Before he was touched, before the pain, Dean's mind experienced a disconnect. His father's hand, the young softer hand he remembered from when his Mom was alive, complete with wedding ring, pushed down on his solar plexus. It was wrong at a base level, as if it symbolized everything that was amiss with the world.

Michael kept pressing downward with unrelenting force until the hand entered Dean up to the wrist. It was shocking and excruciating. He had not felt so violated since Hell. He tried to breathe through gritted teeth, tried to focus on Castiel's grip on his fingers.

A quip about Michael stepping on the accelerator to get on with it, died on Dean's lips.

"Close your eyes now." Michael commanded.

Dean obeyed. Eye burn-out was not on his bucket list.

"All of you," Michael's voice insisted.

Castiel tightened his hold on Dean's hand. Dean guessed it coincided with Castiel's eyelids falling.

The flare of Michael's Grace still penetrated the layers of skin covering Dean's pupils causing spikes of pain and sparks in the darkness. That pain invaded him, not from his eyes but from where Michael had connected his Grace to Dean's soul. It ravaged him, tearing him apart at the speed of light. Nothing had ever come close; not the heart attack from the rawhead hunt, the implosion of his brain when the Impala was totaled, not being torn apart by hell hounds, nor the slow precision of Alastair's knives and teeth.

Dean blacked out.

His conscious mind retreated from the breaking down of his soul and body. He was somewhere quiet, white and clean. It was calm and still. Unnatural. He wondered if Michael had created this space for him. He must have, because Dean would surely have retreated onto a long highway at Baby's wheel with Sam and Cas along for the ride. He focused on Castiel. He remembered his promise. He wouldn't let his angel go…

A reel of images flitted across the white wall. They moved at hyper-speed, like a live action rewind at pace. Dean clung onto to the images. Were they appearing because Michael was erasing them as they sequenced?

On the virtual screen, Castiel lay spread out on his back, exposed for Dean's personal view, on their bed, a sheen of post-lovemaking perspiration on his skin, the long expanse of his neck calling to Dean to lick and suck his devotion.

Castiel hunched broken in the rain.

Cas under Naomi's control punched into Dean's face. Somehow although the image seemed outside his mind, he could feel his cheekbone shatter under the angelic force. He could taste the mix of blood, bile, loss, and heartbreak at the back of his throat.

Dean thought he was travelling back in time, but then the images mixed and shifted in a confusing mass of memories.

Hippie Cas, who never was, popped pills in a Croatoan world.

In a back alley Castiel used his fists to tell Dean what he thought of saying yes to Michael.

Castiel held his FBI badge upside-down, before they ran down the back stairs of a brothel and Dean was happier than he had been in an age.

They sat on a bench watching children play and then they talked at the end of a fishing pier.

Castiel held vigil by his bed in Cheyenne as Dean fractured into pieces before his eyes and he didn't leave. Dean picked this point in time as when he started to fall for him. He loved Cas and he could feel those layers of love were being peeled away.

Dark black wings spread across a barn wall. His shoulder burned too hot like a brand was being seared into his flesh. He smelled the sulfur and Alastair's unique stench.

This couldn't be what he would be left with? Something pulled him out of perdition but he won't remember what? It would be like waking up underground in his coffin but this time underground in his home. What if it was not only Castiel? What if everything since he was bonded and reformed by Castiel's Grace disappeared? He wouldn't remember Charlie, Kevin, Jodie, Garth. He'd think Bobby was still alive. Sam would have to tell him. Sam would have to tell him about the apocalypse. Dean was suddenly terrified that having to do that could break his brother. He wanted out now. He was giving too much. He couldn't do that to Sam. He tried to call out, to tell Michael to halt. That he was done. That he just couldn't give anymore. His screams bounced off the walls in this room made of his mind and echoed back at him in mockery. He tried to force his consciousness to wake up. He pushed back with a supreme effort.

He remembered someone ordering him to close his eyes. It was the most important thing to keep his eyes closed. The pain increased, impossibly, as he had surely been at his limit. There were no more memories to rely on. He was composed only of the agony of his atoms' chemical bonds being forced apart. Cold fusion happening inside, splitting apart what made him Dean Winchester, his soul? His body? His mind?

The tapping of a silver topped cane and the smell of a deep dish Chicago pizza menaced at the edge of his existence.

Then he was no longer in the white room. He was back in his own deeply aching body with his eyes clenched shut and his breath coming in ragged gasps.

"It is done."

He heard the words but could not connect them to a meaning.

A voice that was vaguely familiar spoke, "He is coming round. Sam!"

"Don't touch him." Sam barked.

Dean tried to focus. He felt he should know those voices. He latched onto the last one: Sam. Suddenly his mind was filled with all his memories of Sam like an empty glass on a hot day with homemade lemonade to the brim, and he tried to call out for his brother.

He blinked and could see a face peering into his. More of his life was replenished until he was bursting with pain and pressure.

On the opposite side under all the fiery pain, Dean could feel someone holding his hand.

"Get the fuck away from me." Dean lashed out towards the face with his free arm.

"Not a problem." The stranger scoffed.

"Dee? Are you OK? You had me going there. Thought you'd screamed yourself to death. Jerk."

"Having angel juice scraped outta ya is no picnic, Bitch." Dean took a few stuttering breaths. He tried to move but the nuclear reactor in his middle wasn't cooked. A flare of agony knocked him back.

Michael urged him to remain still while he finished healing but Dean had already lost the battle with consciousness.

Next time he came close to awareness he could hear someone weeping. Sam's noisy snot-filled sobs provided a counterpoint. A part of Dean wasn't waking for a click flick and he gladly sank into the painless dark.

The air had a taint of antiseptic. Something was stuck in Dean's arm. It was a fucking IV. He knew it was. Why would he be in hospital? What had happened?

It wasn't a hospital. There were no beeping monitors and bustling nurses. The batcave… he was in the bunker… in the medical bay.

Someone was sitting to his right reading aloud to him. A poem maybe. The voice was deep, graveled, and grave. Dean wanted to reach out and touch the owner of that voice.

"….I know nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night with any one I love,
Or…"

Dean opened his eyes, blinking at the brightness of the overhead fixture.

Dean's head was inclined away from the voice. The poetry reader stopped and his breath shuddered. A broken intonation came instead, "Sam?"

Dean's vision came into focus. He could see Sammy. He was hunched over in an old metal backed chair too small for his large frame. He held a weird snow globe containing swirling storm clouds in his palms. Sammy's head lifted taking in Dean's blinking eyelids and moving past him to the owner of the voice, "He's awake."

Dean licked parched lips and tried to clear his dry throat. He moved his head to the other side. Dark hair, bluest eyes, a tattered and mended trench coat and blue backwards tie, a hand reaching for Dean's own. His mind opened like a flower turning towards the light. His heart filled complete and the name burst out of him, "Cas?"

++++++++++++++++++++++++SPNSPNSPNSPNSPNSPSNSPNSPNSPNSPN++++++++++++++++++

A/N: What Dean saw and heard in his confusion as he came back from the tortuous extraction will be explained in the next chapter.

The quote is from the poem Miracles by Walt Whitman.

Four Chapters to go... Thanks to you all who have been along for the ride...