Chapter Text
I
I sit alone in the dark and I try to remember
(the words you spoke when you summoned the ender)
-- Secret of Life, Lord Huron
Cas
Before there was anything, there was The Empty.
It empties Castiel out.
Pulls at each individual thread of who he is and has been and might have been, in some other life. Dissolves him; until he can’t remember the laws of the universe, or the structure of a strand of DNA, or his own interminable age.
Disintegrates him until he can’t understand the passage of time, can’t comprehend words like awake. Can’t recall his own name.
He was living once, was something. The Empty – the nothing – tends towards entropy. Wants him boiled down to atoms, to particles, to boundless, shapeless, thoughtless matter.
It hollows and hollows and hollows, and he lets it. Holds to only a singular thing. Holds to the only thing he has ever known to be worth holding. Holds to that single syllable thrum which beats better than his heart has ever learned how.
Dean. Dean. Dean.
If I am to be nothing, Castiel thinks, then let him be the only thing left before I go.
There’s nobody to pray to here. Hasn’t been anyone worth his prayer in longer than he can remember.
But hasn’t he been saying Dean’s name like a prayer all along? Hasn’t that been worth every ounce of blind faith?
Dean.
Dean
Dean has mourned Cas five times, and he will not – cannot – do it a sixth.
The laws of the universe tell him that Cas is gone. That death is death and he won’t come back this time. The laws of his own life tell him otherwise, tell him to sit on the cold ground with a breath trapped in his chest that holds back a sob until reality unravels and spits Cas back out in front of him.
The thing about death is that it doesn’t matter how many times he sees it, or how it happens, or what is left behind. It hurts the same as it did the very first time.
There on the floor, crumpled like a small child, he relives it all.
Dean is 4 years old, and his mother dies. Dean is 23 and Sam leaves for college. Dean is 26 and his dad doesn’t come home. Dean is 27 and his dad is dead. 27 and Sam dies. 30 and Cas dies. 31 and Jo and Ellen and Cas and Sam die. 33 and 35 and 36 and, and, and. Bobby and mom and dad and Sam and Charlie and Eileen and Jack and Cas. It doesn’t matter how many people he loves. Doesn’t matter if they die once or forever, if he saves them, if he doesn’t. They all die. They always die.
And he is always alone.
And it always hurts.
And he always gets up anyways.
Knows no other way.
Sam
Dean seems fine. Good, even.
If it weren’t for the hairline cracks giving him away, Sam might even believe the act. They’re far from the children they were when they first learned to wear fine as a mask, though. But more than that, Sam is far from wanting to ask Dean about his feelings, far from caring for the argument that will inevitably follow. Sometimes life feels like an endless loop, and he wonders if Gabriel really had shown him his future over and over, just in metaphor rather than truth.
What he knows is that he’s still watching Dean die.
And sure, everybody is dying, but it’s not meant to be them and it’s not meant to be this. His bright, vibrant, toothy brother replaced with a caricature. Dean makes a lot of jokes. Eats a lot of food. Kills a lot of monsters.
Sam’s witnessed this (and done it himself) enough times to recognize Dean going through the motions, but he’s still no good at knowing what to do about it. He thinks Cas might have known. Thinks, absently and with a dull ache, that he misses Cas too. Dean was more honest when Cas was around, even if he wasn’t more honest with himself.
These days Dean is only honest at the bottom of a bottle, passed out in front of his computer screen. Sam makes the mistake of glancing, once. Sees Cas there and Cas gone and feels like he’s looking in on something that isn’t his to see. He doesn’t look again after that, because he has no right.
Besides.
He has enough to carry on his own, without carrying whatever it is Dean has on his shoulders. They’re doomed to love each other this way. Two sides of the scale. A coin flip deciding which one of them is closer to giving up at any given moment.
Heads I win, tails you lose.
Sam was seven before he realized that it was a trick; there was no winning for him.
He was older, but not by enough, when he realized there was no winning for either of them, that the real trick was how many years Dean spent convincing him he could make it okay if Sam let him be the one to flip the coin.
Some six months after, they go on a hunt and they lose again. And maybe it’s not to a coin, but it’s to a piece of metal all the same.
---
In the beginning, Sam keeps going because he isn’t sure what else to do. The phone still rings, the dog still has to pee. The world still spins and spins and spins. It’s almost easy, at first, because it doesn’t feel real.
Sure, he promised not to bring Dean back.
But he’s promised that before, and Dean has still come back regardless.
He tries, for a while. Half-heartedly, not because he doesn’t want to do it wholeheartedly, but because he isn’t sure he has even half a heart left. There’s no right answer anymore, and maybe there never was. Dying more than once was never right, either. If he leaves Dean dead without trying, it’s a betrayal. If he brings Dean back, that’s a betrayal too.
The first year flips over to the second, marks the longest he’s ever been alive on an earth where Dean is not.
The second flips over to the third, then the fourth. Marks the longest he’s ever been without Dean at all.
It’s only then that he lets himself collapse.
---
Some time in the middle of the fifth year, Sam makes what peace he can. Locks up most of the guns, stows the books away. Enrolls in a Law program with a falsified undergraduate degree. He answers the phones still but directs them all to someone else.
There are less monsters now than there used to be, and the ones left behind don’t have the same teeth. Or maybe Sam just doesn’t remember how to feel the bite. Either way, hunting doesn’t need him anymore, and it feels like saying goodbye all over again. Eventually the phones stop ringing.
He closes up the bunker, sobs on the other side until dark.
He doesn’t go back again.
---
Sam graduates, passes the bar. He doesn’t feel unhappy but he doesn’t feel happy, either. Supposes it’s thanks to years of living a life of extremes. He feels stuck in the center, mostly. Isn’t sure he wants that. Fights the temptation to find something to move the needle one way or another.
Still. He meets a girl who is smart and beautiful and who he thinks he can stomach losing.
It isn’t fair to love in half-measures, but he’s half-hearted, and life hasn’t been fair to him either.
---
When Sam’s son is born he feels joy for the first time in seven years. Wonders if it’s something like mirrors, if there is some old superstition about when the numbness of loss eventually wears away. Reminds himself that he doesn’t get to wonder about things like that anymore, and names his son Dean. Tells his wife it’s a family name. Tells her it’s his father’s name.
She won’t ever know the truth, and he tells himself he does it to keep her safe, but mostly he does it because the truth of who Dean is to him is too large to be shared, too personal to be explained. There are pictures on their walls, but when he’s asked about them he just calls them family and lets the word hang heavy and final on his tongue.
He doesn’t try not to be like his father. Doesn’t need to, is nothing like him by now.
But he hears Dean in his own voice, sometimes. In his humor, in his gentleness, in his well-acted certainty. Remembers Dean teaching him to tie his shoes (the easy way, with the bunny ears) or Dean keeping the bathroom light on for him (and lying to their Dad, claiming he forgot it on). When little Dean is three he falls down a hill on his bike and knocks two teeth out and finally, he thinks he understands his brother.
He thought he always had.
Sometimes, in the dark of night, he lets himself accept that he knows Dean better now than he ever did when he was still alive.
---
Against odds and often against his wishes, the universe that took Dean Winchester too early doesn’t seem to have much interest in him. It used to sting. Now it’s an old ache, as settled as the ones in his hands.
Life isn’t only pain and sadness. There are all kinds of light.
When he isn’t angry, he’s grateful. When he doesn’t feel like he’s still at war, he feels as if he’s finally, finally survived it.
Sam dies old.
And he goes to heaven.
And he climbs into the Impala beside Dean.
And he wakes up in his bed in the bunker.
---
Living a whole lifetime in what appears to have been a dream is a stretch for even Sam to wrap his head around. For a week, he walks around in a haze, blames it on the whole ending another apocalypse thing when Dean asks.
He’s still living halfway in some other life. Gets out of bed in the morning and expects his joints to ache, and instead has enough energy for a run. Starts getting ready for bed at seven in the evening and stews, wide awake, until past midnight.
It was only a dream but he can’t shake the feeling of a life lived entire. Can’t shake the déjà vu that strikes him when he catches Dean staring a little too long at the dishes in the sink, or laughing a little too hard at one of his own jokes.
Maybe it was a good life. Maybe he loved his wife, and his son. Maybe he found a way out of the endless loop of death and life and death again.
He doesn’t want it.
Worse than that, he’s not sure he needs it.
“Sam. Sam– Sammy.” Dean startles Sam from his attempts to piece together his own thoughts.
That’s where the dissonance lives; in moments like these, that easy two syllable nickname feels like an unimaginable gift when it’s meant to be an irritation. But when he thinks about how finite it is – about a whole life lived never hearing that name again – he can’t reconcile why he should live that life and Dean should die.
He scowls anyways because he’s supposed to. Because they’ve learned over and over not to keep secrets but this was meant to be their last apocalypse and he doesn’t want Dean to know if it isn’t just yet. Because he’s looking for a sign – any sign – that maybe it was just a really involved dream.
“Yeah. Sorry. What were you saying?” Sam stumbles it out, and Dean shoots him a look of confusion but gives up long before Sam begins to consider caving.
“There’s a bunch of disappearances in North Carolina and I–”
“You want to hunt?”
“Yeah, that’s what we do.” Dean aims for what Sam thinks is nonchalance and falls short somewhere between disappointment and resignation. “Why shouldn’t we?”
Sam can think of a hundred arguments but too many of them would require them to say the unspoken name between them, and the ones that don’t aren’t all that convincing.
That’s how they find themselves on a hunt. Then another and another.
And maybe the world is not careening towards another end, but his world is. The apocalypse is no less devastating in its narrowed scope.
Every single hunt is a hunt he knows they’ve done before.
---
Three months later, he’s forced to accept that nothing is changing. Dean neither breaks down entirely, nor does he shake that haunted look in his eyes that appears whenever he thinks Sam isn’t looking. Long minutes spent staring into the darkness like it’s something he can kill with a gun or a knife. Weeks spent away from the bunker, pretending it’s because they have too much to do and not because he doesn’t seem to sleep at all when they stay there.
It’s not enough, it seems, to spend his days worrying that this life isn’t real – that somehow, he’s going to be stuck living it over and over again. Apparently, Sam also has to do so while watching his brother suffer under the guise of normalcy.
They’ve watched each other suffer for a long time. Maybe he should be better at it by now. But the silent suffering was always the hardest. Not the torture, the anger, the pain, the fear, but the quiet. The deep, steady undercurrent of ache he can see when he looks for it long enough.
The knowledge that if things go the way he thinks they will, the only thing that’s going to happen is that Dean is going to get better and better and hiding it. And then he’s going to die.
Sam does the only thing he can think of.
He tucks himself away in his room in the bunker and he says Jack’s name over and over until he’s annoyed with himself, and past then. Figures maybe Jack hasn’t quite figured out how to drown it all out yet, or that maybe they’re still close enough for it to get through.
It’s like praying to a wall, but Sam has prayed to far worse.
It takes hours, and desperation, and a few threats that he’s quite certain he can’t follow through on (at least one of which he won’t even try: if you don’t come down here I’m going to come up there and handle this myself). In the end, what actually works makes him feel terrible: I miss you. I just want to talk.
Jack appears without a sound, and Sam knows he shouldn’t have expected him to look any different but he’s still surprised that the man standing in front of him doesn’t look like a God. Just looks like Jack.
Jack, who didn’t know a damn thing the day Sam met him and who now has the power to know the whole universe. All Sam can hope is that the tiny pockets of it that he doesn’t know yet are the ones that will make this semblance of a plan work.
“Sam.” Jack’s smile is warm and there’s a moment where Sam sets aside the need to get anything done and hugs him instead. He was honest, he supposes. He had missed him. “I miss you too.”
“How’s… being God?”
“Not God,” Jack’s nose wrinkles distastefully, like he’s said it a thousand times. “And it’s… lonely. Trying to figure out which non-humans can come up and which ones can’t and… what if I choose wrong?”
Sam feels a twinge in his chest, the soft ache of guilt in his stomach. It hadn’t occurred to him that things might be hard for Jack. He hates himself for how quickly he tucks away the detail for future use, but there’s no such thing as useless information. No piece of knowledge that has come for free, or that doesn’t carry some value.
Silence draws on for too long – an awkward beat where Sam can’t think of anything to say in response, and Jack seems to understand. “You didn’t… just call me to talk. Right?”
“I’m sorry, Jack, I do miss you – we miss you–”
Jack does look different, then. Like he’s realizing this is a business call not a casual visit. His spine straightens, his jaw sets. He looks, to Sam, a little bit like a kid playacting at adulthood, dressed up in his father’s clothes. Maybe he’ll always look that way to them, though. A side effect of knowing his age, of watching him grow if not in body, then in spirit.
“Go ahead then. Tell me.”
Sam struggles to find the words. To locate an answer for how he’s meant to be explaining the whole of what he’s quite certain is the future. What he had intended to say is lost somewhere hours ago, before he screamed himself mentally hoarse shouting into the void for Jack to listen. Arguments about the value of life, about how Dean deserves to live the life he finally learned to want. About how everyone has always gotten them backwards.
What comes out is: “A piece of fucking metal, Jack? Metal?”
There’s a crack in the expression on Jack’s face, then. A glimpse of realization. “Who told you?”
“Nobody told me, I lived it. All of it. Dean’s death, my life.” Sam can hear the catch in his voice, can’t stop it. “How could you do that to him?”
“I didn’t do anything. Things…” Jack looks briefly at a loss, and his attempt at aloofness crumbles as he sinks down onto Sam’s bed. “Thing’s had to be put back to balance. The both of you were never really meant to survive. It was always one or the other. Even before the apocalypse, back when Dean agreed to go on the rack to bring you back. The only way to give one of you that life without throwing it off balance was-”
“To kill the other.” Because why not? Because how could the two of them ever imagine a life, together, happy? Sam doesn’t even have it in him to care all that much about the revelation. It’s par for the course really. He’d already worked his way pretty close to that conclusion in the privacy of his own mind.
“Yes.”
“Why him? Why him when it was supposed to be me all along?” Sam thinks he already knows the answer. Thinks he can imagine what he might have chosen, in Jack’s shoes.
“Because… he can’t do it alone.”
“Yes he can.”
Jack’s sigh is long suffering, frustrated, and so vaguely reminiscent of Cas that it makes Sam bite back a smile. “Okay fine, maybe he can. But he won’t. You know he won’t. He would just spend his whole life searching for you, and die early in some stupid way, and ruin the whole attempt at-”
“Then give him Cas.”
“What?” Jack looks startled, then pained. Sam remembers Dean, stumbling through his last words, pale and shaking and afraid, and he chooses not to care if it hurts Jack.
“Give him Cas. You and I both know that-”
Jack looks very near to a child, then. Sam could swear his lip quivers, wonders how whatever power makes up the universe has landed itself so squarely in the lap of someone who looks so lost. “I was going to… I was going to get him to help me.”
Sam is quiet then, for a long time. Asks himself if anything has really changed. If he’s still willing to let other people hurt for the sake of his own wants and needs, for the endless dedication he has to his brother. But they don’t do that anymore – the all or nothing. The belief that they can only have one or the other. There’s a solution in the middle, right there waiting for him to take it if he wants to.
Long minutes later, he says, “I’ll help you.”
“You’ll…”
“Let Cas… let Cas come live a life, with Dean. And I’ll come with you to heaven and help you there. I saw what my life would be – always afraid of losing more people, always afraid of loving people too much. I’ll go be in heaven and when Eil– when people get there I’ll see them.”
“But you… you know that then you’d be missing out on the human heaven for years, right? That the things I do, they take time?” Jack sounds hesitant, and Sam can’t decide if it’s because he would prefer Cas (smart, Sam figures) or if he just doesn’t think Sam understands (which, to be fair, has been true for deals in the past).
Sam shrugs a shoulder, “So what? I’ll live out my lifetime with you. And when they get to heaven we’ll figure it out.”
“The thing is… I don’t know if Cas will get to heaven.”
“What? You just said that-”
“I can pull him out to help me. But I can’t ensure that he can get in to the heaven bit of heaven.” Jack sounds absent, thoughtful. Like he’s trying to take in information that doesn’t come naturally. Sam assumes that’s where the whole Amara is part of him thing comes in.
“But you said even the good monsters were-”
“Cas is not a monster.” There’s a sharp edge to Jack’s tone, a reminder of barely restrained power, but he takes a deep breath and continues more calmly. “I don’t know what Cas is anymore. Angel? Human? He’s got no soul, but he had one once. He’s got less grace than what he was made with. He’s not a mix of both the way I am but…”
Sam waits for Jack to continue, and when he doesn’t, says, “Well we’ll deal with that when we get there, then.”
“What about your son?”
He hadn’t forgotten. He hadn’t. He just hadn’t let thinking about it be an option. “Will he… not exist?”
Jack breathes out, whether in frustration or relief Sam can’t tell, and says, “His soul exists. He would be born a Winchester. I can’t say what would happen after, whether he would live an easy life or a hard one.”
Sam already knows the answer – Winchesters aren’t guaranteed easy lives. Wouldn’t take them even if they were offered. He doesn’t waste time wondering what distant relative must be out there waiting to have a kid, just nods firmly and says, “Good enough.”
“I promised I wouldn’t meddle. Hands off.” Sam can tell how close Jack is to giving in – sees this final weak argument, held out for Sam to contradict as easily as he breathes.
“But you did meddle. You picked which one of us – you picked me.” Jack opens his mouth as if to interrupt, and Sam cuts him off with a plea. “I’m choosing this, now. Let me choose. We’re owed that much.”
Jack sighs and stands up, turning to face Sam. “If you both choose, then I’ll do it. You can tell me by prayer when you’re ready.”
He’s gone before Sam has a chance to open his mouth to thank him.
---
Sam doesn’t talk to Dean right away. Finds himself putting it off, relishing the first moments of safety and predictability he thinks he can ever remember having.
Dean isn’t going to die yet.
He’s not going to die at all, if Sam can help it, but even if it all were to go wrong they would still have months to spare before that moment.
It might be selfish to take advantage of that time, but he tells himself Dean will need it too. So they hunt, and they stay in shitty motels with the knowledge that they have a real home to go back to. They teach Miracle to play fetch, and then they teach her to get them beer from the fridge. They rewatch old cartoons, and they fish even though Sam finds it boring, and Dean puts up with Sam’s insistence that they watch documentaries on the real world. The world that exists outside of hunting and tragedy. He wants Dean to remember that when he’s gone.
It takes a month for him to get up the nerve, and he does it because Dean still shows up for breakfast with red-rimmed eyes more often than he doesn’t.
They weren’t supposed to have this life together.
It doesn’t mean they don’t love each other, Sam thinks. Or even that they don’t deserve it. It’s just the way the world was meant to work, the laws of the universe. Fighting against it has lost them everyone else they ever loved.
And Sam knows Dean. Knows him better, he thinks, than Dean might know himself. He knows that Dean can do this – can live a life that’s not quite apple pie, but not so far from it either.
The night he decides to talk to Dean is clear and warm. He finds him sitting on the Impala with a beer, staring up into the black of the sky like something is going to stare back. Nothing startles them, not anymore, but Dean doesn’t move as if he’s noticed him until Sam leans against the car beside him.
“Looking for something?”
“What would I be looking for?” Dean sounds genuine. Sam wonders, as he often does, if Dean is really so good at lying to himself that even he doesn’t know.
Sam shakes his head, barrels into his next question and pretends it isn’t connected to the first. “You miss him?”
“Ja–”
“You know who I’m talking about.”
Sam has been hesitant to bring this up for more than one reason. Even if he uses any sort of tact, there’s no knowing where Dean will draw the line. He feels too much and too big, Sam thinks, to risk feeling at all unless it’s life or death. It’s life or death now, and Sam hopes some part of his tone conveys it. Hopes some instinct in Dean has him see the conversation through but doesn’t tip him over the edge and into panic.
It’s a surprise to Sam when Dean lets out a soft breath and says, “Yeah I miss him. No offense, Sammy, but I think he was my best friend.”
“Then why haven’t you tried to–”
“You think I haven’t? There aren’t exactly a surplus of tools in the fuckin’ toolbox, Sam. We’ve used them up. Played all our cards.” Dean sounds angry, sounds hopeless.
“What if there was a way to–”
“There isn’t.”
“Okay but say there was. Say there was a way to bring Cas back,” Sam speaks soft, like he might startle Dean if he isn’t careful. Like at any moment the conversation will go from something just short of honest, to firm silence. “What would you give?”
Dean tears his eyes away from the sky, looks startled, looks… hopeful. “Anything. I’d give anything.”
Dean
Sam is gone.
---
Sam is gone.
But his body is right in front of him, laying peacefully in his fucking bed.
---
Sam is gone and Dean’s knee jerk reaction is a plea. He learned a long time ago that healing wasn’t a privilege the universe would grant him. For some people, time and healing are the same thing. For others, time is a wound festering. For Dean, it’s never done anything at all. He’s never healed, but he’s built a damn good wall.
He holds a piece of paper, plucked from Sam’s cold hand, and hairline cracks form.
And it can’t break or he will too.
It’s instinct. Muscle memory.
Please, Cas. I can’t– I need– don’t–
Real memory catches up.
---
Sam is gone.
Dean believes in choice until he has one. Then a hundred. Then an infinite number stretching beyond him to the horizon of this new and solitary life. Choice swells and swells around him, balloons into a vast mass in his chest that makes it hard – impossible – to breathe.
Agency is a boulder he’s been pushing up a hill and with nowhere to go – no incline, no climbing, no trail – he’s standing still and crushed under the weight of it. All that time spent wanting free will, wanting freedom, wanting to choose some sort of goddamn future, and now he’s got it but the cost is too much. It’s always too much.
Grief is secondary, but only in its persistence. Rings like tinnitus in his ears, has been there for so long that he’s almost forgotten how to notice it at all.
The first day, then the next, then the next, trickle by in a slow sticky haze. He drinks until he can sleep. Waits for a morning where the fucking list isn’t rotating in his head (momdadbobbycharliesamc–) but that morning doesn’t come and that boulder is getting heavier and he can’t even tell what it’s meant to be, actually. Boulder called brother, called son, called friend, called – he wouldn’t know what to call him, Dean thinks.
Maybe the boulder isn’t agency, maybe it’s the lack. Maybe the mountain is agency, maybe he’s made it to the top. Maybe the weight of expectation has him backsliding again and again, heels dug into the sluff and scree and still not getting any farther.
Sam is gone, and it doesn’t matter what his letter says.
There’s never been a choice and he won’t – he can’t – tolerate the idea that there might be one now. Live, Sam had written. I’ll see you at the end, he’d written. Don’t worry about me, he’d written.
This isn’t a deal this time, it’s a promise. Don’t break it.
Dean doesn’t know how to grieve, but hell if he’s forgotten how to climb.
Sam is gone and it doesn’t matter what his letter said, Dean is going to get him back like he always does.
Cas
Dean.
When Castiel wakes up, he does it at midnight, in a blooming canola field somewhere in Wisconsin. Like some cosmic joke, he spends hours staring at his feet, trying to put his head in some sort of order before he can even begin to realize that the world must not have ended, after all.
It’s hard to put back in order that which never was. This mind is his, but it’s not one that he’s had before. Not a vessel, but a body. Not a human body, but something just shy.
He’s had more minds than he can count (which is, in and of itself, a perplexing issue – math has never been required for something so simple as knowing before). Some of them, so quick that all the workings of the universe could be conjured for him at the snap of a finger. Some, so foggy and sweet as to be human. He’s been driven to madness, driven to megalomania. He’s been cold and hard and unfeeling as stone, and he’s softened, too.
Now he’s somewhere in the middle of it all. Feels the warm pulse of his grace right down to the tips of his toes, but doesn’t feel the separation between it and his physical body. Feels the warm beat of his heart in his chest, too, going and going and going of its own accord. He doesn’t have to tell it to. Doesn’t have to order his cells to multiply, doesn’t have to track the journey of blood through capillaries and make sure all the right neurons are firing.
Doesn’t think he can, even.
Doesn’t think much at all, except that he needs to move, and he can’t do it quickly. That’s fine. That’s good. The feeling of the earth beneath his feet, the thud of it reverberating up his spine, the slow steady dawn.
It’s the opposite of nothing.
Everywhere as far as he can see, a sea of yellow, the very opposite of dark.
Castiel wouldn’t mind wandering here forever, he thinks. Wonders, absently, if The Empty got bored and decided to come up with new tricks. It can’t, though. It’s not a thing that creates, not even a thing of creation. It’s always been, it will always be.
Not a single thing about where he is now is anything like where he was. Why then, he wonders, is there a chill working its way down his spine anyways?
He thought he had been close enough to human before The Empty took him, his grace dwindled down to nearly gone. The feeling is nothing compared to this – everything at once too great and too small. The world around him sprawling and endless, the body he’s in wrapping around him like a vice. He feels his heart beating – too fast, that’s too fast – but he can’t quite figure out why.
With that uncertainty, all the rest floods in too. Where now? What next? How is he meant to even begin to–
Please, Cas. I can’t– I need– don’t–
It cuts through everything else. He always cuts through everything else.
If Dean’s alive, that’s enough. That’s the direction. That’s the where and the what and the how.