inkstainedfic:

Crawling your way through six feet of dirt just shouldn’t be possible. Then again, he’s not entirely sure they buried him quite that deep. I sure as hell feels that way, suffocating and hot and sticky and dirty, and he scrapes himself on his own coffin dragging himself upwards. There comes a point when his exhausted body fails him, and he falls aside and thinks any moment now he’s going to run out of air, buried alive and suffocated straight back into hell.

He doesn’t. His body breathes for him, letting him rest enough to find the strength to climb out, whole and alive.

Everything feels new. It looks the same, mostly–the handprint on his arm definitely wasn’t there before, but he still looks like himself. He feels more like himself than he has for a long, long time, but there’s an ache in his ribs that doesn’t leave for a day or two, and somehow the very air he breathes feels more real than he remembers. For a while, he thinks it’s just getting used to living, again.

He doesn’t catch on for a long, long time. He gets suspicious when Bobby runs every test he’s got twice and he comes up clean, and even more suspicious when they track down a gang of demons and they all go for Sam first. It’s not until they stop for gas in the middle of nowhere at 3 in the morning, and when Sam goes inside to get them coffee, Dean sits down in the driver’s seat and realizes he doesn’t hear one person breathing, but two.

He hurls himself out of the car and checks every space he can find, making sure the devil’s trap on the trunk is still intact and tossing salt in every direction until he finally looks back into the back window, breath fogging up the glass. There are symbols on the window.

It takes another minute to figure out the window wasn’t written on, originally, although it becomes a little more obvious when the words change from that strange, ancient script to English.

Don’t be afraid.

Yeah, that helps.

“Who the hell are you?” The words on the glass change before he’s even finished speaking.

I’m the one who gripped you tight
and raised you from perdition.

“What?”

My name is Castiel.
I am an angel of the LORD.

The word ‘Castiel’ is a sort of sigil before the word becomes legible. Dean leans against his car and takes a second to get his heart rate back to kind-of-normal, and the words stop, quickly frosted over with white.

“What, you’ve got nothing else to say?”

No. It takes a great deal
of energy to do this.
I cannot move very far.

“What do you mean, you can’t move? You’re not possessing me, or anything, are you?” He’s pretty sure he’d know if he was being possessed by an angel, but then again, he was pretty sure angels didn’t exist up until now.

No. I am the breath in your lungs.
I have kept you alive since you
dug yourself out of the earth.

“…any reason you’re still there?” Oh, god. “I’m not gonna die if you leave, am I?”

A long pause, just long enough for Dean to panic.

It is possible.

Great. Just great.

“…well then, don’t leave, okay? I’ve still got work to do.”

I know.