"The siren called beyond the treeline
With another one for the caves
And in the tarn beyond those birches
There's a spirit that I crave."
-Black Water, Timber Timbre
The nighttime here is only slightly darker than the day, a pervading fog that always hangs around dimming just enough to mark the passing time. Evil lurks behind the trees, red eyes only a bend of branches away. A broken stick means a creature out for blood.
The sky looks like oil swirling in water, unnatural and ponderously wrong. Every tree seems impossibly old and all wood crackles like it has been burnt. Mostly, the world is ash. Ash that covers the ground, bush, tree, and cloud. It is oppressive to breath and sight, dirty and dry.
So sometimes, when the night approaches with that inescapable darkening, they rest. Find blackened husks that were once tree trunks, and sit up, alert. Sometimes sleep can be found, but it is difficult to rest deep enough for the closed eyes to have had a purpose at all. Not when you are lying on a bed of broken bones and ancient gore. So most of the time Dean sits up with Cas. Benny sits slightly away from them, leaning over in a way that somehow conveys both tension and nonchalance at the same time.
When the night reaches its darkest, when a thousand fires and the reaching glow of God himself couldn't throw a light across the landscape, Dean takes Cas's hand in his own and squeezes it tight. Not because he is afraid, or worries that Cas might be. There is something calming about reaffirming there is a person sat beside you in the blackest reaches of a place beyond hell.
When wolves lurk around every corner and vampires threaten to drop from trees, when shifters might, at any moment, rise from the ashy leaves of the floor or a siren slink into view, a solid grasp of fingers might be all you need to survive.
Sure, that might sound like sappy bullshit, but when you're past the pits of hell, you have to start trusting the small things. A little glimmer of something bright to help survive the maw of tormenting blackness that eats up everything else.
Hope, in the clasp of calloused hands.