Sam yanked the bottle of pain killers out of Dean's hand.

"Your liver's already about three years away from failing," he said, tossing it across the motel room.

"There's no going back now. Might as well finish it off," Dean grumbled, massaging his temples. "Besides, you aren't doing any better than I am. How doped up are you? Half a bottle's worth?"

"I can because I'm not hell-bent on drinking myself to death," Sam argued, sinking back onto the other bed.

Every time Sam sat on something soft and let his mind wander to things other than hunting, it was like air being let out of a balloon. Instantly deflating, he leaned against the bed post and closed his eyes, succumbing to the screaming migraine he'd been experiencing for the past several weeks.

The brothers were obviously used to the supernatural. For nearly their entire lives they'd been trained to hunt down and kill the creepy-crawlies that lurked in the very assholes of the earth. Still, whenever things actually started happening to them instead of just around them they both got seriously freaked out. Not to mention that their splitting headaches, nausea, strange dreams, and loud noises that no one else seemed to hear kept them from work.

"Can't die quite yet," Dean replied in a forcedly neutral tone. "Still got this case we're working on."

Sam looked over at his brother, noting the winkle in his brow as he fought against the same paralyzing pains and noises that were bothering Sam. More than anything else, the thing that frightened Sam the most was how incapacitated Dean was by the symptoms. This was the brother who'd managed to slay an entire nest of vamps practically on his own with a punctured lung and three broken ribs—without so much as a tear. Now, he could barely speak and his eyes were closed so tightly they might as well have been super-glued shut.

Nearly two weeks ago the first of the symptoms began, almost out of the blue. The weird dreams came first, but only started worrying the boys when they realized that they were having similar visions. Then, the loud, impossibly high-pitched noises that only dolphins should have been able to differentiate started to play every so often in the backs of their minds. Perhaps as a result of these two things, perhaps from an entirely different cause, a constant migraine and nausea invaded their bodies.

Two full meals had already made a round-trip journey from Sam's mouth to his stomach just that day. He knew Dean wasn't keeping anything down either because his brother looked considerably thinner than he had last week. Dean would never let Sam know he was sick, but he knew.

Everything was going to hell. The case they were working had stagnated because neither of them could muster enough energy to research or interview for more than an hour or so. They couldn't admit themselves to the local hospital because "hearing voices" and "seeing things" would definitely land them in the mental wing.

"We're screwed, aren't we?" Dean mumbled from the other side of a very long tunnel, as it seemed to Sam.

"Seriously, dude," Sam agreed. Even his own voice seemed strangely disembodied, as though a stranger had stolen his vocal cords.

"I just want to figure out what the hell is wrong with us," Dean growled.

Beside Sam, though it seemed like the noise reached him from another dimension, the bed creaked and footfalls echoed like drum beats through his ears. The sound of a rushing waterfall—or was it the bathroom sink—resounded in his brain.

"Jo and Ellen don't have any idea what's happening to us," Sam replied, recalling the fruitless conversation he'd had with their hunting partners.

…"There's nothing in your dad's journal?"Ellen asked with that stern, motherly look of hers.

"Nothing that we can find," Dean replied, tossing the tattered book across the sleek, polished surface of the bar.

"I've had Jo look into it. We just can't find anything that would explain everything that's going on, other than you two just being bat-shit insane," the elder woman replied, furrowing her brow. "I know you boys aren't crazy. Maybe it's just stress?"

"Stress causing the exact same symptoms, Ellen?" Dean replied skeptically.

"That does sound pretty strange. I guess I just want to know you'll be alright," Ellen said agreeably…

"Did they ask Ash?" Sam answered, the words somewhat muffled by the splashing of water in the sink.

Dean groaned audibly, and Sam opened his eyes just in time to watch his brother slump against the counter. The contours of his face squished together as though he'd just eaten a popsicle whole, and the words that came out of his mouth were incredibly forced.

"Ash is on a…thing…"

"Noise?" Sam asked, although he already knew from the whiteness of Dean's knuckles what the answer would be.

"I feel like it keeps getting frigging higher," he growled through his teeth, stumbling back across the room and collapsing back onto the bed.

Agreeing quietly, Sam slammed his eyes shut again because he knew that if Dean was having an episode, that unbearable whistling would hunt his ears down as well and put him in an unreachable amount of pain. If he could fall asleep fast enough, maybe he could outfox the sound.

Exhaustion from days of restless four-hour, interrupted naps consumed Sam, and within minutes he was hurtling through the deep blackness into the sector of his mind reserved for dreaming. To his displeasure, however, the dream was another practically hallucinogenic vision like the others he'd been experiencing night after night. Part of him almost preferred to suffer the effects of sleep deprivation than delve into this horrifying world where nothing made sense. Anything was better than the whistling, though, and he'd found that as long as he was asleep the noise couldn't penetrate his mind.

Tonight, as it did every night, the structure of waking life gave way to distorted, disfigured images of creatures that weren't quite human roaming around a cave-like hallway. Vacant, black sockets gaped open wide where eyes should have been, threatening to swallow Sam whole. No teeth tainted the holes that were their mouths. It was like walking straight into The Scream, except that everything seemed so real and life-like.

For the moment, Sam couldn't even remember that the melting forms of people haunting around him weren't real, and that everything he saw was nothing more than the product of his own mind. Here, everything consumed his attention. Here, everything was as real as Dean's alcohol abuse. Here, they were the hunters and Sam was the monster.

Odd though it may have been, whenever Sam entered the dream world, he felt the need to hide from everything. Even if a butterfly flew by (although, who was he kidding. He'd see butterflies in hell before they came anywhere near this God-forsaken place), he flinched as though a belt had been brandished at his face and slunk into the darkest corner he could find.

Off in the distance, Sam would make out the faint screaming pleas of tortured souls. Each note pierced the thin veil of his heart with such intensity, he was close to joining the wailing choir. Thankfully, the ghostly figures paid him no attention. They simply wandered around him as though they were unaware of their very existence.

His visions were always the same: a collection of melting, lost individuals with gaping sockets in place of eyes and wide, gaping mouths. None of them interacted with Sam as they haunted trough the seemingly endless dark cavern. Frankly it was more unnerving for the figures to ignore him because they were at once frightening yet not threatening. He felt intimidated by them but he couldn't justify attacking any of them.

The environment always seemed to the changing as well, which disoriented him constantly. It was like the cave walls and protrusions were made out of a semi-solid gas that formed, dissolved and reformed every few seconds.

"Kind of a creepy atmosphere if you ask me," a snide, nasally voice called from behind Sam.

Sam normally didn't scare very easily—an after-effect of his day job. However, since he'd been coming to this dream-like realm for weeks on end and none of the specters had so much as acknowledged his existence, he practically jumped out of his skin.

Spinning on his heel, he saw what appeared to be an ordinary man standing about two yards away from him. He was average in almost every way, and this alarmed Sam more than anything else. He wore a plain pair of jeans with boots and an army-green jacket pulled over a nondescript black T-shirt. The light brown sweep of his hair and goatee embellished a long, angular face with delicate features. The only defining aspect was his eyes, which pierced like whiskey-toned torches through the muddled, vaporous darkness.

When Sam didn't say anything in response, he stuffed his hands in his pockets and gazed nonchalantly at the haunting surroundings.

"I gotta say, this is probably one of the most screwed-up subconsciouses I've ever seen," the man remarked lazily. "Talk about your nine levels of crazy."

"Who the hell are you?" Sam asked, voice strained, hand twitching at the knife he kept at his hip.

"Relax," the man said, shaking his head with a raised eyebrow. "I'm not here to do anything to you."

The stranger eyed the sheath at Sam's belt—not with hesitance as Sam would have expected, but with something close to annoyance.

"Sorry if I don't immediately believe you," Sam retorted.

He was becoming more and more uneasy as time went on, but found that he was too interested in the foreigner to move or run. Something also told him that he probably wouldn't get very far if he tried.

"Look, I'm not here to make any of this worse than it already is. That'd be hard anyway considering how seriously screwed up this place is," the stranger replied. "Would it make you feel any better if I explained some of this to you? You're so tense it's making me a little uncomfortable."

"That would probably be a good idea," Same agreed, remaining in his rigid position.

"My name is Gabriel, and this might be hard for you to wrap your head around, but I'm actually an angel."

"An angel?" Sam replied, attempting to remain skeptical while his heart skipped several beats in excitement. "Like, the angel Gabriel? From the Bible? Prove it."

"What do you want me to do, unfurl my wings?" Gabriel scoffed. "I'm not a showboat. I'm here to explain a few things to you before you wake up. Now will you let me do my job?"

After an entire lifetime spent hunting down every last God-forsaken creature that crossed his path, willingly or unwillingly, Sam found solace in prayer and faith. If so much evil existed in the world, then reasonably he thought that an equal amount of good must also reside somewhere in the universe. The fact that the person before him could be an angel wasn't what had Sam on edge; it was the fact that he'd been lied to so often by demons he felt he couldn't necessarily trust everything anyone said. Especially in this ethereal world.

"Alright, say you are the angel Gabriel. If you were an angel, you'd be able to tell me what the hell has been happening to me and my brother for the past few weeks," Sam told him decisively.

"That's what I'm here for. If you stopped being paranoid for more than two seconds, maybe we'd actually get that accomplished," Gabriel replied.

Relaxing just enough to pull himself up to his full height, Sam folded his arms across his chest and nodded at Gabriel to continue.

"Thank you," the light-haired man said. "So, it's a lot to explain all at once so I'm just going to brush on the details. Essentially, you and Dean have both been undergoing a process we in Heaven call the Preparation. Basically, we're trying to get you two knuckleheads in an open enough state for us to make a bond with you."

Sam felt his heart flutter in exhilaration, but he didn't completely relinquish his skepticism yet.

"So you're telling me that we've been sick to the point where we can't even work a case, because heaven wants us to do something?" he clarified.

"Yeah, pretty much," Gabriel shrugged, taking several steps towards Sam, who didn't back away or stiffen this time. "You guys are up for something pretty damn important. I'm the angel who's been assigned to help you not totally screw it up."

In the back of Sam's mind, past his natural suspicion and sense of constant unrest, he felt that Gabriel's story made sense. Past experience had already proven that he and his brother were indispensible with a price on their heads from hell. Why wouldn't heaven want to recruit two young, capable hunters?

"So the headaches?"

"Us trying to probe around in your head to get to know you pretty well before the first date," Gabriel answered.

"The nausea?"

"Humans aren't exactly equipped to have angels sifting through them 24/7."

"The whistling?"

"Hey, it's not our fault that you can't understand our natural language," Gabriel said, throwing his hands up in mock defense.

"What about this place?" Sam inquired, gesturing around at the wraithlike surroundings.

"Now that's the most interesting question you've asked me so far," Gabriel said, this time with a sly smirk playing his thin, almost feminine lips. "This right here is the ship wreck that is your subconscious."

"We're in my mind?" Sam asked, now even more intimidated by his environment.

"And Bingo was his name-o. These visions you've been having are me trying to make sense of all of those emotions and thoughts you like to bury beneath that façade of brotherly commitment you present out there," he gestured vaguely at where the cave walls seemed to be, far off in the unseen distance, "to everyone else."

All of a sudden, Sam found that his chest seemed constricted and his heart picked up its rhythmic pace.

"This is my head?" he breathed, directing his attention back at the swirling mass of infinite cavern and wandering figures.

"Pretty jacked up in here, huh?" Gabriel agreed, bringing himself forward to stand at Sam's side. "You know all of these weird looking screams are every thought, memory, and emotion you've managed to bury deep in that endless black soul of yours."

"So why don't they attack me?" Sam wondered; because knowing the sorts of existential embodiments that dwelt down here, they'd probably want to slaughter anything that came near them.

"They don't even know you exist," Gabriel answered with a small cynical snort. "They're just things, Sam. They exist outside of you. Here, let me show you."

As one of the specters glided past the two of them, the angel lunged forward and swept his hand directly at its lifeless grey-tinged face. Like wind through a cloud of smoke, his palm and fingers passed through the wraith; and forced the wrinkled folds of its strained skin to dissipate, shimmer in mid-air for a fraction of a second, and coagulate again. After recollecting itself, the figure continued on its way as though Gabriel wasn't even there.

"See?" he pointed out wryly, brushing his hand on his jeans even though no visible residue could be seen there. "So, before I get out of this literal hell hole, there's one more thing I have to do with you."

Reaching into the pocket of his jeans, Gabriel rummaged around for a moment in search of something. From inside the pocket, Sam thought he heard the hollow sounds of banging and clashing as though he were searching from the inside of a well. Finally, he pulled out a thin, corked vial hung on a silver chain. Made from glass, the vial contained a small, powdery substance that looked almost like gold dust. Wrapped around the outside of the container was a pair of wings to match the powder on the inside. Sam found that he couldn't take his eyes off of it.

"This is something we call Link Powder. Whenever you have it with you, as long as the bottle is touching some part of your skin, I'll know where you are. You can also give me a call and I'll be able to hear you," Gabriel explained, holding out the little bottle for Sam to take.

When Sam grasped it, he found that the contents exuded its own warmth: just enough to feel like a small light in his fist. In addition to the heat, the necklace did something extremely strange to him the moment it made contact with his skin. All of a sudden, he felt like another form of energy was rushing through his body, separate from his blood. It reminded him faintly of adrenaline, but stronger, more persistent, and without affecting his pulse. In the back of his mind, he also sensed a faint sort of buzzing sensation like static from a radio.

"Holy shit," he gasped, observing so much power in his body he felt as if he could punch through a brick wall.

"It'll probably take you a while before you learn how to use it properly," Gabriel said.

"Wait a minute. How am I going to bring this out there," Sam gestured at the deep black abyss, "if you gave it to me in here?"

Gabriel simply snorted again in reply, rolling up his sleeves and allowing a cocky smirk to spread across his lips.

"I'm an angel, Private Pinhead. I can do whatever the hell I want."

Then he snapped his fingers, and he was gone; and Sam was left alone with nothing but the swirling, overbearing darkness weighing down on him.