If you're seeing this message, then I'm, well, dead.

Not really, but that always sounds so epic in movies and such. I lived through my surgery. It was really odd. They took me into the prep room and strapped me into a table, hooking up IVs and heart rate monitors and pulse-ox monitors and who knows what else. I was just staring up at a team of masked, capped, scrubbed doctors, nurses and anesthesiologists, anonymized by their sterile gear, like in movies when the main character is going in for some sort of procedure. Then, someone jostled a breathing tube down my throat (loads of fun) and strapped on a mask. Then, they started with the laughing gas, which worked remarkably quickly. Let me explain you a thing: laughing gas is as weird as hell. Nothing's funny, you're not being forced to laugh, but you find yourself in histrionic convulsions, an out-of-nowhere hysteria that just feels so good. Then, I don't remember anything else, and I was waking up in the recovery bay, next to a young girl named Carys who had broken her arm so badly she needed surgery.

I had an out-of-body experience then, and it was trippy as fuck. I thought that only happened when you were dead/dying/high as a kite/completely under. But apparently its more common than you might think, especially for non-smoking young women, which is the demographic most affected by anesthesia. I just started floating around, gliding around the recovery bay, unable to see past the curtain that kept me and poor unconscious Carys who got in a car accident inside. Her cast was green.

Then I passed out again in a bed cubicle and nurses were hooking me up to IVs. They gave me my iPhone to listen to, as the surgery ward of the Children's Hospital was echoing with the pleasant peals of a screaming toddler receiving dialysis for the first time. Poor girl. She got diabetes because her mother hadn't bothered to take care of herself during pregnancy. She couldn't be bothered to be healthy for nine months, so the poor thing has to clean up the mess for the rest of her life. (I don't think the gossiping nurses thought I was aware enough to listen.)

Guys, if you get pregnant/impregnate someone, please make sure you/the mother is healthy.

I'm typing this in the recovery room, and by some miracle FF Net is letting me post from an iPhone. I am not responsible for any weirdness. Well, I am, but I just came out of universal anesthesia. This fic is currently distracting me from my intense throbbing pain in my lumbar region. It's about seven-thirty in the evening, and I've been here for twelve hours. UGH.

"Cas?" Charlie called softly, knocking gingerly on Dean's bedroom door. The fallen man had slept through lunch and the others had put off dinner as much as possible to let him sleep. That may have been an effect of Dean's obtuse refusal to let anyone eat before Cas got up. Finally, they volunteered Charlie to go rouse Cas.

"I can't," Dean had said, aand nobody really wished for him to elaborate.

"He'll probably try to smite me. Plus, I cooked all this," Crowley had chimed in.

"I am a prophet. I can sit here and stare at this chicken curry without getting up if I damn well please. I may not have any archangels currently at my disposal, as two are locked up and two are dead, but you don't mess with me," Kevin had defended. Dean had just looked at him oddly.

"I'll go," Sam had said, but as he tried to stand, Dean caught his shoulder and pushed him back into his chair.

"Nope, Sammy." Sam had looked at Dean, an I-am-fed-up-with-your-shit look, but didn't protest. His head had been throbbing all day, blood pressure changing as rapidly as possession in a professional basketball game, plummeting and rising and being all together strange.

"That leaves me," Charlie had said good-naturedly. Truth be told, she would have been reluctant to have let anyone else deal with Cas right now.

Dean had opened his mouth to warn her, unsure of what state Cas might be; whether it be catatonic or unclothed or both or somewhere in between.

But he grappled in midair for the words he needed, not finding them. How do you tell someone that their already trodden-upon surrogate family member had been trodden on some more? And secondly, how did you admit that you were doing the trodding? Oh, hey, warning, Cas got beat up because he took some painkillers. Oh, yeah, it was me who did it. No biggie. He closed his mouth, watching her walk away. Sam squinted at him, sensing that something was wrong, but didn't press further.

Now, standing at the door, there was no response. After trying again, she reached for the door knob and found that the room was unlocked.

"Cas, honey?" The lights were off, and she noted that Dean had done this despite his anger at the broken angel.

"Dean?" Cas said weakly, hope seeping into his voice like sunlight through a ripped blackout curtain.

"No, sweetheart, it's Charlie."

"Oh."

Charlie noted that Cas had a way of communicating efficiently through few words, a rare gift. He could say 'would you like some bacon' and his words would convey more meaning than a well-crafted novel.

This small, uttered, 'oh' spoke volumes. It said that Cas was weary, Cas was in immense pain, and most of all, that he cared for, no, loved the elder Winchester in a way that Charlie couldn't even begin to fathom. She knew that Cas was in severe emotional pain as well as physical pain.

"Is it okay to turn on the lights?" Charlie asked, heart breaking. However, she was immensely relieved that Cas was conscious.

"Yes," Cas said, an obvious lie. His voice quivered in pain, the single syllable ringing with the echoes of a thousand neurons alight in agony, reacting to all of the damage, rushing back full force now that he was conscious again.

"I'm going to turn on the lights now," Charlie warned. She groped around on the wall until she found the light switch, and flipped it deftly with a flick of her hand.

Cas wasn't in the bed, though the covers were tangled and unmade. Charlie caught a glimpse of a bulky white thing- his cast- out of the corner of her eye. She gasped as she saw Cas on the floor, on his side, one arm awkwardly slung through one of his crutches, lying to the side of him, and the other was pinned between the crutch and his body and the floor, the metal frame almost parallel to his body, his arm squeezed in the middle.

Charlie had never met Castiel the angel. She knew Cas, the pathetic, endearing, weathered man who just didn't know how to treat the world, but poked at it gingerly, tilti until it complied or ran away.

Nonetheless, seeing him like this, in too much pain to even free his arm from the punishing grasp of the metal, made Charlie sad. She walked over to him, mumbling comforting nonsense, aware that it wouldn't help unless it came from Dean. She gently untangled him from the crutches, paying special attention to the nasty purple lines now on his arm.

"How long did you lay like this?" Charlie murmured.

"Since I fell over," Cas responded truthfully. He just hadn't had the strength required to move, and that was even before the Vicodin wore off. After that, he faded into a pain-clouded haze, followed by a nightmare-riddled sleep.

Finally, Charlie had maneuvered him onto the bed, sitting upright and at attention. She felt like chucking the crutches halfway to Isengard for what they had done to the poor man, but somehow kept the voice of reason and left them there for now. She retrieved a wet washcloth and some bandages and set to work on repairing Cas's face, knowing that he needed it out of mind, Dean needed it out of sight, and the others just didn't need to know. She had guessed what happened as soon as she saw his face, and Dean's 'I can't wake him' echoed in her mind.

But somehow, impossibly, she got the vibe that things were on the mend. Cas had come back, tail between his legs, and Dean was once again being stubbornly, ridiculously, lubriciously protective of him.

She would bring up the apparent beating later.

The oxygen fled the room as soon as Charlie walked back in, crutches nowhere in sight, helping Cas walk along on his good foot. Dean was inhaling, but no air was coming in, and he wondered briefly if that was what it might be like to lose one's space helmet while on a nice hike atop the moon. His heart rate increased, the powerful muscle contracting quickly, trying to squeeze out all of the oxygen left in his bloodstream as if someone held his neck underwater. With an ornamental necklace made of cinder blocks.

Cas's face was patched up, and too the naked eye it looked like the angel had just ridden his motorcycle through a rosebush. But Dean knew the angel's face like Roman schoolboys knew their classic literature: wholly, unflinchingly, grudgingly, perfectly. His complexion was sallow and wan, from the blood loss and the lack of vitamin D. He had been crying, given away by the tiny sliver of redness on the edges of his eyelids. The bruises were covered by Charlie's mostly-unused concealer or foundation or whatever. At least, Dean hoped it was Charlie's; it would be a scary thing to behold if it belonged to Sam, Crowley or Kevin.

Dean's insides decided to rearrange himself as the facts hit him again. He had done this to Cas. He had beaten him and yelled at him and left him lying on the floor, taken his painkillers and left only bruises and pain. Sam placed a hand on his forearm gingerly, and Dean noted absently that his fingernails were digging into his leg through the cotton of his pajama pants.

Weird. Why does that not hurt?

Then, Cas smiled weakly at the table and the people around it, and Dean could breath again. If not oxygen, the air had been pumped full of laughing gas. There was nothing funny, but Dean couldn't stop his body from convulsing in silent laughter, giddy with who-the-fuck-knew as Charlie helped the fallen angel into his seat and Crowley offered to say a grace.

"A grace," Kevin repeated incredulously, staring open-mouthed, dumb-foundedly at the clean-shaven king of Hell who held his hands out to Sam on his left and Cas to his right. Sam shrugged and gave Dean his other hand, and the older Winchester, still enveloped in waves of silent laughter, gave his to Kevin. Cas clasped hands with Charlie, who extended her palm out to the startled prophet.

Kevin's hands stayed in his lap, even as the look of astonishment thawed off of his features. Finally, he lifted them, but instead of completing the chain, he held Dean's hand to Charlie's, cutting himself off from the circle of faith, casting himself aside from the believers.

Cas realized what Kevin had done as soon as he had done it, and smoothly connected Charlie's other hand with Crowley's, excommunicating himself firmly from his faith.

Dean stopped laughing.

Cas had lost his faith, and he had expressed it just as subtly as sending a brick through someone's locked window to tell them you weren't fond of them.

Cas.

Castiel, his brother, his ally, his fellow soldier, his savior many times over, his nearly-lover, a literal man of God.

Had lost faith.

If Cas, who was borne of love for his father, carried it in every cell and folloed it relentlessly and wholly, had lost that faith, then what was left for him?

Then, as everyone else listened to Crowley's prayer (even Kevin had the grace to close his eyes) Dean opened his eyes to find Cas's blue ones staring intensely back at him.

Am I holy to Cas?

Have I become the epicenter of his reality, as God once was?

Dean shut his eyes, unwilling to face the weight of his angel's soulful gaze.

And in that moment, Castiel became Cas for good.

Oh, and it's time for me to the cue the Alice Cooper, 'cause school's out! for! SUM-MER~!

At least for me, it is. Happy June fifth, every pony.