jensensitive:

There’s a shock of light, bright from his eyes and mouth, and then his body’s falling. Cas. Falling, knees to the dirt, then a thump against the ground, and then nothing, just still. It’s all too familiar, just as bad as the first time, worse, horrific, impossible.

And Dean is rushing at Michael, grabbing at his jacket, screaming in his stoic face. Michael volleys nothing back, makes no move to attack or defend, Dean without a sword at the ready.

“I have a proposal,” Michael says.

Dean knows he will agree. Yes Yes YES JUST SAVE HIM BRING HIM BACK TO ME

Michael smiles. He knows he’s won just as well as Dean does.

“He is dead. But you carry enough of him in your soul for me to resurrect him, if you let me in. My grace resonates with you. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Dean closes his eyes. “If you’ll bring him back… yes.”

There’s a humming that grows louder, and then he’s being lit up from the inside. Michael’s grace is a fire singing through every neuron in his body, buzzing in his spinal cord, and it feels as if his ears are bleeding, though he knows they’re not. Everything feels wrong and right and then his eyes are being forced open, and he can see Cas’s body, and it feels distant and at the same time as though he’s already touching it, touching every inch of him and seeing every atom. He sees his own body move, though he feels as if Michael himself is still, or everywhere at once.

Cas’s body is turned over, dilated eyes unseeing. Blood drips from his nose to his mouth, the impact of the fall having broken it. Dean recognizes that it looks all wrong. At the same time, he can feel Cas’s grace inside himself, somewhere in the vicinity of his heart, knowing it and seeing it for the first time in his life, clutched and twined around his soul, his soul that aches and screams to have Cas look at him again, breathe again, move again.

Michael heals Cas’s body first, blood vessels and skin and bone stitched back together. He gathers Cas’s grace from Dean, rips it from where it tries fruitlessly to clutch to Dean’s soul, where Dean’s soul tries to pull it back in. Michael holds the grace in him, and then reaches further. His soul protests and fights at the intrusion, and then there’s a burning, a white-hot fire at his core searing something off of him, rending his soul into two pieces, the separation a worse pain than anything he’s known. But he sees it now, for what it is. Castiel’s soul, made his, now made Castiel’s again, torn out of him. Dean is empty. Broken apart. Broken.

Dean’s– Michael’s– lips brush against Cas’s, and the grace and soul are pushed from one vessel to another. Dean looks on, physically numb to it, as if scar tissue covers every inch of his body.

Within seconds, Cas is moving and seeing, squinting, confused at Dean– Michael– above him, and Dean is seeing all of him. His broken, flightless wings, his eyes and his limbs every color he’s never even known. Castiel. Cas. Dean loves him. Dean loves him. He wants to scream it at him.

Quiet, Michael says to him. You had your chance.