Chapter Text
“Mary?”
No answer.
Slowly, as if he was approaching a skittish animal, Jack walked over to the dark spot the ground where, only seconds before, Mary Winchester had been, the overwhelming feeling in his head from just seconds ago replaced by a shocked coldness that spread more and more into his body with every step he took. Like his brain had been snap-frozen and his mind was now desperately trying to catch up, to crawl out of wherever it was stuck now, because what the hell just happened? And how?
An irrational thought popped into his head that was obviously still trying to come to terms with the last 45 seconds. Where is the rewind button, Jack thought desperately and he needed a couple of seconds until it sunk in that this was not a movie, this was real. Gruesomely real.
Jack knelt down next to the spot on the ground which looked a horrifying lot like ash. Had this been here before? Or maybe he'd just placed her somewhere else? He reached out to her with his powers, searching for wherever she might be, for a place his powers could latch on to her and fly her back here. He came up empty at the first try. Telling himself that he just hadn't looked hard enough, Jack tried again. Nothing. It felt like his powers slipped away from her every time he tried to get a grip. Still nothing. “Mary?” he repeated.
Shock slowly transformed into panic.
Oh god no, please, he thought, feeling the blood rushing to his head and making him dizzy, what have I done, what have I done?
Just one moment in which life was ripped brutally out of her. One moment, changing everything. Mary was gone.
Dead.
And Jack had murdered her.
He had murdered Sam and Dean's mother.
Just minutes ago he had murdered a man in cold blood, burnt him alive and hadn't felt remorseful at all, convinced he had done the right thing. He felt cold then, detached, like the cause justified the deeds, burying his emotions under a heavy blanket of righteousness.
It was all gone now and just like when he was powerless, he was achingly aware that he still was just a child, two years old, inexperienced and blinded by the shiny temptations of his powers.
The boy couldn't stop the sob coming out of him, dry heaves at first, feeling like they forced themselves up his throat, pushing away the shock, the disbelief, confronting him with the cold, hard, ruthless reality.
Then, as if a dam was broken, it all crashed down on him. One moment in which his whole world was turned upside down. His brief acquaintance with Max, Stacy and Eliot and their falling out had taught him that, apparently, even if he fixed what he had broken before, it sometimes didn't mean that a relationship, a friendship could ignore what had happened and still fell apart, just like it had happened with Jack and the three teens.
If he had to take a wild guess - killing Sam’s and Dean's mother even by accident would not fall under the category of water under the bridge.
He had ruined everything. Under no circumstances would Sam, Dean and Cas take him back now.
With his body still shaken by sobs, he rose to his wobbly legs, contemplating how to move on from here. What should he do? He knew only one thing: he had to bring Mary back, he had to fix what he had broken, no matter how Sam and Dean would react.
Would they hunt him? Would they be like John Winchester, madly chasing him for years and years on a mad quest for vengeance until they finally cornered him somewhere and snuffed his light out somehow?
If it ever came to this, would he fight back? Could he ever hurt Sam, Dean and Cas intentionally?
Jack had no answers to all those questions.
He just knew his life would never be the same again.
***
Sam's bloodied, bashed in face would haunt his future nightmares, Dean had zero doubts about that. It would take some time until he would be able to close his eyes again without seeing his little brother on the brink of unconsciousness, murmuring what easily could have been last words. Again.
As soon as he spotted Sam lying on the floor and rushed down beside him, Dean knew the situation was serious. Obviously, Sam had been gravely injured.
Swallowing the anger and hate towards Nick down, he focused on Sam instead.
He had to keep Sam conscious, had to keep him talking but not let him bid farewell. He couldn't take it. “Let’s play a little game. We're gonna count, okay? We're gonna count.”
Instead of answering, Sam gasped for air.
“Count with me now. One.”
Another gasp for air. “One,” Sam repeated and it sounded horribly painful.
“Two.” Please Sam, please.
“...two.” It sounded weaker than before. Dean's heart sped up. Desperation threatened to close up his throat, swallowing his words, but Dean could not afford to succumb to his weakness. He had to stay strong now, get Sam through this and then later break down when the situation was resolved and he had a minute or two to spare.
“There you go. Three?”
But Sam stopped counting. He seemed to have something on his mind. “You - you always put me first… your whole life...”, Sam said weakly while simultaneously violently gasping for air, his gaze distant and glassy but still trying to focus on his big brother, while Dean pressed the cloth to his head to stop the blood flow. Cold dread filled Dean's body, a sinking feeling in his stomach that Jack might not come back, the ambulance might be too late, Sam might -
Dean shook his head. If it was to banish his own fear or stop Sammy from talking or from overstraining himself, Dean didn't know. “No no. No. Ahhh, come on, stay with me now” he said, trying to calm Sam down, who apparently was dead set on saying goodbye, which was something Dean would not allow to happen.
“Yeah okay, alright. Just count with me, come on,” Dean said, feeling his brave face slipping, the smile on his lips that said “we get through this” feeling like a mask that once maybe had fit on his face but since then had started to shrink and choke him in the process. He knew he was about to lose it and he could only stand there and watch, could do nothing to stop it.
Sam didn't reply. His eyes drooped shut like he'd used up the last bit of strength.
“Sammy? Hey! SAM!” Dean cried, lightly slapping his brother's cheek while he felt as if all air had been punched out of his lungs.
Please. Not Sammy. Not again.
The sound of flapping wings right next to him made him look up. It was Jack, who needed less than a second to recognise the seriousness of the situation and knelt down beside Dean and Sam. White and golden light from Jack's hands and eyes fell on Sam, closed the wounds and made the blood on his face disappear.
When Sam opened his eyes, took a deep breath and sat up like he hadn't been on the brink of death just moments before, just then Dean felt like he could breathe again.
This alone would have been enough of a reason for Dean to grab his brother, his adopted son and his mother, wherever she was at the moment, call Cas from wherever he roamed at the moment, barricade them in the bunker with their phones switched off for some family recovery time. Just a couple of hours ago, right before Nick lured them into his trap and tried to kill them all, they'd had nothing else on their mind than how to assemble goddamn Mouse Trap and if pineapple on pizza was a crime against humanity or not.
Dean was tired. He wanted to go home, sleep and not be in mortal danger for once. He wanted a normal evening and to play silly board games with his family. He wanted to lock himself in his room, flop face first on his bed and scream into his pillow until all tension left his body.
After Jack told them he'd stopped Nick and that Mary was alive and well, he flew back to fetch her with the promise to meet them at the bunker.
They drove Donatello back home, then turned the Impala around and made their way over to Lebanon. It was time to go home.
It could have been over now that Nick was dead.
But the blows just kept on coming and coming.
The loud squeak of the bunker’s door announced their return back home. Sam and Dean made their way down the stairs, exhausted after several nerve-wracking hours and another almost-death. Deans continuous yawns caught Sam, who had every intention of heading straight to bed.
“Helloo! We’re back!” Dean yelled as he threw his duffel bag on the war room table, announcing their arrival. Jack and Mary should be back already. Maybe they sat in the kitchen, or they had gone to bed as soon as they came back.
There was no one in the kitchen, with no signs at all indicating that someone had been here since Sam and Jack had left earlier. No used coffee mugs in the sink, their cold, forgotten pizzas from game night all still in one piece, not one slice missing.
It was after Sam discovered the orphaned bedrooms that the alarm bells started ringing for real.
Mary and Jack weren't home yet.
With a tense feeling, Dean dialed Mary's number and felt his stomach drop when he only reached her voicemail. Five minutes later and it was voicemail again. Call him crazy or whatever, but Dean had a bad feeling about this. Something must have happened. Or, it was at least a possibility. Maybe his misgivings were the result of the last rather strenuous weeks, but he wouldn't take chances. He trusted his gut instincts.
Quickly he sent his mother a text message. After that, Sam had fired up his laptop and looked if the GPS on Mary's phone was active. It wasn't.
“Fuck,” Dean cursed and tore at his hair.
Sam said nothing, but clenched his fists so hard that his knuckles turned white and his fingernails pressed bruises into his palms.
He caught himself after a minute and instead searched for the location of Jack's phone. After a second, the camera zoomed in on a location
"There we go" Sam said as he recognized it as where they had fought with Nick earlier - but after a couple of seconds the location changed. "Look! Wait. Is that Nepal? Wait a second."
Dean craned his neck to look at the computer green over his brother's shoulder. "Where'd he go?" he asked. Sam shoved the laptop so that Dean could have a better look.
"There" he said while pointing at a red dot on the map.
"Lima, Peru" Dean read, just when the dot jumped again.
"Jack's flying. Paris, France" Sam said, sounding as bewildered as Dean felt.
"What the hell is he doing?" the older hunter asked, still trying to comprehend how everything had went off the rails in only a couple of hours.
That's when Cas called.
To say Dean was in a foul mood after speaking to Cas who told him about the untimely demise of Felix the snake and Cas' suspicion that something might be wrong with Jack was an understatement. He started pacing and Sam would not be surprised if he wore a groove into the bunker floor if he continued to pace. He was agitated enough and so was Sam, but if Dean now added some Cas-related feelings to the mix, Sam knew it would only get worse and he had to be the one keeping his head straight and focused.
Sam groaned internally. It was nothing he needed right now, but then, so was the whole situation of Jack and Mary missing.
He chose not to comment on it.
Sam tried to ignore his brother while he tapped on his phone and put out an APB on Jack and Mary. It wasn't likely, but maybe the other hunters might see them somewhere.
Just after Sam had texted Donna and Claire, Dean snapped.
“We need to get out to where Jack was and we need to talk to Cas. He knows something,” Dean said with a stony expression on his face, but at the same time burning for action. Sam sighed. There it was. Dean had officially mixed his Cas related angst to the whole mess. You hung up on him when you got pissed. Maybe we would be a lot wiser now if you hadn't done that and let him talk instead, genius, Sam thought and rolled his eyes. It was bound to become a lot more complicated from now on.
Their whole relationship was complicated and Sam had long since stopped trying to understand if they were an item or not or what the hell, but it was obvious that they felt something for each other, but to Sam's knowledge were caught in an endless circle of "will they, won't they?" they couldn't get out of, a fact which tended to make things more complicated.
Yup. Complicated.
Sam had tried talking sense into his brother for the whole hour and a half they sat in the car. Sam, even if terrified himself and avoiding all thoughts to what horrible thing might have happened to Jack and Mary, tried to be the calm voice of reason and tried to calm his brother down, who, after texting Cas to get his location out of him, ignored all speed limits and apparently saw right through Sam's façade, all while ranting about Cas, whatever he hadn't told them and being worried about their mother and son.
And so, Dean busted Sam’s well-thought-out plan of action including no arguments and a rational course of action.
To be fair, later Sam too wouldn't care less about aforementioned plans and rationality when they finally arrived where Jack apparently had fought with Nick. Cas arrived only a couple of minutes later and jumped out of his car the second he'd killed the engine. Dean's greeting sounded cold, detached and like strict business only, which made Cas look like Dean had kicked his puppy when Dean looked away, but he schooled his facial expression back almost instantly. Sam threw his arm around Cas' back and hugged him to counter his brother's stressed-out douchiness.
Their faint hope to find Mary or Jack quickly dissolved. There was no trace of them. Instead they found the burnt remains of Nick and a patch of burnt ground which Cas identified as a bigger version of an angelic blast.
Sam's gut told him that whatever had happened here, it was nothing good. The crisp piece of coal that had been Nick once horrified him due to the brutality with which he must have been murdered - which was ironic, after Sam himself had told him that he could burn for all he cared after Nick had released Abraxas and after he was almost brutally beaten to death himself by Nick just shortly before. Even more horrified him the dawning realization that if Mary Winchester had been in the middle of all this, the probability that some harm had befallen her, or worse, became bigger and bigger by the minute.
"It might have been Lucifer", Dean said in a last desperate attempt of hope. "Nick was trying to bring him back."
Sam shook his head. "But Jack said-" he started, but was interrupted by his brother just after he opened his mouth: "Who cares what Jack said? We don't know what happened!"
Dean seemed to have succumbed into his fear-induced rage mode while inspecting the scene, a mood Sam hated with passion, because it tended to make everything worse in the end due to rash decisions made in emotionally overloaded situations, followed by crashing guilt for treating others as scapegoats or punching bags, followed by stupid decisions once more, this time due to guilt for being an ass.
Well, Sam was used to it after forty years. He still hated it, but it was unlikely Dean would ever change. And frankly, right now Sam was just as worried for Mary and Jack as Dean to chastise him for being an asshole to Cas, who Dean had found to be guilty for the current situation, an opinion he voiced loud and angry.
"I swear, if he did something to her, if she is -" he stopped, not able to voice the imagined scenario out loud, then turned to Cas and pointed at him. "Then you're dead to me!" Dean bellowed, ignoring the crushed look on Cas' face. Sam saw it though and he knew that Dean had crossed some invisible line. Now he had to step in after all. "Dean", he said in an attempt to knock some sense into his older brother, though he already knew it would be futile.
Sam was right. Now that he had started to unleash his rage and fear unto them he wouldn't be stopped so easily. "No, he knew. He knew something was wrong with the kid. He knew it, and he didn't tell us! He didn't even tell us!"
"I was scared", Cas said, apparently taking the blame again, accepting the role as Dean's scapegoat once more. "I believed in Jack for so long, I believed that he was good. I - I knew that he would be good for the world. And he was good for us. My faith in him, it, it never wavered, and then I saw what he did. It wasn't malice. It wasn't evil. It was like Jack saw a problem, and in his mind, he just solved it with that snake."
"The snake?!" Dean sounded irritated by the snake as it was not his favourite animal in the world and he hated to talk about it. He didn't even respond to the rest.
Cas though wasn't finished yet. "What he did wasn't bad. It was the absence of good. And I saw that in him. But we were a family, and I didn't want to lose that, so I thought I could fix it on my own. Felt like it was my responsibility. So I left. And I didn't tell you, you had enough on your plate. If I could go back and just talk to him right there, I would. But I can't, Dean. I failed you. And I failed Jack. And I failed -"
Cas had intended to say "Mary", but he never got to it, as Dean cut him off, delivering the next gut punch to the angel.
"No, no. Don't even say it. Don't even say her name."
Sam's suspicion that something horrible must have happened to Mary was verified when Rowena called right then and told them she hadn't been able to find Mary with her tracking spell, spelling out one of his worst fears in eight words and a Scottish accent.
"Mary Winchester is no longer on this earth."
***
The atmosphere between Dean and Cas was still bitter now, days after Mary's funeral where they burnt the shell Jack had brought back and Cas' visit in her and John's Heaven. Sam and Dean grieved and they grieved on their own, privately. Sam just wanted to be alone and the couple of times Cas had met him in the kitchen in the last few days, they didn't talk much. Sam seemed just as miserable as Cas about their little family falling apart in such a sudden and violent way. Sometimes they sat at the table in the kitchen, Sam sipping his coffee, Cas just… sitting, a hopefully comforting presence who didn't pressure Sam to talk, or sometimes keeping an eye on the laptop for possible signs of Jack's whereabouts.
Dean had sticked to few stints out of his room with even fewer words directed towards Cas, most of them still harsh and dismissive. To Cas, it felt like their profound bond had been brutally ripped to shreds and that Dean didn't care about its loss at all, when Cas felt like he had lost a limb.
Cas knew Dean and why he acted like he did and objectively, he shouldn't be bothered as much by the forms Dean's grief took sometimes. But Cas himself wasn't at his a-game, so to say, and being denied his family's support and Dean's friendship because of some screwed up blame game took his toll on the angel, as well as years of trying to be the strong one, the guardian, too. His many failings, his depression and his fading powers were proof of that.
They couldn't catch a break though. First, there was the hunter's memorial for Mary. Sam tried to at least partially put on a good front for that, even if it was hard to smile, to shake hands, to receive condolences and offer some comfort of his own when he felt like he had no capacity whatsoever to shoulder someone else's grief, too, which made him put his own feelings away and put on a brave, functioning face for the other ones - the remaining hunters from Apocalypse World were his friends and he was glad they wanted to come and still have something to do with him after the fiasco of Michael's killing spree. They deserved to grieve and say goodbye to Mary, too.
After that, Cas went to Heaven to ask for the angel's help and they investigated the biblical deaths Jack might be responsible for, a suspicion they proved to be correct when they talked to the man in the hospital. Worse, apparently, Duma had lied to Castiel and manipulated Jack to rain heavenly judgement on non-believers and to be Heavens sock puppet.
At this point, Dean snapped and with an expression that did a bad job hiding how pissed and desperate he really was he led Sam to the room in which they had stored the Ma'lak box.
This is a nightmare, Sam thought. We've slipped into a nightmare and it only gets worse and worse and worse.
He knew what Dean intended to do was wrong. He hated everything to even think about it. Though, after the last weeks and days had taken their toll on him, the younger Winchester doubted he had the strength to convince his brother of how wrong this was. Which didn't mean he wouldn't try to stop this.
"Are we seriously talking about locking Jack in this? No, we're seriously talking about not having a choice."
Dean shrugged. "We can't kill him, okay? And this is warded to lock down an archangel." He stepped away from the Ma'lak box and Sam, facing the wall, as if he didn't dare to look at his brother right now.
Sam's conscience screamed he had to stop Dean. Meanwhile, another voice who got louder and louder with each passing day screamed it's frustration of not getting a break at him, nevermind the consequences. If he had to guess, his breaking point, the moment in which the second voice would drown his conscience drew near. But it was not now. He still wouldn't give in.
"And then what? We just force him inside?"
"Maybe. But he might if he only has to stay in there long enough for us to finish the spell to fix his soul." Dean's answer came, he still wouldn't look at Sam though. This never was a good sign. Something was up.
"Spell? What spell? There is no spell. You want to lie to him?", Sam asked, a suspicion growing what it was Dean was suggesting. He didn't like it one bit.
"No" Dean answered, shaking his head, but finally turned around. "Well, I mean, I want Zeppelin to get back together. But what I need, what we need is to stop Jack. Big difference. But here's the deal. We both got to sign off on it. This might be our only shot, and if he even catches a whiff that this is a scam, he's off into the wind."
The voices in his head screaming at him became louder, a crude mix of "I have to stop this" and "fuck everything, give me a break."
It was just like two years ago when Dean had resented Jack so much, before Cas returned to them, when he acted like a bloodhound on a trail, searching for ways and ways to put Jack to blame for everything, tried to find a legitimate reason to get rid of him because he couldn't stand seeing him. When I see him, all I can think of is everything we've lost, he had screamed. After that, after Cas came back, Dean felt guilty and tried to make an effort, tried to connect with Jack. And now it was like all of it had never happened. Like he'd never admitted to loving Jack, to calling Jack his son, to feeling guilty for his behaviour and for leaving when he had died. It was back to square one and Sam was clueless if he had enough strength to go through it a second time. Now, he didn't even have the hope of finding their mom alive and bringing her back anymore, a hope he had carried before him like a torch two years ago. He had nothing.
"Exactly. And how do you think he's not gonna know something's up?" Sam asked, the lines on his forehead deepening. How Dean could sound so calm while saying such cruel things he couldn't fathom.
"Because you're gonna be so damn sincere."
"Me?"
Dean made a confirming hum.
Sam hated it. He wanted to scream, grip Dean's shoulders and shake him until he came back to his senses. It probably wouldn't work though, as he apparently was dead set on doing this. And on dragging Sam down along with him. Still, Sam had to ask.
"Why me?"
Dean sounded stone cold as he said "Because you've always been in his corner, all right? You're his go-to guy. Sam, if you reach out, he'll come. If I do it, after what happened to Mom, I could lose it. I will lose it."
"I don't think this is gonna work" Sam objected, his voice shaky and quiet, in a desperate tone. Please don't make me do this.
Dean didn't hear his plea. Instead he, drove the last nail into the proverbial coffin.
"One way to find out."
That did it. Sam knew he should scream at his brother, make him see that there is one thing they should have learned after all these years was that trapping creatures in a prison, that bottling things up instead of dealing with it, even this creepy enchanted metal box would not work forever but presumably make it even worse. Everything inside him writhed at the thought of Jack inside this metal coffin. It was wrong and they should find another way of prevent their surrogate son of doing more harm. They should put every effort into saving his soul.
But Sam knew he didn't have the strength to convince his brother of the wrongness of his strategy (it was possible he would see it himself sooner rather than later), find a way to restore a soul, for which there were no books they could hit, no one they could really ask for help as it surpassed even Cas' knowledge of souls and, of course, his powers, which were not what they were back in the day when Sam lacked a soul. Also, their number of powerful allies was a little short these days.
He was just too tired for everything else. The voice screaming for a break had won. His conscience choked on his own screaming voice, coughed and went quiet.
Sam sighed. "Jack", he said. Another sigh. This would end in a catastrophe. But in for a penny, in for a pound. Story of his life. "I hope you can hear this..."
***
Two iron bars and one angel blade were hardly ideal for hand-to-hand combat with a horde of freshly risen and undead dudes. But they had them surrounded in seconds with their sheer numbers and the Impala’s trunk was out of their reach.
Dean felt the rush of adrenaline running through him, his body adjusting, anticipating the fight that was undoubtedly going to start soon. Why else would those half-rotten zombie-people come after them?
Somehow, he had problems to determine if the last minutes had really happened. He should be used to shit escalating so hard and fast as his life regularly derailed like a train going too fast on the tracks, overturning a couple of times and burning out, but every time it happened it was as scary and horrible as the first time. He just became better at dealing with it, or so Dean thought.
Right now was not the time, though. And so the hunter shoved all thoughts of a pissed off Chuck who started the apocalypse with a snap of his fingers away, stashed his feelings of betrayal somewhere so a possible future version of Dean could deal with them, if he came out of this alive, of course, and tried not to look at the spot right next to the statue of Mother Mary where the lifeless, burnt-out body of their son still lay.
Deal later. Survive first.
The undead came closer and closer and the space between them became smaller. Right next to him, Sam and Cas stood just as tense next and behind him, their weapons raised and focused on the approaching monsters.
This was it. They would meet their ends here, together, going down fighting back-to-back. In the end, it always came back to the three of them. The last weeks and months hadn't been easy on them and especially on Dean and Cas’ friendship or whatever-it-was between them, but as they stood here now, facing their ends together, it was as if their many disagreements were being drowned out by the pure, all-encompassing love for his brother and his angel, the, because who was he kidding, really, love of his life.
If this were a romantic movie, Dean would declare his undying love to Cas, for one lyrical moment of total understanding between them, of peace of mind and the feeling of closure for the audience, but-
Life didn't work that way. Life was too short for that nonsense if one was simultaneously being eyed by a horde of hungry zombies. Time didn't pass magically slower if they somehow decided to be all touchy-feely in the last ten seconds of their life so that being torn to shreds a second later might be more bearable. Because that was the secret that all romantic stories never told: It wouldn't be more bearable, it would hurt just as much and they would still be dead afterwards.
All Dean could do was to hope that they already knew.
One of the zombies snarled. In the next second, the self proclaimed Team Free Will was tackled by the masses of half decayed bodies from all sides.
Dean stabbed and drew the pointed end of his makeshift weapon into whatever opponent in front of him, but it was clear from the second the fight had started that they were outnumbered and wouldn't last for long. Behind him, Dean heard Sam scream and saw him going down from the corner of his eye. Everything in Dean screamed at him to turn around and help his brother, but it was Cas who acted before Dean could decide on what to do.
“Close your eyes!” he commanded and Dean complied. The white light that lit the graveyard up just an instant later was visible even through closed eyes. It only lasted a couple of seconds, then the light ebbed off, leaving behind the foggy darkness clouding the graveyard that hadn't been there minutes before.
With a groan, an almost uninjured Sam pushed a dead zombie away and climbed to his feet. Dean realized just then that he had been holding his breath, but his breath of relief got stuck in his throat when he spotted the crumpled, unmoving shape of a man in a trenchcoat on the grass amidst all the zombies.
“Cas?”
Oh no, no no no no no no-
He fell to his knees next to the angel, a well-known, heart wrenching kind of fear rising in him that differed from the one he felt while being surrounded by undead people.
With a push, he turned Cas around, so that his face wasn't pressed into the chest of some half-decayed guy anymore and shook his shoulders, but the angel showed no reaction.
He still breathed, but it was shallow and weak.
“Cas?" Dean repeated, more desperate, pulled him into his lap. "C'mon, don't do this to me. Cas, please!"
Don't make me lose you too. Don't make me lose you after the last thing I said to you was that you should leave. I can't lose you, Cas.
He immediately schooled his face into a neutral expression when he saw the desperate and shocked look Sam was giving him and the lifeless figure of their best friend in his lap.
"He's alive" he said and Sam's shoulders visibly relaxed. "Now let's get Jack and then bring them home. Quick."
Together, Sam and Dean heaved him back to the Impala and gently laid him on the back seat.
Dean's gaze rested on his best friend for a moment longer, taking in the exhausted, tired features of the angel and an unpleasant but well-known feeling creeped up in Dean. He hated to see Cas like this, totally running on empty, and still desperate to protect them, even if Dean and him were not on the best of terms right now and both of them had threatened to end their friendship multiple times in the last months.
But apparently there were some habits that died hard, and those included that in the end they always stuck together nevermind if the rifts between them were as big as they are now, and that Cas rather drove himself to total exhaustion than to see his family get hurt.
Cas, you stupid son of a bitch, Dean thought as he closed the door and locked the car in case there were zombie strays here somewhere that Cas' grace explosion had missed, so they would only reach Cas by destroying the car and making a lot of noise in the process.
Then, Dean braced himself and turned Jack who still lay on the grass, his wings burnt into the ground - something that not twenty-four hours ago Dean might have wanted to see, but now that it was real, after he'd come to his senses, it was more like he stepped into a nightmare - from the one he was already living anyway.
Jack was two and a half years old and had died for a second time now, which was, for the most part, Dean's fault. If Michael had never escaped, if Dean had never listened to Cas' and Sam's pleas and gone into the Ma'lak box, Sam would still have his hunter friends, Jack would still have his soul and Rowena wouldn't be traumatised, while Dean paid for what he'd brought upon them and in time, would have faded into a fond memory of a brother, a father, a friend. Or so he told himself, as he approached the little boy he'd vowed to protect, once, after the first time he had tried to kill him.
Sam was right behind him, his gaze diverted as he couldn't look at Jack, at the burnt parts of his face, and the empty eye sockets, his thoughts spent on blaming himself, too, as the one who had angered Chuck with the gun.
It was almost unbearable to look at the kid, so he tried to avoid it, which proved difficult when trying to lift him up and carry him to the closest vehicle, which was Cas' grey pick up. What he was not able to ignore was the smell of burnt flesh. Sam gagged as they hoisted Jack over the back flap of the truck bed.
Dean, who wasn't better for it, saw him struggling afterwards and pried the keys for the pick up from Sam's fingers.
"I got this. You go, we have to look out if the bunker is still safe. I'm right behind you," the older Winchester said and tossed him Baby's keys.
Sam caught them and nodded with a stricken look on his face, before he fled to the Impala, ashamed of himself.
He threw himself on the driver's seat and a last look over his shoulder to check on Cas before he started the engine and drove off the graveyard. The last thing he saw of it was a stray zombie slowly approaching Dean and the pick up truck and his brother who slashed its head off with Cas' angel blade. Then the graveyard vanished behind a stone wall and a group of trees and he desperately hoped that he never had to come here ever again.
“I got no reason to fight
And I don't care what's wrong and who's right
There's nothing that we didn't try
Pretending to know what we don't
Understand yet
I got my back to the wall
And no one's gonna answer my call
Like a hit from out of the blue
I woke up this morning, it came without warning
My house is on fire
I've been hanging from a tree
I've been down to the sea
As I walked every street
I found no one to cheat
As I stay up all night
As I lay by your side
I've been chasing around
I got up, I came down, so come on
I make my way all around
And if everybody's wearing you down
It's been that way for too long
I woke up this morning, it came without warning
We got no reason to fight
So will anybody join us tonight
Will you stop and give it a try
My house is on fire but I am alive“
Beatsteaks, „House On Fire“