He was supposed to be home a week ago. But then his stupid dick of a brain decided it needed to shut off, randomly, for a couple of hours a day. And it didn't have the plain human decency to do it in a quiet fashion. No, it had to twitch and jerk him about a little before slipping into oblivion. Missouri told him that it wasn't good for him to keep doing that. He got a little sarcastic and now he's to address her only as Dr. Moseley or Ma'am. Goddamned brain.

Oh, right, and he's in a coma now. Fan-friggin-tastic. Although the fact that he knows he's in a coma must mean that he isn't, at least not anymore. The wheels were spinning in his mind but the hamster isn't home.

And then someone's holding his freaking hand. First he gets some angel's freaky inner bits inside him somehow and now he can't even enjoy a coma without having his extremities groped. God, its probably Sam, the big girl. Holding his hand, pinching his elbow, stabbing his vein.

Shit.

"Whur?" Sure it's a muffled grunt but it's a manly, coherent muffled grunt.

"Dean?" That's definitely Sam's voice coming from his other side so the one with the inappropriate hand holding has got to be someone else. He really hopes it's Dr. Moseley. "He's waking up."

Suddenly the world came into existence outside of his head, the sharp hospital lights piercing through his flimsy eyelids. Fuzzy shapes dotted the room. Why the hell were there so many people here?

"What?" he tried again. It wasn't what he was trying to say but he could roll with it.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Winchester." It was Dr. Moseley after all at his right hand side. And there's Sam's giant form looming at his left. That leaves three unidentified blobs, all of whom were extremely large blobs. Except they weren't just wide, they were shifting in size, undulating smaller and larger because they weren't their bodies. They were wings. He had three angels in his room. Awesome.

And one of them was pushing around a cart of rags.

He wanted to go back to sleep.

"Dean, don't go back to sleep," Sam snapped, frowning with every ounce of his large puppy face.

"The matter is urgent." The closest blob sounded a lot like Michael. Dean blinked a few times and rubbed the grime out of his eyes so that he could confirm that yes, the head of his division was standing in his hospital room while he was wearing nothing but a backless paper gown. Good impressions.

He didn't recognize the second angel. If he could pick to words to describe him, they would be "short" and "smug."

The last angel was Balthazar and he wasn't pushing a cart of rags. He was pushing a wheelchair filled with tattered wings. Presumably beneath those wings was yet another angel. A doctor, an overgrown man-girl, and four angels walk into a hospital. His life was a bad setup for a cheesy joke.

"What?" he asked again. And this time he meant to.

"The piece of Grace within you has, for lack of a better word, reawakened," Michael supplied.

"That's um..." he started but couldn't find the right words to describe whatever that was. He knew what it should have been. It should have been terrifying. It should have had him pissing mad that it was getting worse instead of better. It should have scared the shit out of him that the stupid Grace was messing with his body. But he just swallowed and accepted it because some part of him that he couldn't understood thought that everything was just fine the way it was and there was no reason to panic.

That in itself started him panicking. "Ok, so what do we do? We can't take it out right? So can we, I don't know, put it back to sleep? Can you do that?"

"Not without killing Castiel," Balthazar snapped. The angel in the chair shifted and Dean caught a glimpse of dark hair. He gaped. That was Castiel with the ragged wings, entire patches of feathers missing, their natural sheen given way to dull tufts.

"So then what can we do?" Dean shot back. He didn't know why seeing the depressing state of the angel's wings makes him angrier than the thought of his own impending disability. He chalked it up to the fact that this was the angel who was supposed to protect him.

"So impatient," the unknown angel chortled.

"And who the fuck are you?"

The angel grinned and swept his wings in an elegant bow. "Gabriel. I'm, hmmm, I guess I'm the closest thing Cassy has to a dad."

"I thought God was your Father," Sam cut in.

"I don't know about you, but most fathers show up more than once every two hundred years," Gabriel said with a grin that did not move his stone cold eyes.

"Do not disparage the name of our Father," Michael answered swiftly.

"Right," Gabriel barked, rolling his eyes.

"Why the fuck are you here?" Dean scowled.

"It was my idea," the short angel shrugged. "And I wanted to see it through."

"What was your idea?" Dean narrowed his eyes. Dissension in the angelic ranks did nothing to ease the coil of unease that had begun to tighten as soon as the angels had started talking.

"Humans aren't meant to form True Bonds with angels," Michael said.

"But you said that it's happened before, right?" There was Sam, always trying to correct the angels on angel lore.

"Yes. The difference, however, between those Bonds and the one between your brother and Castiel is that they were not cut off. The Grace still lay connected to the angel, so it could be controlled by the angel. Castiel's Grace, however, seems to have completely separated from him."

"It's because I died," Dean grumbled.

"What?" Four pairs of eyes turned to look at him. Dr. Moseley had been surreptitiously looking at him the entire time. Castiel... didn't move.

"Um," he cleared his throat. "I mean, it makes sense, right? I died so the little piece of Cas inside me died with me. And now that I'm alive again it can't smush itself back into him." He looked imploringly between the three angels. One of them had to know what was going on.

"Maybe," Gabriel conceded after a beat of silence. Michael nodded slowly. Balthazar just looked at him like he'd grown a second head that was singing operettas. Sam looked smug.

"Ok, so?" he prompted. God, it was worse than keeping a five year old on track.

"The unregulated Grace is, in a sense, too large for your human vessel. It's pushing out against your soul."

"And that's what's hurting him? Making him seize?" Sam asked.

"It's our best guess," Gabriel shrugged.

"Except your soul is a mean little bastard and it's pushing back," Balthazar said, trying to sound bored but unable to contain the slight snarl at the insult.

"It seems that previously, you were able to suppress the Grace within you," Michael explained, one eyebrow lifted in amusement, like it was silly antics that a human soul could control the chunk of Angel innards.

"So how do I do that again?" Dean asked. It seemed the most logical answer to his current predicament.

"You don't," Balthazar snapped.

"Well why the hell not?"

"It'll kill him!"

The silence that hit the room was oppressive, a moldy blanket smothering the color out of the world. Missouri finally broke the silence with a cleared throat and authoritative stance.

"Dean, honey, what the angels are trying to get to, is that your soul can't handle the Grace, but there's a way for Castiel to relieve some of the pressure building up."

"How?" Dean prompted impatiently.

"A Blood Bond," Sam blurted out.

"What?" Dean scowled.

"Like they do at the graduation ceremonies."

"Seriously?" Dean attempted to throw his hands up in the air but the motion was aborted by the tubes and wires still taped to his arms. "So this all could have been avoided if we'd just gone through with the damned bonding ceremony in the first place?"

"Well, yea, but with Castiel," Gabriel answered petulantly.

"Alright, let's do this." Dean looked around the room for a likely instrument to pierce his skin before realizing he already had easy access to his blood. A short, painful tug was all it took to get the IV drip out of his arm. A moment later, a bead of blood welled out of the pinprick hole.

Balthazar had wheeled Castiel up to the bed and held up a silver blade.

"Alright Cassy, time to get a little bloody."

A flick of his wrist and a small cut opened up at the base of Castiel's limp palm. Dean grabbed the yielding hand and pressed it against the spot of red on his own arm. The moment they touched, a bright flash of light illuminated the room, forcing Dean to close his eyes against it's intensity.

By the time he'd blinked away the dark spots in his vision, a pair of dark blue eyes were boring into his skull.

"Dean Winchester," the angel said, voice deep and hard.

"Uh, yea?"

Dean would never forget the first thing Castiel would say to him after he'd practically saved the freak's life in that gravelly voice that lent gravity to everything that came out of his mouth.

Castiel narrowed his eyes and tightened his grip around Dean's forearm, his face covered in a fine sheen of sweat, his hair a complete mess. "Do you know what you do to me?"