All day, the voices of his brothers and sisters had been getting louder.

They were afraid, and many of them were dying, but he had still had hope. There was something he had seen, a charm tied to Sam's duffel bag, that might help them. Not enough to save everyone, and certainly not enough to derail the devils plan, but perhaps enough to slow him down.

He told them he would be right back, and flew to the motel.

He landed outside and immediately he knew that something was wrong. He felt as though he had been dropped, thrown loose of the ether. He took an unsteady step, and the sound of the angels built to a deafening roar. He felt a cold knot of dread in his throat. It was too loud. Too much.

His entire world was drowned in a cacophony of voices, and then there was nothing. Castiel reached out to find them, but his grace found only a void. The other angels were gone. All of them.

As he searched, a new feeling, nagging hot and bright at the center of his chest, overcame him. Pain. A high-frequency buzzing that shouldn't have bothered him twisted loud and agonising in his ears, and he felt something like a magnet pulling him from someplace far away. In an instant the noise, the pain, was gone. But it was more than that… His grace.

The silence now was absolute. He was empty. He tried desperately to find the ether, tried to send himself to another place, back to Dean, back to Sam, to heaven, anywhere—but it was pointless.

No amount of focus would work.

The realisation that he was alone on Earth hit him with a force he was not prepared for. He collapsed onto a bench outside the motel, and stayed there for hours. The sun sank out of view and the chill in the air made its way through to his bones. His fingers grew numb. He couldn't warm them.

For a moment he wondered if Dean had been able to stop Sam from—but no. He knew the answer to that. The message was in the silence, and it came loud and clear. The red haze of the no vacancy sign might as well have been the glow of the pit. He was fallen. The world was lost.

What had been metaphysical pain became a solid, real, all-encompassing ache in his core. Dull at the edges but sharp and focused at the center, like poison spreading out from a wound. His pulse was rapid and his limbs felt heavy. He had never been so tired. He had never been tired. The pain was too much, and suddenly he remembered the pills, taken from a hospital so many months ago and forgotten in the pocket of his coat. He took them out and turned the bottle in his hand. He swallowed four. The little white capsules caught in his dry throat, and his eyes watered with the effort of keeping them down.

It was all too much. The pain, the silence, the end. Soon it would really start. The croatoan virus would not be contained, and the world would descend into madness.

Desperate, he looked to the sky and begged his fathers forgiveness, begged for help, for salvation, instruction. Anything.

But the sky was empty. His father had forsaken him. All of them. A few minutes passed and his pain had not subsided. He swallowed another four pills. Still nothing. Another two. Castiel dropped his gaze to the pavement at his feet and waited for the inevitable. It was only a matter of time before bad news officially arrived.

There was nothing he could do, so he did nothing.

His shoulders hunched and he closed his eyes as he heard the low rumble of thunder in the distance carry with it the sound of an engine. A fork of lightning, bright and terrible, split the sky as the Impala stopped in the parking lot before him. He listened but he didn't look up.

He heard one door open and he tensed his jaw.

One door slammed shut.

One set of footsteps. Stopped. A small, broken voice nothing like he had ever heard from the hunters lips cut through the silence. It was a question, a confession, a plea for help.

"Cas?"

He didn't look up. He couldn't.

If anyone is interested in reading it, I might turn this into the prologue for an AU fic which would lead to the end!verse. Let me know in a review or a PM :)

~ Imogen