Author's Note: Sorry for being so bad at posting consistently, everyone, but I've been working on another story. Please forgive me!

~ Chapter Seventeen ~

Castiel sees the black smoke swirling in thin, strong ribbons around his ankles and he feels both frozen and on fire, unsure of what to do in this situation to save himself, to protect the ones he loves. He's positive there must be a way, but the sinister plumes of black smoke are twirling their ways around him and he's trapped, nearly encaged in it, except his throat is working, crying for help, even if he can't move and save himself.

He clenches his jaw shut, grinding his teeth together as if to prove a point to the smoke that's trying to strangle him and is somehow succeeding. He holds on as long as he can, though any kind of thought process he had before is dying rapidly as he's finally forced to gasp for breath, the demon's smoke shoving itself down his throat, choking and suffocating him as it makes itself an unwilling home in his body.

A way out, there had to be a way out.

"Sorry, Castiel," a woman's unfamiliar voice rings out in his head, and he wants to cringe at it, but his limbs aren't functioning for him anymore. "I win this time, but I might let you enjoy the show."

Castiel doesn't have to ask to know what that means and he wants to sob. His real self, now his inner self is screaming and hopelessly trapped in an ever-shrinking cage made of fire while his outer self, the damn demon is flexing her fingers, taking a few steps, adjusting herself to his body.

"I think I like it in here."

He blacked out, though Belial let him have his vision in flashes, flashes of seeing Sam and then Dean. Flashes of holding Jo, who looked so disgruntled and unhappy it made him want to hold her forever, to soothe her the right way, not the dreaded coddling the demon was giving her. And then there was what Sam said, and everything went black again.

It was only darkness though, and all his other senses were working out of time excluding his eyes, which offered him no relief. He could only feel what he assumed was Jo's tiny squirming body in one arm, only hear her pitiful cries for Dean and Sam and for Papa to come back, those cries followed by moments of horrible, blissful silence before it was shattered by a crack, a gasp, and a pleading, feeble voice. But even that stopped given time too, and then came the taste of blood on his tongue and the feeling of something slippery and wet on his hands.

This was all too much; it was both overwhelming and excruciating, Castiel not having the faintest idea of what was going on, but altogether feeling too much and creating pictures in his blackened mind of what was actually happening around him. He internally cringed at the fact that this damn demon was probably terrorizing his family, people he loved dearly in his own skin. Making Jo shriek and cry, plastering his hands with blood and oh God, was that Dean trying to talk to the demon?

Castiel's trapped inner self was thrashing about now, screaming in the demon's head as loud as he could, relishing in the fact that this wouldn't actually hurt him, only give her tremendous pain and him an opportunity to get out.

/

"Took you long enough." The words that cascaded off Castiel's tongue weren't his and Dean could tell all of a sudden, understanding much too slowly and much too fast what exactly was happening.

He just handed over his baby girl to a demon. A demon wearing his husband. God, this fucker was going to die slow and painful if Dean had any say in it.

But all of a sudden, the ground wasn't below his feet and the wall was denting outwards to accommodate the force of his body being slammed into it; Dean had only witnessed the demon raise Cas' hand and do it before the blow struck him like eighteen freight trains. Shit.

He groaned pathetically, falling onto his hands and knees but still trying to stand. He could see Sam on the ground across the room from him, unmoving. He winced, wanting nothing more than to scramble over to his baby brother, shake him and make sure he was awake and okay. There was no way he could do that and he knew, but he wasn't going to let the damn demon win so easily. The Colt was in his jacket pocket – Dean jammed his hand into the deep pocket, fingering the gun for half a moment and pulled it out, glaring up at the demon in the form of something he loved.

"Don't bother." It hissed, flicking one wrist gently, causing Dean's to do a full 360, dropping the gun in favor of clutching it to his chest at the pain. Fuck, when did he get so soft?

It was standing in front of Dean now, Cas' black boots and dirty jeans crowding his vision; a hand gripped at the short hair on his head, nails scraped his scalp, making him look up and watch Cas' ethereal, perfect blue eyes switch to a shining black. Dean cringed and tried to lower his gaze, feeling as though he was going to vomit all over the place if he had to keep looking at the man he married, smirking down at him with black eyes. And to think that he'd almost gotten them out of this sickening mess of being dragged back into hunting, to think that he thought they could avoid the fights that shaped his childhood and ruined his perspective on people, to think that the way of life that had murdered so many people he loved would spare him a second time around – was he fucking blind?

"Oh, Dean," the thing sighed as it kneeled down to his level, tightening its grip on the back of his neck, "there was absolutely nothing you could do to stop this. I planned all of this for you. It was hard work, but damn, is it worth it." The words were all wrong and this wasn't him, it wasn't his Castiel.

It still wasn't when it took the knife out of Cas' pocket and held the clean blade in front of Dean's face, before slicing straight through Cas' stomach; thick, dark red blood spilled over it, gushing out in hot steady streams while Dean could only sit, powerless, watching and dying. His voice was gone, his brother was gone, Jo was probably gone too, Cas was definitely gone, everything just gone, dead. "See, Dean? Now both of our husbands are dead."

Its voice rang sinister and clear in the old hunter's ears as that same damn knife slid right into his chest, a sharp, painful slice that snapped one thing in him after another; blood gushed and spilled, pain tore at his chest and through his veins, but everything was slowing down like gears in an engine until finally it all just… stopped.