Author's Note: Just a drabble for you today, ladies and gents! Same 'Verse as "Before the Fall," "Afterwards," "Incarceration," "Some Sin for Nothing," and Mrstserc's new one (just posted today!) "Drive." This is sometime after Some Sin for Nothing. We're working out our plot for the next multi-part, so keep an eye out.

If you haven't read 'em, this one'll still stand-alone just fine, but you're missing out. Meanwhile. . . Enjoy!

...

The storm rages around them, lightning crashing, wind a dull roar in a world that smells like ozone and sulfur and mud and blood and charred flesh. So much blood. They stand in a field of corpses, and he desperately clings to the hands of the man in front of him, trying to make him stop, to remember. He can't watch him die for him again. Beneath the press of his fingers, skin is sloughing off—he's burning out with the power and the heat of him is nearly unbearable.

Castiel. God. His Cas has been washed away in this storm, and Dean tries desperately to call him back. Kissing him now is like slipping his tongue into a light socket — a sharp jolt of pain, and then spreading numbness of destructive power. He died for Dean. Murdered for Dean. Fell for Dean. And now Dean is pulling him down again, trying desperately to bring him crashing back to earth. Back to him.

'See.' Cas mouths against his lips, and when he pulls back slightly to look at his angel, Castiel opens his eyes again.

Dean's spent too long memorizing those eyes, far longer than he wants to admit. He knows the creases of them, the warmth that can suffuse them, their rage, their pain. He knows their exact color, the blue of a cloudless Kansas sky on a May afternoon.

Yellow bleeds into those irises, now, amber spilling across his pupils, and the demon stares back at him.

'I did all of it for you.'

He's pulled Castiel down from Heaven, he wanted him to Fall. Dean never expected how far he could plummet. In his dreams, Castiel's fingers become claws, his eyes swirl with poisonous hues, and they fall together.

Dean wakes with a start and he knows instinctively that he's alone in the bed. Across the room, Sam's snores continue smoothly, and as he slips out of bed Dean can feel that in the space left empty beside him the sheets are cold.

He has to reach past the pill bottles brought to the top of their bag to grab his flask, and it's such a clear illustration of how messed up the pair of them are that he almost hesitates. Almost. As he tugs on his jacket to cover the threadbare Zep t-shirt and pockets the motel room key, though, he unscrews the cap of the flask and takes a first shaking draw from it, steadying in its familiarity.

Closing and locking the motel room behind him has the feeling of tucking his little brother back in again for the night, a familiarity that spanned back decades. Finding his angel sitting alone and silent and pained on top of his car is threatening to become just as routine. Elbows on his knees, folded in on himself against the cold, Castiel cradles his head in his hands as if trying to support the weight of his thoughts, or trap and contain them behind the cage of his interlocked fingers.

"You gotta stop doing this, Cas. It's not safe." Dean was learning the hard way that a fallen angel on Earth was a bit like monster-catnip, as if all the demons of Hell and creatures of Purgatory were drawn towards the dim, flickering remains of an angel's Grace shaped into a vulnerable soul. One day he was going to wake up because Cas had gone wandering again and find out something had snatched him up, and that idea left him quietly terrified. Castiel shrugs one shoulder slightly, unconcerned by that thought, and Dean grits his teeth against the sudden urge to shake sense into his friend.

"I didn't want to wake you." There's a rough edge of pain to Castiel's words, deepening the timbres of his voice, and it effectively stops Dean's rant before he can begin. The hood of the car is bitingly cold as Dean slides up to sit next to his angel; December in the desert is a brutal thing, and even in his current state Castiel leans slightly into Dean's warmth as Dean coils an arm around his shoulders.

"Scale of one to ten, how bad?"

Castiel's short huff of bitter laughter is harsh, his breath steaming the air, and he drops his hands to his lap, fingers twisting together on his knees. Staring out over the parking lot, Cas shakes his head without answering the question or turning to his companion. "Crowley tortured an angel tonight."

His words are so matter-of-fact, so measured, that to the casual observer it might seem like clinical detachment. Dean knows better. This is the iron grip of control that betrays just how close to losing it Cas really is. Pressing his fingers into the fabric of the thin t-shirt Castiel had wandered out in, he pulls Cas closer to his side until Castiel's composure slips and he turns into Dean's chest, arms wrapping around him beneath the edge of his jacket, fingers like ice.

Dean's nightmare was just a nightmare. His screwed up head dragging all of his worst fears to light, mixing them with memory and playing them across the theater screen of his closed eyelids. Castiel was getting the live feed from a war beamed into his head, complete with screams of his brothers and sisters, and the telepathic remnants of an angelic link letting him feel it.

Letting him. Not making him. Dean's seen the vacant expression slide over Castiel's features before in the middle of a crowd, stilling his feet. Seen him reach for that connection at the faint inklings of it, just as he's seen him push it away in order to keep walking again, pick up the loose threads of conversation. And Heaven had let slip that Castiel was doing it to himself – he was so intrinsically tied to his own family, that even though he'd turned on them, even though he couldn't fight on their behalf and though most would prefer him dead for the danger he posed to them, the blasphemy he represented. . . he felt compelled to listen.

One of Castiel's brothers had been tortured by the King of Hell tonight, and Dean has absolutely no doubts that Castiel had stayed with that 'transmission' start to finish, immersed himself in it. The link to his brother would let him feel it – the guilt he took with him made him feel responsible for it. The Hell Hit Parade: torture and pain and ultimately guilt and failure and bitter responsibility. Dean rests his cheek against the top of Castiel's head and knows there's not much he can offer to fix this. He knows just how hollow anything he said would sound because he knows how hollow it all sounded to him.

He doesn't ask if Cas is okay. He knows better.

"You can't do this to yourself. You gotta let it go." His words are as much a plea as a command, though he knows neither is likely to work this time.

Castiel's breath is warm against the column of Dean's throat as he responds, and a thread of anger has crept into his words as he refutes Dean's advice. "Could you, Dean? Have you ever been able to let go of anything?"

Touché. If it were Sam, even when he was locked in the pit being flayed soul-deep, Dean would have jumped at the connection to his brother's pain. Wallowed in it. "I'm a pretty piss-poor example of a human, Cas."

"And I was always a 'pretty piss-poor example' of an angel." Pulling away rather than accept Dean's self-criticism, Castiel drops his bare feet to the pavement, flinching at the cold, and Dean wants to argue with him. Wants to point out that he was a damned good angel, right up until Dean shook his faith in everything. As selfish as it is, though, Dean has always reveled in the moments when Cas seemed more human than angelic: even before he became human in every way that counted.

Instead, he reaches out to catch Castiel's wrist before he can step away, drawing him back. Cas isn't weak by any stretch of the imagination. He could break free, and if it came down to a fight he might give Dean a run for his money. But he lets himself be drawn back to the Hunter as Dean slides slightly down to brace his own feet on the ground again, slotting Cas up against him.

"C'mere." He mumbles the command against Castiel's lips, his breath a warm fog between them, and Cas is already there, cold-chapped lips softening against his, body of angular lines and piano-wire muscles now pliable. He's crowded into Dean, slowly commandeering the kiss and god but his angel could kiss - he chases the taste of whiskey on Dean's tongue as if he could get drunk on Dean.

His fingers slide up Dean's sleeves, hand cupping the back of his neck, and Dean breaks the kiss with a sharp gasp and a shiver. "Holy shit your hands are frikkin' cold."

Cas moves his hand back to Dean's jacket covered shoulder, pulling away slightly, his forehead still resting against Dean's. "Yes. We should go get warm."

And it's such an innocent phrase. It is. Castiel probably was just being practical and reasonable like he frequently was, but the words are low and dark and dragged from him in that rough, deep voice and Dean groans in response quietly because it just went right through him better than any pickup line version of the sentence could. "Do you have any idea what. . ."

He hears the faint jingling of his keys, and opens his eyes again to find his angel has stolen them from the pocket of his jacket. Castiel tilts his head again, lips grazing over Dean's as he speaks, and clenches the edges of that jacket in his fists, drawing him back from the hood of the car, each step taking them towards the back door of the Impala. His pupils have chased the blue of his irises to narrow lines of color, and maybe the phrase hadn't been so innocent after all.

"I have several ideas for how to get warm."

So sure, the drinking and the pills weren't the best coping methods for two broken people struggling with life, but this. . . reaching out for one another, falling into each other's arms, it's probably the most healthy thing Dean has going for him anymore, nightmares be damned.

Dean manages to turn them once the car door opens and shove Castiel into his usual seat hard enough that he bounces off of the leather upholstery before Dean crawls in after him, blanketing his angel with his body and reasserting his own control as he dips back in for a kiss, pinning the angel beneath him.

They have a few hours until sunrise. Dean intends to take full advantage of the sleepless night, and chase the horrors away.