Castiel found himself falling quickly asleep in that dark and damp hole.
Alone, exhausted, he had pressed his forehead to the cracked stone beneath him while water dripped down the back of his neck and he thought-I'll close my eyes, just for a minute...no, no! His inner Dean voice hissed at him. Whatever made those tracks could still be around...
But then a minute became more than that, and it was the next day, where he found himself curled up on his side, suddenly wide awake and choking on the water he had inhaled in sleep. He shot straight up, eyes wide as he choked and coughed and sputtered. His clothes clung to him like the damp, draping, overlarge wings of a butterfly, freshly divested of its cocoon. It was this way because the crater Castiel had fallen asleep in had turned into a puddle overnight from the rain falling freely through the hole in the roof, and that was the source of the water that had woken him.
Castile looked around himself as his chest heaved, at the ruined church now flooded with warm, early morning light. He remembered what happened. Castiel had died...again. And God had brought him back...again. Different, this time. Smaller. Without Grace or wings. Cas slowly calmed as he contextualized his situation. It wasn't good, but it also wasn't the worst thing that could be happening right now. Castiel would just call Dean...
The ex angel fished his phone out of one of his coat's sodden pockets. He decided to tilt the phone to let the water drain out of the cracks of it before he used it-he wasn't eager to drip more water onto himself-his brows scrunched up as another drop landed on his forehead from the ceiling, and he scooted over to another position in the pool to avoid that, his progress greatly slowed by his adult sized, sodden clothes dragging behind him.
After all the water had drained out of the phone-there was an awful lot of it-Castiel held it up with a serious look on his small face and pressed the button that was supposed to make it light up, the first step he had been taught in how to make a phone call.
The phone failed to respond.
A drop of water once again landed on the crown of Castiel's head of dark hair, and slid cloyingly through his scalp and down the back of his neck. Castiel scowled and pushed the worst of his wet mop slicked back from his face, huffing in annoyance. He knew what to do when the phone was 'dead' as well. He stumbled his way to his feet with much overbalancing and near tumbles, while the little Voice of Dean that lived in his head swore. Castiel ended up losing his shoes to the shallow pool before he managed to drag himself out of it.
Castiel grimaced and spread his arms out to his sides as he assessed himself. The sodden sleeves of his tan jacket hung loosely far past the ends of his tiny fingertips, dripping more water onto the cracked tile of the floor. His pants hung so loosely on him now that they dropped to pool around his ankles with a clank from his belt buckle as he watched. Deciding to forgo the pants for now, Castiel only reached down to pull his black boxers back up for modesty's sake and then stepped out of them. His wet socks made drag marks on the dusty dirty floor, marks quickly overtaken by the sweeping drag of his wet overcoat trailing behind him like the wings of a cape. He picked his way carefully around debre until he reached the outer wall of the church and then began looking for the holes in the wall that Dean called a 'plug'. He eventually found one along the back wall, but after he scrounged up the 'charger' out of another sodden coat pocket and set up the phone to receive its nourishment exactly the way the Winchesters had taught him. Instead of lighting up the way it usually would, the screen briefly flashed with a sketchy rainbow of colors, sparked briefly, then went flat black. The symbol that would appear in indication that Cas had performed this task correctly did not appear.
Castiel frowned, but decided to leave the phone alone. He wandered off in search of an exit to the church, but only found a single pair of massive wooden doors, locked and barred from both sides. Or perhaps, Castiel thought, scowling up at the ornate brass door handle that was situated at least a good few inches above his head now, perhaps the doors were not particularly large, but Castiel was particularly small now. Not for the first time since he had begun his acquaintanceship with the Winchesters, Castiel found himself questioning God's decision making skills as he frowned down at his tiny hands. He would be even more of a liability to the Winchesters than his depowered self usually was, with his vessel-his body-like this.
Castiel found himself wandering back over to the small pool in the crater that marred the floor just before the altar. That steady drip of water from the roof was still making ripples expand from the center of it.
Cas found himself frowning down at a brown loafer bobbing lightly along with each ripple. He replayed the thought he just had. Water dripping from the edge of the hole in the roof...was making ripples spread from the center of the pool?
Castiel looked up, and sure enough he discovered that the water was not dripping from the edges of the hole in the roof, but that the steady rain drops were coming from the sky...the perfectly clear, blue sky...was dripping water...in exactly one place, and one place only...every four seconds like clockwork.
Eyeing the phenomena warily, Castiel carefully fished his shoes out of the puddle while trying not to touch the water any more than necessary...the water that he had slept in all night. Under his observation, Castiel watched as a spark of...something flashed across the depths as the next droplet fell, so quick and subtle it could be mistaken for the reflection of sunlight on water. After a moment of contemplation, Castiel leaned out over the small pool, hand held out towards the center, where every drop of water had fallen like clockwork before now. His brows furrowed as he realized he had failed to account for his now shortened stature. His arm couldn't even reach halfway to the center of the little pool. He needn't have worried though; even as his little fingers stretched across the water, the next drop to come down landed exactly in his palm, a good foot away from where the stream had been steadily dripping before Castiel had entered himself into the equation. Castiel's arm jerked in surprise, almost losing the drop of water to the pool below, and then almost losing himself to the pool below as he overbalanced. He quickly scuttled back, snatching his hand closer to his chest and eyeing the pool with some suspicion, which had gone back to innocently dripping water into the center as he shuffled backwards on his heels. Vaguely, he recalled that when he first awoke in the pool, no matter which edge of it he moved to, he was always getting dripped on.
Once he was satisfied the pool wouldn't do anything...weird, while he wasn't looking, Castiel turned his attention down to the droplet of water cupped in his palm. Something shone subtly within it-bluegoldwhite and shining silver-Castiel's eye widened as he realized it was the barest traces of an angel's grace, less than a droplet of water's worth-it only composed a tiny fraction of the miniscule amount of water cupped in Castiel's palm. And his vessel-his body-stopped breathing as he realized it was his own grace, (though how much longer would it be his body instead of his vessel, if his grace was slowly being drip fed back down to him?).
What had God said? 'Once the size of the Chrysler building, now only a drop in a bucket?' 'Snapping my fingers to make things instantly better hasn't worked?'
Castiel had turned making drops in a bucket's worth of Grace to stretch for the longest possible mile into an art form, in the time sense he had abandoned the seat of his power in Heaven for the sake of the Winchesters. He had only seen archangels fare better, when it came to preserving their power outside the dimension that supported their existence.
Even as he watched though, that tiny speck of Grace fell drifting like the tiniest of stars through the water drop, until it rested at the bottom, and sank into Castiel's skin. Castiel's big blue eyes still stayed fixed, even as what he held now only contained a single water droplet, perfectly ordinary. The implications were enormous. If God was attempting to restore the state of Castiel to his former glory, even if only less than a drop in the bucket at a time...
Well. The implications of that would have to be pondered another time, as well as the question of how to get into contact with Dean; even if he managed it, Castiel would not be able to go with the man until he had retrieved every drop of Grace from this place that God was willing to pity him with. It was apparent that this would take quite a while; Castiel had slept beneath the drip all night, and still what he had absorbed was not even enough to notice, even in the barren canvas of an otherwise completely graceless body.
Mentally grimacing an apology to Dean for being unable to return to him, once again with little to no explanation, Castiel set that thought to the side and began stripping himself of his sodden suit and tie, laying them as well as his tan jacket down in the least dirty spot he could find amongst the pews to dry. After, as naked as the day this body was born, Castiel took a deep breath and wadded his way into the pool, about shin high at the deepest, and as he did, the water dripped-over his scalp, his forehead, down his back and spine. Castiel hunkered down there, huddled cold and wet and naked, as water and Grace dripped down his back.
The sensation set his shoulder blades to itching fiercely.