaller feathers escaped from their grasping hands, floating gently down, twisting in the air, to land by his manacled wrist. He gazed down at it through eyes blurred with tears, trying to lose himself in the soft golden sheen of it. Trying anything he could to distance himself from the pain in his wings. Dimly, he heard something snap, screwed his eyes tight against the nauseating pain that washed through him. Heard them swearing and moving around behind him, then something scratchy and uncomfortable pressed to his wing. A blood feather. They'd snapped another one, again. Every shear, he lost blood to the slowest feathers to grow back in. They only needed an extra day or two to finish, and then the blood would recede and the feather would no longer bleed out when snapped, but his captors were impatient. An extra day before shearing his wings was an extra day of making no profit from him. The fifth shear was usually the last one they would do before killing the Angel and throwing the corpse out. After the fifth shear, it would take an Angel's wings over 2 months to recover.

Oh, but he would not be spared that easily. They dropped his wings, and he let them hang heavily from the manacles that held them up. It wasn't over. They would kill him and leave now, were he any other Angel. There would be no good profit left to make from him. But he wasn't, so they would not. Instead, he felt them lift his next set.

Yes, as an Archangel he had the pleasure of being held for shearing not just five times as any other Angel, but eight. Eight shears. He wasn't sure he could last that long. The pain alone felt it should kill him. But it never did, and so he had to sit out his lift in a cold and damp cage, miserable, awaiting the next shear.

I'm so sorry this took so long.

There aren't excuses for this taking as long as it did, it shouldn't have. :( I've been focusing on my drawing more than my writing, when I could have been doing both. This chapter isn't very long, but I think I'm getting back into it well enough. As an apology for this taking as long as it did, I'll be writing up a couple more of the one shot info stories that go into this series - one for Angels, one for demons. I'll also be drawing a bit of art for the story for you guys to enjoy.