Awake

He had not been alive. His body had held shape, but Dean was as dead as Sam ever was.

Until he woke up where he lay. For the first time since Sam's death, he did not feel the buzzing sensation as soon as his eyes leaked open. He tasted the powdery ash of the tree that had crumbled and now lay burning like a pile of notebook paper behind him.

Dean lay there blinking at the bleak sky. It was grey with the ashes and aching with something that felt different.
Something felt different.

Dean blinked, as hail stones stopped falling around him. He felt the tenderness of snowfall touch his lashes.

It was summer.

Slowly, he sat up. There was a strange sound in the air. The sensation in the forest when the silence tries to settle after a shout disturbs it, with the squirrels still chattering at the nerve of that sound.

Dean sat there blinking. Then, a jolt, something that sent the hair standing up on the back of his neck.

"Hey!"

That voice...

He would know that voice anywhere on earth, Hell, Heaven, or the Realms.

Dean bolted in the direction of that sound.