✨🐧✨

It was no longer bubbling as the mass took a more solid form, going from a puddle on the ground and growing into an arching peak. Shoulders, something in the back of Dean’s mind told him. It looks like shoulders, and a head.

The breath was stolen straight from his lungs as he realised that his theory had been right on the money. The form continued to shift into something that looked almost human. The black ooze melted away, almost like it had been absorbed by the thing it had produced. “Not a thing! A person hunched over, crouching.” His shoulders curled in on himself as he sat crouched to the floor, his back facing them. An oddly reminiscent pose that Dean had seen only once before, sat at the river side in the greying afterlife of Purgatory. The tails of tan trench coat pooled around him dusting the floor, the muss of dark hair just visible from where his head bowed, disappearing behind the huddle of shoulders.

It was like he was experiencing some kind of outer body thing, not feeling anything but just left watching. His legs felt heavy, like magnets were keeping him tethered to the ground and it was sheer willpower alone that he didn’t fall to his knees at that moment. Every emotion he had been keeping at bay the past months battled for attention inside his head, but their fighting war was counterintuitive, not being able to focus on a single thing essentially made him numb. He just stared blankly at the unmoving huddled figure in the middle of the dungeon floor.

He didn’t even realise he had moved until he was on top of him. Hand tentatively reaching to lay on his shoulder. A solid warmth beneath his palm and a breathy whisper escaped his lips. “… C… Cas?”

It all happened so fast that Dean didn’t even have time to process it—not until the shackles were around Castiel’s wrists.

That tanned shoulder flinched away like he had been burned, as eyes bluer than the midday sky turned sharply to consider him, but they soon clouded over with a dark storm of fury. His lips pinched into a snarling grimace as he lunged at Dean with a spitting and foaming-at-the-mouth feral roar. A hand locked around his throat as Dean was rushed backwards head colliding with the solid concrete wall and those fingers around his windpipe squeezed tight.

He saw his own panicked look in the dark of his eye as he gasped for air, not clouded over like a demon, they were still blue—beautifully blue—but there was something else to that stare, a haunted fearful look that Dean almost didn’t recognise beyond the fury.

Dean didn’t even fight back.