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"So what, is this your freakin' happy place or something?" Dean stands rather than sits by the lake he's come to know, the lake of his dreams or the lake of a dark day from what seems like a long time ago; a lake once black and burdened, not warm and bright.
Beside him, Castiel, as Dean knows him, as Dean sees him, as Dean has always seen him, not messy or bloody or beaten or things are different here, Dean, or half ripped up or oozing some kind of celestial light-blood stuff; not like that. "No, Dean. It's yours."
He snorts. "'Scuse me if I'm not exactly convinced of that." He does not look at Castiel, for fear of remembering the gnashing claws or flowing blood, or go, I'll hold them off.
"Dean." A hand on his shoulder. "You mustn't blame yourself, Dean."
At one point, Sam shook his shoulders and gripped them tight, stay with me, Dean, at one point he gripped Castiel's shoulder like this, at one point and another point and another but never in a way he would've liked to, never in a way so tender.
"Dean." Sometimes Dean hates when Castiel says his name. It's filled with so much he'll never hear again and so much he could never say, so much that the unfeeling angel could put into words that the human never could (never will).
And sometimes Dean loves it.
He turns to look at him. "Cas, I--"
Castiel's face is ripped apart by dozens, hundreds, thousands of rows of teeth, blood from his forehead and eyebrows and hands and skin and veins and cracks and cracks and cracks, his whole body (vessel, flesh, suit) cracks apart and light flows out, but he still stands there, a hand on Dean's shoulder, two blue eyes staring into his, and then one blue eye and one gouged out mess.
"It's not your fault, Dean."
Words blur together. Vessel bones slip out. The lake dyes red. The sky dyes black. A hand grips tight.
Dean's eyes snap open, drenched wet and half-shaking, and he has to make sure it's sweat and not blood covering him. He sits up, Sam asleep in the bed beside him, and he has to fight against the urge to swear. In the end he settles on stumbling to the bathroom and heaving, no food to throw up, and to remind himself he's not in Hell, he's not in Heaven, he's not even in freaking Purgatory. He's on Earth, and he's not sure if that's what he wants.
(Sometimes he hates it, sometimes he loves it, but most times Dean just hates himself.)