It didn't matter how many times he'd felt it before. It was the same every single time anyways.
The world was fucking crashing around him.
In a way, he hated Sam for his ability to be so outward about it, because he knew that he could never be like that. He wasn't wired that way. His being -- fine, ego -- wouldn't let him express disarray. Be smart. Be serious. Be so headstrong that you forget what it feels like to want to cry.
He watched the life abandon her body.
She was still choking when he pulled her out. Gargling repulsively, salt water leaking from her open mouth, streaking down the sides of her already graying face. It wasn't her dead eyes that got to him; that was something that he would forever hate himself for becoming used to seeing. It was the way her rubbery fingers brushed against his cheek, the way her legs bent in ways they definitely weren't supposed to, the way he could practically feel the way her body got lighter when the last of her soul had left and the last of the murky water had been coughed up.
You can't save everyone.
Dean slammed the door to the bunker, somehow knowing that the space was empty. Sam was hunting a wendigo in Montana, Cas was stopping demon deals somewhere in Germany. It didn't matter. He trudged down the stairs, flinging his pack carelessly on the floor.
His first instinct, naturally, was to head to the fridge for a beer. Little did Sam and Cas know, his favorite pastime after hunts as shitty as this was to get as blackout drunk as he could possibly manage. But for some reason, tonight, he felt that drinking away the memory of the girl wouldn't do any good. Instead, grabbing his gun, he headed to the shooting range.
This, it seemed, was the one place where the burning pit in his chest didn't consume him. Instead, he controlled it. Ever since he was little, the only place he knew safer to him than the seat of the Impala was behind a gun.
He shot. Emptied an entire round of bullets into the forehead of the first target. Eyes blank, mouth in a thin line, he didn't think. Didn't think about the girl's name or her big brother's name or her dark, curly hair that had so quickly begun to fall out into the unforgiving lake. He just shot, his trance-like state between perfect calm and furious anger more dangerous than he'd ever been on any hunt.
"Dean, are you--"
With inhuman reflexes, Dean turned at the source of the noise, emptying three quick bullets into the figure now standing at the doorway. A split second later, he recognized the figure as Cas, looking the same as he usually did despite the especially anxious frown on his face.
Cas stumbled back, taken by surprise, and yet, of course, completely unharmed. He didn't even bother to address the three holes that had just ripped through his chest.
"Dean, what was that?" He exclaimed, voice just barely tinted with the sound of an angry parent.
Dean said nothing, lowering the gun. "Sorry," he grumbled, showing a scary lack of remorse. "Didn't realize it was you."
Cas stepped forward, mouth falling open. "Didn't realize it was me?" He shook his head in awe. "Dean, what if I'd been Sam? What if I'd been human?"
Dean looked down, avoiding Cas' gaze. Reloading the gun, he turned back to the target. "But you weren't." he said, setting his jaw.
Cas was in utter disbelief. He'd seen Dean after hunts, sure. By now he could pick out the particularly bad ones, the ones where Dean locked himself away for days, not speaking, completely isolated. But he'd never seen Dean like this before.
