Oh gosh, I am SO SORRY this took so long to post! I really, truly am! I ended up dragged into another fandom and I didn't have any good fics to inspire me and finales and I'm just really, really, REALLY sorry this took so long for me to finish.

One Wing in the Fire (16)

Dean and Sam were in trouble.

Since the angels had stolen Castiel away, they had situated themselves amongst the humans, swinging easily back into their old lifestyle as if they had never left. They hunted, lived in seedy motels, saved people from terrible fates, and hid under false names.

But they missed Castiel.

Neither of them said it out loud because real men did not talk about their feelings, real men did not sit on the hood of their brother's salvaged '67 black Chevy Impala and sob their sorry hearts out, real men stowed it all away and pretended it wasn't a problem.

Of course it was but neither of them mentioned it. That wasn't how it worked.

And now they were neck deep in trouble.

Crowley's agents and Heaven's warriors had been chasing them across the country, determined to either capture or kill them. The brothers had managed to elude them for the most part, apt at warding sigils and protective measures, but some of the demons had managed to catch up to them. And now they were out numbered, surrounded on a backwoods road in the middle of nowhere, two against seven.

Hardly fair odds.

"It was a good life." Dean muttered, swinging his shotgun around at the circling demons, looking for a good shot. There wasn't one.

"Don't talk like that." Sam snapped back, all bitchface and six feet of taunt muscle.

"If we die up here do you think we'll end up back in Hell?" Dean asked, jabbing at a demon who'd wandered to close. It hissed and skittered backwards.

"Well I don't think Heaven's going to exactly welcome us with open arms, Dean." Sam growled. Silence fell upon the group as they eyed one another. It was tense and thick and dramatically theatrical.

"Fuck it," Dean said and fired.

One of the demons dropped back with a scream and the rest surged forward. Sam was suddenly a blur, spinning on the spot to slice open the chest of a demon with his specially tempered knife, its blade carved in ancient runes. Dean preferred his gun but both of them were more than willing to burn their enemies if given the chance. If anything, their flame powers did come in handy when banishing vengeful spirits with a good ol' salt-and-burn.

Dean ducked the swing of a demon as he reloaded his shotgun and kicked the knees out from underneath another. A blow to his side sent him stumbling and he fell over, jarring his shoulder against the hard pavement of the road. A demon loomed over him and, without time to fire, he swung the butt of his gun up to smash into its chin. It fell back with a garbled scream of pain and Dean rolled to his feet, cocking the gun and firing a nice sized hole in the thing's chest.

There was the screech of something sharp scraping against metal and Dean whirled around to see a demon pinning Sam to the side of the Impala and trying to cut him with his own knife. Sam, fighting back as best he could, was keeping the knife well away from his face but it was stabbing the car instead.

It was stabbing Dean's baby.

Unacceptable.

Dean let out a wordless battle cry, launched himself at the demon, looped an arm around its neck, and hauled it off his younger brother kicking and screaming. It struggled in his grip, trying to stab him with the knife and failing because Dean kept twisting out of its way. He focused on where his hand was pushed against the side of the demon's face and it started screaming as heat and sparks flared to life, licking at its flesh. Dean didn't let it go until it had stopped moving.

When he dropped it to the ground, its flesh still smoking where it had been burned, and turned to continue the fight he found the four remaining demons regrouping, all hissing a spitting and cursing. He scooped up Sam's knife and his shotgun, tossed the blade to Sam, and spun around to fire his gun. It cracked in gloomy afternoon and another demon fell back with a snarl of pain only to scramble back to its feet and launch itself at Dean with its teeth bared.

It was going to be a long night.

"You keep breaking my car. First you let her get stabbed and then you bleed all over her seats."

"Dean, it's just a car. You've only had it for, like, a month—."

"If that stains, I'll never forgive you—ow! That hurt, bitch!"

"Don't be such a crybaby. Jerk."

Dean smirked as he leaned on Sam, purposefully leaning more of his weight on him as his younger brother struggled to open the motel room door. The fight had been a bad one and neither of them had gotten away from it unscathed. Sam had a deep cut in his arm that was oozing blood everywhere and a gritty looking scrape on his cheek, Dean was sporting some bruised ribs and several lacerations through his favorite T-shirt, and both of them had swelling bruises and scraped knuckles.

Sam dumped his brother on one of the motel beds, dropped the keys on the table, and went to collect the first aid kit. Dean shed his leather jacket and slowly peeled off his ruined shirt, hissing as it caught in the cuts across his skin. He was in bad shape and so was Sam. Another attack like that, from either side, could do them in.

Dean really, really, really didn't want to go back to Hell. His memories tangled together in his head, a confusion of senses. He remembered being a Demon Lord and being pleased with his status and his power and all the souls he'd tormented. But at the same time, his human mind rebelled at the pleasure, sickened by the things he'd done. Dean could only assume that Sam was going through the same thing; he'd sometimes catch his younger brother staring blankly into space, looking for all the world as if he'd walked into the room and forgotten why he'd walked it. Dean himself probably wore the same expression once or twice (maybe more). It was a painful thing, made worse by the fact that they had been in Hell for, by Sam's estimate, at least a century, half a century if they were lucky and no Winchester was that lucky.

That meant they were completely alone. All their friends, all their family, all the people they had ever known were long gone. It was hard enough with that but factor in all of the changes and the two brothers were almost completely lost. Internet, cellphones, fashion, speech patterns, social norms, slang, mp3 players, computerized cars, and a whole other assortment of things they had to adjust to. But the brothers were nothing if not adaptable and it hadn't taken them long to pick up the stride of the world they had been thrust back into. Dean had his car and Sam had already picked up a laptop. They needed to establish connections with other hunters and find places to start storing information and weapon caches.

But that could wait. For now, they needed to patch themselves up and get some—in Dean's most humble opinion—well deserved rest.

Humble opinions went out the window when Sam dumped half the bottle of alcohol on Dean's chest and the two ended up squabbling for the better half of an hour.

Castiel thought he might be in shock.

He had experienced it before, of course, but this was overwhelming.

Falling had not been, no pun intended, graceful. If wasn't supposed to be, obviously, but Cas hadn't expected the veritable pummeling that had come from it.

As he'd dropped from Heaven, he'd felt something twist, wrench, and pull. Being in Hell, with his Grace slowly being corrupted, had been like a small paper cut on the knuckle of his finger. Every time he moved, it split open again and stung with a ferocity that was shocking for such a tiny wound, never completely healing. After the demon taint had been ripped from him, his Grace had felt more like a bruise, sore and tender but no longer bleeding with every twitch.

Falling, though, falling felt as if someone had forgone the small beatings of paper cuts and bruises and had simply stepped up to ripping off his limbs. Rusty meat hooks bit into his Grace, wrenching on it, pulling piece after piece from his body as he tumbled out of the sky. His black wings beat the air, trying to stay upright even as the blinding, mind-numbing agony of it brought tears to his eyes. It was disorienting, wrong, painful to have a part of him ripped out from the inside, drastically different from his brothers picking it apart.

And crashing was just as painful.

Slamming into the earth, driving into it so hard it buckled and collapsed beneath him. The last shards of his Grace were torn away with the force of his impact and the void left inside Castiel felt like a black hole trying to fill itself. The emptiness unfolded over and over again as it searched for something to consume and Castiel trembled at its hunger. He dug his fingers into the ground and pushed himself up on trembling limbs only to tumble sideways when his arms gave out. Desperate to stop the void from consuming him, he reached into his coat and pulled out the vial of Gabriel's Grace.

Castiel fought with the stopper for a long moment, his fingers weak and struggling but unable to free it. So he dug his teeth into it and pulled. There was a light pop and the cork fell free. Gabriel's Grace swarmed out of the tiny vial and into his mouth. Castiel fell back with a gasp as it flooded the void inside him, burning hot against the cold edges of the darkness, pushing it away and filling it with light before it settled into a warm beat in his chest.

The thing that was neither angel nor demon nor human lay in the crater left from his impact for a long time, simply gathering his thoughts and breathing evenly. The sky above him was a wonderful shade of blue, the thin clouds circling the spot around his landing, disturbed by his fall. Castiel sucked in a deep breath through his nose, taking in the scent of the fresh earth around him, the crisp scent of pine trees, and, a fair distance away, the stench of pavement and motor exhaust. He lay in the dirt for a moment longer and then pushed himself up so that he could clamber out of the crater he'd made.

His body ached from the fall, the pain of his Grace being ripped out, and from the impact, but no place hurt more than the base of his wings. Castiel twisted around to look and saw his wings half folded at his back, his feathers askew and crooked and bent. He would have to groom them but for now he needed to find Dean and Sam.

Castiel experimentally tried to spread his wings but winced as that sharp ache intensified and ended up folding them behind his back again.

It looked like he would have to do this the hard way.