Time is elusive.

It's slipping through his fingers like grains of sand, gone in the blink of an eye. He's not sure how long he's been down here. He could make a guess, try to work it out but he's not sure it even matters how much time has passed and even if it did there's nobody down here who cares, so why would he bother to count? Maybe he's only been down here for a few minutes or hours, just long enough to accept that he's here. Or maybe, just maybe, he's been down here longer, for years, for centuries. Maybe the world upstairs has moved on, maybe there's nobody up there that even remembers the possibility of Dean Winchester ever existed.

Maybe Sammy and Emma and Bobby aren't alive anymore.

Maybe they've moved on to a better place.

He hopes that's truth.

(And yet he knows it is not. He knows because what would the point of Alistair's torture be if the people he uses don't even exist anymore?)

There's no light penetrating the darkness, not even a hint of one, and yet despite that Dean has no trouble seeing in the vast darkness. (He's not sure it's him, or something Alistair does, or just the cave he hangs in that makes that so.) He misses the light – but then he misses a lot of things, things he never even thought about – but he's pretty sure he's never seeing it again, so it might actually be better not to think about it. (Not that his brain is co-operating with that. It's apparently impossible not to think about something when he's down here. And Alistair's taunting is just making it worse.)

In the beginning - when he first arrived and Alistair hung him up on the rack and started his torture - Dean thought that the easiest way to survive the torture was to think happy thoughts. (And the minute he thought that, he came to the conclusion that he'd been hanging around Sammy and Emma for way too long. But God how he wishes he could still be hanging around them.) So he thought of Sammy and the practical jokes they used to play on each other. He thinks of Bobby and the way the older man called him 'idjit.' He thinks of Emma and the way she smiled at him. He thinks of the three of them driving in the impala towards an unknown destination, listening to music and laughing at silly jokes. He remembers a million happy moments.

It was a really bad idea.

(It's not quite the worst idea of his life – selling his soul definitely wins that prize – but it's up there.)

Thinking about happy things just makes everything harder to bear. (Something tells him he really should have realized that.) So the next day – at least he thinks it's the next day – he tries thinking of nothing. Which as it turns out is impossible. By then he's pretty much figured out – or just accepted really – that there is no easy way to get through this. There's no way to fight this – he tries to fight, literally, at first, but that is also impossibility. The only thing he can do is grind his teeth, breathe and try to make it through. He's not sure why that is important though, it's not as if there's a way out of this. (Maybe, maybe he can climb out like his dad but it's not likely someone will open the doors again will they?) It's not like someone's coming.

Sometimes he wants to say yes.

(There's nothing to fight for after all.)

But he doesn't. Every time Alistair asks – at the end of the day, though for all he knows Alistair is messing with him and it's actually morning – he says no. Because he won't become this, because his mother would be disappointed, because the thought of Emma's face when she finds out is heartbreaking.

So he says no.

And the day starts again.

(And time keeps slipping through his fingers and there's no way to stop it.)

It was not his place to question his orders.

Castiel is a soldier, an angel of the Lord, one of the many up here in the heavens. It is not his place, nor is it his job to ask any questions or think too much about things that have nothing to do with him. The heavens are usually a calm place, where nobody thinks too much about stuff that are above them (especially humans. But then why would they talk about humans? Apart from the times they talk about their work, which they only do with their superiors.)

But now everyone's talking.

And they're all talking about the same thing.

(The last time that happened, the last time everyone talked about one thing was when Anna ripped out her grace and fell. That was the first time – at least that he remembers – that he truly questioned things, truly thought about things that had nothing to do with him. He spend months, years, trying to figure out why Anna had done it, why she had left them – why she had left him – but he never figured it out, so he just stopped thinking about it. At least he thinks he stopped thinking about it. He's not sure it matters.)

This time everyone is talking about Dean Winchester.

The Righteous Man.

The Michael sword.

And Castiel knows, he knows, it is not his job to question his orders, especially not Michaels. But he can't figure out, can't understand, why Michael isn't going into hell himself to get his vessel. He could do it, and quite faster than the rest of them, but for some reason he's not going to. (He must have his reasons, Castiel knows, reasons that are beyond his comprehension but it's still odd.)

But it's not his place to question; it is not his place to judge.

So he ignores the small whisper that he should and gets ready with his fellow angels to go down into hell to save the Righteous Man.

Because that is his job.

It's easy to say she's going to start living again.

It's easy to say a lot of things but it's not so easy to actually do it. But they try because they have to, because they can't give up. They get up every morning and they eat breakfast, they help other hunters out there, they try to talk to Sam but he's not responding. Sometimes they leave the house – she goes to the doctor, he goes for groceries. Bobby offered to go with her to the doctor but she had to learn to handle all of this on her own. Even though she knows she'll never be alone, Bobby will be there, she still needed to do it alone. She cried the first time she went to the Doctor. For a moment she felt like she was eighteen again. Lost and alone, pregnant and abandoned with nobody to rely on and only one thing to do. (It was the best thing back then, the best thing for her baby.) This time she was older, grieving, not abandoned – not really – but still alone.

This time, she promised herself, everything would be different.

She's older and she knows that she can take care of the baby, she isn't alone and she has somewhere to live. And someone to protect her and if she could just find a way to talk to Sam and tell him she was pregnant she was sure she would have two protectors. (Something tells her that Sam knows that what she'll tell him will make sense and he'll have no choice but to come back. It might explain why he only ignores his phone when she calls.)

She thinks she might name her baby Dean if it's a boy.

(She's not sure what she would name her if it's a girl.)

Strangely enough, after a while, it becomes easier to go on with their lives (if you can call it a life, that is.) It's the routine, she thinks, it makes it easier to survive, to go on. Just as long as they keep doing the same things, just as long as nothing strange happens, they will be fine.

Still sometimes she feels like she can't breathe.

(She curls up in a ball sometimes, not quite crying, breathing heavily, and trying to remember what it feels like not to hurt. She never quite succeeds.)

She hopes they tell the truth when they say time heals all wounds. She hopes they tell the truth when they say that it will all get better, that it will stop hurting.

She doesn't quite believe it though.

(Sometimes, in her nightmares, she thinks she can hear Dean scream. She hopes it's just a dream.)