Chapter 1: dean pulls cas from the empty
Chapter Text
“INT. MEN OF LETTERS — DUNGEON — DAY
Dean’s phone rings. But Dean doesn’t answer. He’s in the corner, back to the wall. His best friend dead — only bloody handprint on Dean’s clothes remains. Shattered, hopeless, ALONE. And off that desolate image, we —
BLACKOUT.”
— Robert Berens, in the production draft for “Supernatural” Episode #1518
“If I die, survive me with such a pure force / you make the pallor and the coldness rage; / flash your indelible eyes from south to south, / from sun to sun, till your mouth sings like a guitar.
I don’t want your laugh or your footsteps to waver; / I don’t want my legacy of happiness to die; / don’t call to my breast: I’m not there. / Live in my absence as in a house.
Absence is such a large house / that you’ll walk through the walls, / hang pictures in sheer air.
Absence is such a transparent house / that even being dead I will see you there, / and if you suffer, Love, I’ll die a second time.”
— Pablo Neruda, “Sonnet XCIV”
THE DAY
After weeks of researching, a cross-country trip in search of a “ankle bone of a ghastly prince,” and a few million prayers to Jack, Dean pulls Castiel out of the Empty.
By pulls, Dean actually half-guides, half-carries Cas out of the Empty. The angel cannot keep his eyes open nor his weight on his own two feet, so Dean makes the effort for both of them. Cas carried Dean’s weight for so many years — it’s the least he could do.
The first thing Dean sees beyond black is Sam coming straight for them. He can’t hear him -- Dean’s pretty sure there’s black goo sinking deep down his ear canals -- but he doesn’t care. All he can think is Cas Cas Cas .
With Cas’s arm wrapped around his neck, Dean holds him around the waist with one hand and presses just above Cas’s heart with the other. The first step out of the Empty is like the first step on ground after hours in a pool; the lack of a viscous force causes Dean to overstep, nearly bringing both of them to the floor.
Helpfully, too, the second that their feet hit the hardwood of the bunker, Cas’s knees buckle.
Cas Cas Cas!
“Help,” Dean gasps, and thank you to John and Mary Winchester for giving Sam the tall and gangly genes, because if he had taken a second longer, one extra step, Cas would’ve smacked his face right on the edge of the library table.
A few grunts and curse words go flying, but the two brothers manage to maneuver the angel so he sits propped up against one of the concrete poles next to the table. Once he’s settled, Sam sits back on his heels to give him some space, but Dean keeps a hand on Cas’s ribs to steady him. Plus, letting go of Cas might as well be like losing him all over again. His body heat is a lifeline; each shallow breath keeps both of them alive.
With his free one, Dean swipes his thumb over Cas’s upper lip, getting as much of the black sludge off of his mouth and nose as he can with the tremors shaking down his entire arm. Underneath the goo, Cas looks paler than he ever has.
Dean moves his hand to Cas’s shoulder and gently jostles him. “Cas? Can you hear me?”
Sam is saying something that sounds like his name, but Dean won’t let his eyes drift. His brother is fine, but Cas…
“Come on, buddy,” Dean mutters, shaking the angel once again. Nothing, not even a lip twitch.
So help me, Jack, Dean thinks, if we did all of that and he doesn’t make it, I will come up there myself.
After all of this, after everything they did to bring Cas back, to save the goddamn world, they still can’t catch a break. And if Cas doesn’t make it?
Dean shakes his head gruffly to get rid of the thought. He focuses on the shallow movements of Cas’s ribs, a slow inhale, a shaky exhale.
Sam’s voice comes a little clearer now. “Dean… is he-”
“I don’t know,” Dean snaps. Gently, he cradles Cas’s jaw in his hand, pats it lightly. “Cas, come on. Wake up.”
Dean can’t breathe. He doesn’t even think to, and if he did, he wouldn’t remember how. After all that they went through to find a way through the Empty, after so many months grieving him, months of his final confession echoing in Dean’s dreams, after everything, he never stopped to consider a world where he pulled Cas from the Empty, but Cas wouldn’t make it anyway.
Cas Cas Cas-
When Cas died in North Cove, stabbed in the back by the devil himself, Dean had carried his stiff body inside and laid him on the kitchen table. He drew a sheet over him and tied him up with curtains from the dining room windows. They burned his body on a pyre alongside Kelly Kline, hunter style. Alone, once the fire had lost its flame, Dean gathered up some of the black ashes, and alone, he drove and drove and drove, and eventually came upon a meadow with a small creek running through it.
There was a windmill. Cas would have loved the windmill. He would have stared at it in awe, captured by the beauty he saw in it. To Dean, it was just a shitty windmill, falling apart and abandoned, in a random field in the middle of Kansas. He could never see the beauty in the ordinary like Cas could.
He spread Cas’s ashes there anyway. He had hoped Cas would’ve liked his choice.
“Cas, please.”
He can’t do it again. He can’t watch Cas die again. He can’t say goodbye to him again .
What a story it would make, a tragic end to cap off Dean’s miserable life: the Winchester brothers saved the world, but they couldn’t save the one person who mattered most.
Seconds pass, or maybe hours. Then, at last, at last, Cas lets out a deep groan.
Dean inhales, lungs burning. “Oh, thank fuck.”
Slowly, Cas’s eyes flutter open, unfocused and distant, but otherwise he doesn’t move a hair. He keeps leaning into Dean’s touch, like he can’t support his own weight even while sitting. Dean chooses to ignore that worry because Cas Cas Cas, he’s back. He’s home.
Next to him, Sam wipes a hand down his face and lets his shoulders sink.
Finally, it’s over. It’s all over.
Six months ago, Jack reset Chuck’s snap as he said he would, but he refused to interfere more than that. He wouldn’t bring Cas back. He wouldn’t pull him from the Empty because Chuck hadn’t snapped him out of existence. Cas had died, and by his own volition. It was absolute bullshit reasoning.
For weeks, Dean spent night after night screaming at Jack to bring Cas back, about what new level of BS he was on to not “count” Cas as disappearing by Chuck’s hand. But Jack wasn’t listening, and, after all, he was to be fully hands-off, even if it meant his surrogate father would rot in the Empty. Years ago, Jack had gotten Cas out of the Empty by just wishing it was true. Now, he refused. Now, Dean supposed, he didn’t care. It was fucking bullshit.
One of those nights, Sam tried to toe the line and explain why Jack wouldn’t bring Cas back. Dean nearly decked him.
(Somewhere, buried underneath an alcoholic haze and incredible fury, he knew Sam had a point. Logical reasoning told Dean that the Empty was as old as the original God, and Jack physically couldn’t invade the Empty to pull Cas out. Dean, however, was never really one to choose logic over his anger and guilt. Plus, Jack refused to even try. If the kid hadn’t meant everything to Cas, Dean would’ve revoked Jack’s Winchester privileges.)
So Dean did it himself. After months of research, driving cross-country, making dubious deals in university parking lots, and a couple of screaming matches with Sam, Dean went into the void, found the most infuriating angel ever, and yanked him out.
All of that because Cas made a stupid deal and didn’t tell anyone about it.
Cas, the idiotic, self-sacrificing son of a bitch who doesn’t understand even a bit of pop culture. The angel who pulled Dean out of hell, and from then on, never stopped trying to save Dean’s ass. The winged dickhead who never lost his sense of righteousness, but rather shifted his loyalty and his moral compass.
Cas, who made a deal to save their son, acted on it to save Dean, and gave a deathbed confession of love to the man he “gripped tight and raised from perdition,” now sits right in front of him, alive.
Anger floods through his veins before he can stop it, and Dean slams the heel of his palm against the soft spot between Cas’s shoulder and pec.
“Why the hell didn’t you tell me about your deal?!” Dean’s voice booms, even louder than he meant to.
Between ragged breaths, Cas finally makes eye contact with Dean. His eyes are piercing, stark in contrast against the sludge lining his cheeks and dripping from his hair. Something deep in Dean’s chest aches at the stare — a shade of blue once gone for so long, and now a gaze so familiar. He drowns in it.
A small smile forms at the edges of the angel’s lips, like Cas knows something he doesn’t. “Hello, Dean.”
Then his eyes roll back, and Dean barely manages to catch him as he passes out.
---
MONTHS BEFORE
It felt like he was underwater, drowning.
The dungeon, minutes ago loud with Billie’s pounding at the door and heartbeat thumping loudly and Cas, was still. Even if it wasn’t, there was a rushing in Dean’s ears that wouldn’t stop, and his chest felt tight and thick. He tried to breathe, but it was as if the air in the room disappeared with-
Dean’s stomach heaved. He put his trembling hands to his face.
Beside him, his phone buzzed incessantly, Sam calling yet again. He should pick up. He needs to pick up. He wouldn’t be able to force out words. He couldn’t even breathe right.
Just minutes ago, he was here, standing in front of him, saying things he shouldn’t have, things Dean could never believe, not before now. He cut open his own hand, painted a sigil on the door, and saved Dean yet again. He told him about a deal that he made to save Jack’s life, and then he saved his, too. All Dean could do was stare at him in awe.
Why does this sound like a goodbye?
Cas summoned the Empty.
Because it is.
Cas is gone.
I-
---
After he brought back the world to the way it was before Chuck snapped everyone out of existence, Jack disappeared in front of their eyes in the middle of a bustling street, filled with people he brought back from nothingness.
(“It’s bullshit is what it is.”
“He said he wanted to be hands-off-“
“After everything we did for him?” Dean snaps. “We raised him! We brought him back from Apocalypse World. Hell, we even let him hang around after he killed Mom. And this is how he repays us?”)
Chuck had left them in an empty world for weeks, maybe months. Time moved differently when no one was around to keep track of it.
But now, there were people everywhere, filling the gaps they had left as if nothing had changed. For a moment, staring was all Dean and Sam could do as people walked on, back to their regular lives like they weren’t zapped away to begin with, like they actually did exist just seconds ago.
They stood and watched for ages, or maybe mere minutes. Dean’s not sure they would have ever moved if Sam’s phone hadn’t rang.
It took him a minute, but eventually Sam snapped out of his reverie enough to tug the phone from his pocket. He stared at his phone for a long minute, the name flashing on the screen just far enough away that Dean couldn’t read it. With shaky hands, Sam hit accept, then put it to his ear.
“Eileen?”
(Now, Sam drops the duffel bag full of weapons on the map table, then sighs. “He brought back the whole world. That’s not insignificant.”
“Not the whole world.”)
Dean spent days obsessively checking his phone for any message or missed call, sitting in the map room of the bunker, staring at the front door. In the mornings, when he first woke up, there was still a sense of hope, a flame in his chest, that Cas would contact them or walk through the creaky door, that his phone would ring like Sam’s had back in Hastings.
Sometimes, Dean envisioned him walking through with a small smile, dumb trenchcoat blowing back like a tan cape. “Hello, Dean,” he’d say with a huff from the top of the stairs.
Other times, Dean could almost see him stumbling in, bruised and bleeding and battered, and Dean would catch him and help him down the stairs. He’d sit Cas at the kitchen table and stitch up his cuts, and Cas would let him, even if his grace would kick in mere hours later. They’d top it off with two glasses of whiskey back in the library armchairs.
Every once in a while, as Dean was dragged into sleep in the map room chair, he could nearly feel Cas’s hand on his shoulder, gently shaking him awake. “Dean,” he’d whisper. “You should not sleep here.”
In every case, Dean would grab him and pull him in, hold him close, and he would mutter words he couldn’t bear to hold back any longer.
But the days passed, and the hope wore thin. When he woke up on day five with no missed calls and no Cas, he started drinking within the hour and didn’t stop until Sam found him passed out on the floor of the library.
“He’s not coming back,” Dean croaked, still half-asleep and full-drunk and eyes on fire. “He’s not coming back, Sammy.”
And he never did.
Now, it had been months.
Ever since the world came back, there hadn’t been many monster sightings at all. In three months, the brothers had only gone on three hunts, one of which turned out to be an actual animal attack by a feral dog and the other a simple salt-and-burn. Otherwise, the news was quiet, and the cases didn’t come.
For Sam, it was a relief. After decades - hell, their entire lives — they could finally take weeks in between cases and start building a home. Now, they spent more time in the bunker than they did bouncing around motels.
For Dean, more time in the bunker meant less time taking his anger out on murderous creatures and more time alone, bored, and with unlimited access to alcohol. The lack of hunting meant more time with his own head and more effort spent to avoid whatever conclusions it came to without his consent.
After trudging through their third hunt since Jack became God -- another false alarm this time, just outside Oklahoma City with a pack of coyotes murdering cows -- Dean’s reaching his wit’s end. They hadn’t had a single real hunt since they depowered God, since Cas-
And then, after every fake call, they would return home to this hole in the ground, the place where Cas carried Dean as his heart failed, the place where Cas met his fate. Every corner reminded Dean of something Cas had done, or liked, or said. He hasn’t even brought himself to walk down the hallway that leads to the dungeon. Cas’s blood is still on the back of the door, and on the floor, and imprinted on his shoulder.
Dean’s stomach twists. He needs to fucking kill something.
In the meantime, unfortunately, Sam keeps talking.
“I know it’s hard, Dean,” Sam says from across the map table. “I miss him, too. But Cas didn’t disappear like everyone else did. Cas died because of Billie and the Empty, not because of Chuck. He would be breaking his hands-off rule.”
Dean whirls around, slack-jawed, staring at his little brother. “Are you kidding me? Everything was because of Chuck! Everything!”
“Dean-“
“No, Sam!” Dean growls, and he holds up a hand. “Cas was his father in every way that mattered, and Jack didn’t even care enough to bring him back.”
“He didn’t bring back Mom either. It’s not like he’s picking and choosing who lives and who dies. He just undid Chuck’s decision to evaporate the universe. He didn’t bring back anybody who died outside of that.”
Dean needs to kill something before he strangles the shit out of his little brother. “Sam, this devil’s advocate thing ain’t workin’ for me.”
“I’m just saying-”
“No! You got Eileen back, but Cas is still d-“ Dean chokes on the word. “Cas is gone, and Jack not bringing him back? It makes him no different from Chuck. Choosing not to bring him back is still a choice.”
Sam scoffs and shakes his head. “You do realize what you’re doing? You never liked Jack. You condemned him from the minute he was born, and you could never, ever forgive him for anything. Everything he ever did was wrong. Now, he’s doing exactly what we wanted, being hands-off, not controlling some story about us and bending us to his will, and you hate him.”
“Fuck you. It’s not that fucking simple.”
“What, because Jack won’t meddle to bring Cas back?”
It takes every ounce of willpower for Dean not to jump at Sam and tear him a brand fucking new one. His jaw is tight, and he’s pretty sure his shoulders are shaking. Instead, he turns on his heel and makes to go back to his own room.
“Dean, come on. I’m sad about Cas, too, but you can’t expect Jack to make an exception-”
Spinning back around, his feet keep moving, but now toward his brother. “No. You know what? Kudos to you, Sammy. You got Eileen back, and the whole goddamn world back, and bing-bang-boom, it’s all good. Sucks about Cas, though. Really does. Not like he was our best friend or our fucking family or anything. But oh well, out of our hands. It’s in God’s hands now. God, the kid we raised Lilo-and-Stitch -style.”
Dean starts toward his room again, back facing Sam, but stops just short in the doorway. Without even glancing backward, he states, “And just so we’re clear -- I would expect one exception for his own father.”
---
Dean doesn’t leave his room for hours, or maybe days. It’s hard to tell without clocks in his room.
Unbeknownst to Sam -- or maybe beknownst, but he hasn’t done anything to stop it -- Dean has a small stockpile of alcohol under his bed. Admittedly, he’s leaned into the alcoholic life of hunting, but what else is there to fucking do? So he drinks, and he watches movies he hasn’t seen since his childhood, and he sleeps, and he drinks to fall asleep, and he tries desperately not to think for a little while.
Tomorrow , he thinks often. Tomorrow, I’ll pull my shit together.
He’s not sure when tomorrow is, though. He doesn’t have any clocks.
Eventually he wakes up hungry next to a half-empty bottle of scotch and with a mouth drier than the Arizona desert, and the TV’s playing reruns anyway, so he gets up. He chugs a glass of water from the sink in his bedroom, brushes his teeth, and puts on semi-clean clothes, and then he wanders out into the stale light of the bunker.
In the kitchen, Dean finds a premade burrito in the fridge with a sticky note that reads “Heat this up” in Sam’s neat scrawl, so he does, and eats it in a few ridiculously large bites between sips of a cold beer. He’s pretty sure Sam hid at least three vegetables in it, but it tastes enough like a bacon, egg, and cheese burrito that he can’t bring himself to care.
Where is Sam, anyway?
As much as his little brother pisses him off, Dean knows Sam has been bearing the brunt of his angry tirades. Sam didn’t do anything wrong, except for maybe being a fucking smartass. But Sam is all he has, and Dean’s trying to stop his anger before it leaves his mouth, he really is, but Sam is also his younger brother, which inherently makes him a thousand times more infuriating, especially when he’s right.
Dean finds the sasquatch in the library, sitting at the table hunched over his laptop. Sam doesn’t see him yet, too focused on something on the screen.
For the first time in a long time, longer than he could remember, he was alone with his brother. No Cas, no Jack, no Mom away on a hunt or following a lead and coming home soon. Jack brought back the world, but he and Sam were the only ones left in their little corner of it.
Dean and Sam, Sam and Dean. Brothers by birth, but Dean is 41 years old, and Sam is edging closer and closer to the end of his fourth decade, and by now it’s a choice to stay together. Dean’s not entirely sure what he would do without his little brother. Brief stints without him, like his own time in Purgatory and Sam’s year in hell, proved hard enough.
It’s unhealthy, Dean knows, to need his brother like he needs his limbs, to treat each other like extensions of themselves. But no matter who came and lived in their lives -- Cas, Kevin, Jack, Mom, and friends of all kinds -- no one survived. It left them only with each other.
As he takes another sip of his beer, Dean watches as Sam’s phone buzzes, and his brother picks it up, reads a message, and smiles softly. It must’ve been from Eileen; he only ever smiles like that for her.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knows there will come a day that Sam leaves the bunker. He knew it the second that Eileen came back, along with the rest of the world. Little Sammy, nearing 38 and towering over Dean as he has since he was sixteen, will grow up, and he’ll get married, and he’ll get a job and a house and a white picket fence with some dogs and maybe a baby or two. And he deserves every bit of it, no matter how much Dean’s chest aches at the thought of him leaving. Sam deserves a life beyond the one of hunting and killing, and plus, there aren’t nearly as many monsters as there used to be. The world will be fine without Sam Winchester hunting.
Dean’s still figuring out how he will be.
“Dean?”
His head snaps up at the sound of his name to find Sam staring at him, then at the beer in his hand. Dean doesn’t try to hide it, instead pushing the bottle back to his lips and ignoring Sam’s muffled sigh. He’s earned the right to beers whenever he wants, and it’s not like he didn’t drink all the time in the past anyway.
Sam gestures over to the seat across from him. “Come talk to me for a sec?”
Pushing himself off the doorway, Dean replies, “What’s there to talk about?” but he wanders over anyway.
At some point after Lucifer’s possession, Sam picked up a nervous tic in the form of pressing his thumb into his opposite palm, rubbing over a scar that has long since faded. It started as a reminder of what was real and what wasn’t, but since Chuck wiped the world, it’s picked up even more.
Dean can’t blame him. After all, it is still hard to believe that this life is real, that they are no longer puppets, and even harder to believe that they were characters in Chuck’s story, that their lives once weren’t real at all, that there was no free will to begin with.
As Dean sits down at the library table, Sam gestures at the beer in his hand. “You know it’s ten in the morning, right?”
Actually, he didn’t. Time didn’t seem to matter when he had nothing to do with it anyway, and he still hasn’t looked at a clock. But Dean just shrugs and says, “This is my brunch beer.”
His little brother makes a face, obviously biting back a lecture about alcohol and his liver and cirrhosis and whatever else, but Dean appreciates the effort. It wouldn’t do shit to change his mind anyway.
Instead, Sam pushes his laptop to the side and leans forward. “I wanted to say I’m sorry,” he says, “for trying to justify Jack’s decision earlier. It- I understand why he’s making it, but I miss Cas too. It’s not fair at all. I’m trying to respect his decision to be hands-off, but… you’d think, after everything, that he would bring Cas back.”
Dean picks at the corner of the label on his beer bottle. “Yeah, you’d think.”
Sam-squatch flicks the hair out of his eyes, then says, “I don’t know if you’ve considered it, but I’ve been praying to Jack.”
It doesn’t come as a surprise: Dean has, and he won’t. For the first few weeks after Jack became God, he begged and pleaded through prayer to please, please, you brought back the world, bring back Cas too, come on, Jack, please, until he finally admitted Jack, like Chuck, wasn’t listening. Either that, or he didn’t care. He wasn’t sure which was worse.
“Fuck-ton of good that’s done you,” Dean snaps before he can push the words back into his mouth. “Yet again, God’s not fucking listening. Doesn’t fucking matter that we raised the kid or anything.”
Ever patient Sam, he doesn’t rise to the bait, but instead leans back in his chair and rubs his palm some more. Ever hot-headed Dean, he feels like shit for snapping again. But that’s who he is: hot-headed, short-fused, quick-tempered, angry. Cas got that part wrong.
You think that hate and anger, that’s what drives you. That’s who you are. It’s not.
Dean shakes the memory away.
“Well,” Sam continues anyway, “we lost him, too. I just… I want him to know that I’m still thinking of him, and that we love him, and that he always has a home here if he wants to stop by. And I… I do ask him to help us get Cas back. I just need him to know that even though he’s God, he’s not alone, you know? Just like we’re not alone. He’s still watching out for us, even if he’s not responding.”
Dean nods only once. “We lost him, too.” He’d been so caught up in Cas that he hadn’t thought about losing Jack, especially when the kid was still alive but unreachable.
“Yeah,” Sam murmurs. Then, he leans forward in his seat, forcing Dean’s eyes to meet his matching ones. “I need you to start talking to me, Dean. We can’t go back into this cycle of you shutting yourself off and drinking until you either get destroyed on a hunt or fall off the face of the earth. We lost Jack and Cas and Mom, our whole family. I need you to be here. I can’t lose anyone else. I won’t.”
Ever since Sam was little, a tiny toddler wobbling around on unsteady legs, he could pull of this face with big puppy-dog eyes that would have even the coldest of stone cold people bending to his will. Eventually, it made him brilliant with teachers at each new school, and it helped witnesses open up to the brothers about whatever they had seen, but first, the eyes forced Dean to give Sam the last bowl of Frosted Flakes and to stay home on Friday nights as teenagers to watch stupid movies and to sneak his kid brother into places he shouldn’t have been.
Worst of all, that stupid, pathetic face often manipulated Dean into talking if Sam kept at it long enough. Privilege of the youngest brother: manipulation techniques and the patience to wait until it works in his favor.
“The truth?” Dean whispers. The label falls from the beer bottle, pulled all the way off. “I don’t know what to do, Sammy.”
Sam doesn’t say a word. He just looks at his brother with those big sad eyes, and he waits, and the motherfucker ends up being right because the words start tumbling out of Dean’s mouth like the first rush of water after a dam breaks: “I feel like I’m losing my mind. We got nothing to do. There’s no fucking monsters anymore, and I should be grateful we don’t gotta risk our lives every other day to save people, but instead we spend every fucking day in this damn bunker and it doesn’t even feel like home anymore without Jack and Cas and Mom, and I can’t even walk down the east hallway anymore because that’s where the dungeon-”
His breath catches. Darkness creeps up Cas’s trenchcoat. Tears well in the angel’s blue eyes for the very first time. You are the most caring man on earth.
Why does this sound like a goodbye?
“Sometimes I don’t remember he’s gone,” Dean says quietly. He’s not even looking at Sam, but he can feel the puppy dog eyes boring into him, and he closes his own eyes. “I’ll wake up in the morning and think, ‘Cas should be back soon’ from wherever he is, or I’ll be grabbin’ a beer and open two, or my phone will ring and I’ll think it’s him. And then I’ll remember. And it’s like it’s the first time all over again, like I’m watching him go again and again, and I can’t stop it. I can’t even say anything.
“I don’t know why, Sammy,” he whispers, swallowing back the lump in his throat, “but this doesn’t seem like one I can get over.”
Part of him screams that he’s lying: he does know why. It’s Cas. It’s Cas! How is he supposed to get over Cas being gone after what he did and what he said?
You are the most caring man-
Dean slams the beer bottle on the table. “And, God, I just wanna go out and kill something, but there’s less monsters now than there were even before Lucifer got sprung. I’m just… I’m going out of my mind, man.”
A long time ago, more time in the bunker meant more time with Cas and Jack, more movie nights, more cooking. When he couldn’t sleep at night, Dean would wander out into the library and inevitably find Cas flicking through an old tome or listening softly to one of Dean’s cassettes on an old boombox Dean grabbed him at a passing garage sale.
“Hello, Dean,” Cas would say every time. “Can’t sleep?”
Dean needed something, anything. He needed to do something or he was going to go out of his fucking mind.
Clearing his throat, Sam drags his computer back to its place in front of him. “Well, I’ve been looking for cases, but nothing’s sticking out, except for maybe something up in the 100-Mile Wilderness up in Maine-”
Suddenly, Sam stops, mouth agape. His eyes dart back and forth, scanning across something on the screen, and then stopping to rest at some spot on the table. Dean waves one hand over the table.
“Sam? Hello?”
“Wasn’t the 100-Mile Wilderness where the portal in Purgatory let out?”
“Uhh, yeah, I think so,” Dean replies with a shake of his head. “What does that have to do with anything?”
His brother doesn’t reply. Instead, his gaze stays fixed on the empty table, and Dean can practically hear the cogs turning inside his head. Finally, after ages, Sam jumps out of his seat. “Alright, I have an idea.”
“An idea for what?”
“I’m not saying it’ll work,” Sam babbles, pacing back and forth beside his now-former seat. “It’s just an idea, and we’ll have to see if the same sigil will work, but it’s the same idea. It’s where angels and demons go, and Purgatory’s where monsters go, so the processes should be similar at least. I wonder if that book on leviathan would mention- well, maybe not. I wonder where- Do we have any angel blood still? Not that it matters yet, but…”
“Sam!”
“Yeah, alright.” Sam shakes his head, hair falling in his face, then stills. “I have an idea, and I’m not sure it’ll work, but there’s no harm in trying. You just need to promise me that you won’t get your hopes too high.”
Dean looks up at his baby brother. “What are you talkin’ about?”
“I’m saying ,” Sam says with soft urgency, “that if Jack won’t spring him… we go get him back ourselves.”
The brothers Winchester stare at each other for a moment, and then, the meaning of his words hits Dean full-force.
It’s possible that the way to open Purgatory could also open the Empty.
Something settles in Dean’s chest like a resolution, and he’s on his feet in an instant.
“How?”
Chapter 2: dean can't let cas go
Summary:
“This is Cas,” Dean tells Miracle. “He’s been gone awhile, but he was here before you, so I expect you to be nice, okay?”
Miracle stares up at him. It’s official, Dean thinks. He's talking to a dog. He’s officially lost his fucking mind.
Notes:
This chapter is currently unedited, and all mistakes are my own.
Chapter content warnings: excessive alcohol use and abuse, poor coping mechanisms, brief driving under the influence of alcohol, brief beginnings of panic attacks
Chapter Text
“You realize that grief is perhaps the last and final translation of love. And I think, you know, this is the last act of loving someone. And you realize that it will never end. You get to do this, to translate this last act of love for the rest of your life.”
— Ocean Vuong, on the loss of his mother in an interview for NPR
“It is also then that I wish I believed in some sort of life after life, that in another universe, […] maybe he is that new puppy I see tugging at the end of my other neighbor's leash; maybe he is that toddler I saw running through the square a few months ago, shrieking with joy, his parents huffing after him; maybe he is that flower that suddenly bloomed on the rhododendron bush I thought had died long ago; maybe he is that cloud, that wave, that rain, that mist. It isn't only that he died, or how he died; it is what he died believing. And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.”
—A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara
THE DAY (AND THOSE THAT FOLLOW)
Cas goes comatose for four days straight.
After he fainted, Dean and Sam hauled him down the hall to the infirmary to let him sleep on a cot and hook him up to vitals.
(“We should move him to the infirmary,” Sam says, voice moving as quickly as his body does to grab onto Cas’s free arm.
“I got him.”
“Dean-“
“I got him,” Dean growls. “He’s not leaving my sight.”
Sam sighs, folds his lips together. “At least let me help you carry him.”)
After they get him flat, Eileen, paramedic-in-training, checks Cas’s vitals, taking his blood pressure and unbuttoning his white shirt just enough to press her stethoscope to his chest. She checks his breathing, looks in his mouth, shines a light in his unseeing eyes. Dean watches every move like a hawk, keeping a few light fingers on Cas’s forearm the whole time.
Finally, after an eternity, Eileen turns to the brothers and nods. “Everything seems okay. We’ll just have to wait until he wakes up.”
So, they wait.
In the meantime, Dean claims the padded wheelie chair from the desk in the corner, rolls it to the right of Cas’s cot in the infirmary, and doesn’t move from it. For the first few hours, he just sits and watches him, like the second he takes his eyes off of Cas he’ll disappear, retaken by black emptiness. Sam and Eileen each come in for a few brief minutes, each saying something to Dean that he doesn’t comprehend (or even try to listen to).
After Sam leaves for the third (fourth? fifth?) time, Eileen ends up coming in again with a first aid kit and a stethoscope, both courtesy of her paramedic classes she started taking over in Kansas City. Without drifting his eyes, he lets Eileen move him around, press the stethoscope to Dean’s back and chest, and clean up his face with wet wipes and rubbing alcohol, and he only responds once by pulling away from her grip when she tries to shine her penlight in his eyes. He barely lets himself blink; there’s no way she’s shining something in his eyes when Cas could fade away any second.
He guesses she checks off everything to see that he’s fine, because she ends up leaving, and neither she nor Sam come back that day. At some point, he passes out, feet propped up on the end of Cas’s cot and head lolled back onto the top edge of the wheelie chair.
On the second day, after a long morning of watching, Dean manages to turn his back on the sleeping former angel long enough to scrounge up a large bowl of water and a washcloth from the rack across the room. Back in his seat at Cas’s side, he takes the washcloth and gently scrubs away the black goo from Cas’s face, ears, fingernails, hair, and everywhere else he can get while Cas is still clothed in his ratty, old trenchcoat. Even if he could get it off, Dean isn’t sure it would survive a cycle in the washing machine, much less cleanse it of the blackness, blood, and whatever else stained it.
What does Cas even look like without the trenchcoat? Dean lets the idea float in and then away, refuses to linger on it until Cas is awake, alive, here. Until then, it’s just waiting and watching and Cas Cas Cas!
He’s probably got insane muscles though.
Dean has to shake his head to get rid of that imagery.
Eventually, he leans back to look at his handiwork. It’s not perfect, with goo still sticking to the roots of Cas’s hair and random patches where Dean rubbed the skin pink, but it’s better. He starts to look more and more like Cas, just pale and asleep and unresponsive.
The only time Dean responds to anyone all day is when Sam comes in, says some shit he doesn’t hear, and then randomly reaches for Cas. Dean jumps out of his seat in a millisecond, before he can even consciously think about it.
Sam holds his hands up, caught. “Dean, we have to adjust the way he’s laying. He’ll get bedsores if we don’t.”
Gently as all hell, they move him onto his side, and Sam comes back every two or three hours to repeat the process to a new position every time. Dean hadn’t considered the very human things that come with Cas being a human in a coma. They’re just lucky Cas’s kidneys haven’t seemed to kick in quite yet.
After turning him the second time, Dean returns to his post, but Sam just stands there shifting back and forth on both feet. Dean doesn’t say anything, or even acknowledge him; if he’s got something to say, he’ll say it.
It only takes half a minute or so: “Dean, I know you don’t wanna leave him,” he states from the doorway, nose wrinkled, “but you reek, man. And you’ve still got Empty goo in your hair.”
Like every other time Sam comes in here asking him to shower, or eat, or get some sleep in his own bed, Dean ignores him.
“You really want Cas to wake up and the first thing he says be ‘Wow, Dean, you desperately need a shower?’”
The eldest brother doesn’t rise to the bait. He just stares at Cas, and thankfully, Sam gets the message and leaves once again.
Sometime later, Eileen wanders in with a new plate of food for Dean and with a few minutes to spare to hold Cas’s other hand. Neither one says anything. They don’t need to. After she leaves, he manages to pull out his phone and shoot Claire a quick text: he’s back. But Claire hasn’t responded to any calls or texts from him or from Sam since that night, and it’s unlikely she will to this one, too.
He must pass out again for a few hours because the next thing he knows, Sam is shaking him awake to help him move Cas again. His body aches from the Empty and from sleeping in the chair, but they manage to shift Cas without too much jostling. Afterwards, unlike the time before, they both stand beside the bed, staring at the comatose former angel.
“Why hasn’t he woken up yet?” Dean eventually whispers.
“Oh, so you’re talking to me now?” Sam snaps. Then, he sighs and drags his palm down his face, an act Dean knows he uses to calm himself down. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have snapped.”
Dean doesn’t reply. They’ve forgiven each other for worse.
“My best guess?” Sam says. “His body is probably relearning how to function on its own. It would take a massive amount of energy to get out of sleep mode.”
“You think he should have an IV or somethin’?”
Sam shrugs. “I think we should wait to see if- see when he wakes up. Hopefully he’ll wake up tomorrow or the next day, and he can eat whatever he wants.”
It’s good enough for Dean.
They continue on like that into day three. Eileen pops in with food and water every once in a while, and Sam comes back at one point for another Cas-shift with Dean’s headphones and tape player. It’s a sweet gesture, but Dean never puts them on. He prefers the soft sounds of Cas’s breathing, the reassurance that he is, in fact, alive, even if he isn’t awake.
At some point, Miracle trods into the room to join Dean in his pity party, probably at Sam’s gentle urging. Bumping Dean’s free hand with his nose, Miracle rests his chin on Dean’s knee, and Dean gives in, scratches behind his ears lightly.
“This is Cas,” Dean tells Miracle. “He’s been gone awhile, but he was here before you, so I expect you to be nice, okay?”
Miracle stares up at him. It’s official, Dean thinks. He's talking to a dog. He’s officially lost his fucking mind.
But eventually Miracle leaves, too, off in search of a toy or maybe Sam to take him on a jog or to give Eileen the big-sad eyes until she gives him something he isn’t supposed to be eating.
Alone, again, Dean nods off, until there’s a small groan. Slowly, his eyes crack open.
“Dean.”
Dean’s never moved so fast in his life.
“Cas, hey,” he whispers, leaning forward to grab Cas’s bicep and rest his other hand on his cheek. “Hey, buddy. You with me?”
Cas doesn’t respond or even acknowledge that he heard him, but he presses his cheek a little more firmly into Dean’s hand, and it is answer enough. “Dean,” he sighs, voice cracking.
“I’m right here,” Dean says, and then again, “I’m right here.”
At Cas’s voice, it feels like an elephant has been lifted off of Dean’s chest that he didn’t even know was sitting there. He’s alive. He’s alive and he’s awake and he’s here. He’s back.
Dean’s eyes start to prickle, but he swallows away the lump in his throat. Instead, he just moves his hand from Cas’s cheek up to the hair above his ear, brushing it lightly back and forth. With eyes still shut, Cas lets his head fall a little more into the movement of his fingers and sighs.
“How are you feelin’?” Dean whispers. There’s no reason to; there’s a 90-percent chance Cas still has Empty grossness clogging up his ears and he can’t hear Dean anyway, but Cas is in a hospital bed and barely out of sleep, and the whispering feels right.
As if just realizing what pain he might be in, Cas grimaces. “Like I got hit by a bus. Or a high-speed train.”
Despite everything, Dean huffs out a laugh. “Yeah, Sam said you might feel like that. The Empty had its claws in you pretty good.”
“The Empty,” Cas murmurs, and finally, he opens his eyes. Although bloodshot and cloudy from sleep, the blue still pierces Dean’s own gaze. He looks up at Dean, then down at his own body, and then back to Dean again. “You aren’t an illusion, right?”
“I’m not. I promise: this is real.”
Cas breathes heavily and closes his eyes. “I don’t think I would be feeling anything physically if it was anyway.” Dean squeezes Cas’s bicep at that, and the former angel smiles with tight lips. “I felt that, Dean.”
Dean smiles back. “Just offerin’ proof.”
Proof to Cas, and to himself: Cas is here. He’s right here. He’s alive, and he’s right here, and there’s no more deals. Cas isn’t going anywhere unless he has some other deathbed confessions he’d like to make, but Dean’s ready for it. No more deals are coming to fruition without taking Dean, too.
No more last-second admissions of love.
“Do you remember what happened?” Dean asks hesitantly, like he doesn’t want the answer. To be honest, he really isn’t sure what answer he wants. What if he doesn’t remember? What if he doesn’t remember what he told Dean before he died?
Cas takes a few structured breaths, to the point where Dean thinks maybe he fell asleep again, but then he says, “I invoked my deal with the Empty to kill Billie.”
It sounds so simple when he says it like that, like he didn’t give the biggest confession of his entire, thousands-of-years-old life and left Dean with immeasurable amounts of grief and sorrow. I made a deal to save him.
The price was my life.
Even with Cas nearly dead in the bed in front of him, Dean can’t stop the rage that fills his chest. It flows out to his fingers, burning through his veins like hot sparks, and threatens to part his lips, to move his vocal chords, to relay verbal attacks he’ll regret later but mean in the moment.
All he can think is: How could you, Cas? How could you?
Why did you keep all of this from me?
“You’re a fucking asshole, you know that?” Dean bites, still in his whisper-tone, but he can’t stop the words, he can’t close his jaw, he can’t control his own body or his anger. “You made a deal, and you didn’t tell us-”
But before he can finish his tirade, Cas sits up with a start, eyes open and wild, and the force throws Dean’s hands back into his own lap. “Jesus, Cas-”
“Where’s Jack?” Cas asks.
Oh. Shit. Dean hadn’t thought of what to tell him about Jack.
“Where’s Jack?!” Cas asks again, slightly louder and higher-pitched. “Jack!”
His chest is heaving now, and his eyes are getting wetter, but before Cas descends into a panic attack, Dean quickly intervenes with “He’s alive. It’s okay, he’s alive. Lie back down, okay? You’re gonna give yourself a heart attack, and we just went to all that effort to get you back.” Dean reaches out, pushing lightly on Cas’s chest, and the former angel leans back just slightly enough to rest his back on his pillows, but he’s wide awake now.
“And- and Chuck… what happened?”
“You need to rest, Cas. It’s too long of a story to tell you right now. I promise, the second you get better-”
“ Dean, ” Cas rasps.
Dean can’t remember the first time Cas said his name in that gravelly, low tone, the one of exasperation and desperation both. He always said it like a plea, like his name in and of itself was a prayer, and it stops Dean cold.
Cas’s bottom lip trembles. “Jack isn’t coming home, is he?”
---
MONTHS BEFORE
As had been the usual lately, Dean was beyond drunk and well into belligerent.
This time, however, it started with Claire.
Hours before, to save himself from yet another little-brother-lecture about “having depression” and “needing to find things to look forward to,” Dean had dragged his perpetually hungover ass through a shower, shave, and haircut. His hair was getting long enough that Sam would smirk at him, biting back words, but Dean knew his brother was getting a kick out of his bangs falling into his eyes. It was time to cut it, if nothing else.
Looking at himself in the mirror post-shave and haircut, Dean barely recognized the slope of his own chin, the bags under his eyes, the new wrinkles appearing on his forehead. Saving the world took a lot out of him, and so did losing the people he loved in the process. He inhaled deeply, exhaled slowly.
He brushed his teeth, too, and stole a sip of Sam’s mouthwash to get the tacky taste out of his mouth. He dressed in clean clothes, including jeans for the first time in ages. He changed the sheets on his bed, flipped the pillows, threw everything from the floor into the laundry bin, organized the small knick-knacks on the shelf above his bed.
Then, right as he sat down on the edge of the memory-foam, his phone started to buzz: Claire Novak.
Dean squinted at the phone. Claire, just barely out of her teens now, was a notorious texter, even going so far as to call Dean a dinosaur for calling her to get an update on a case she was working. Not to mention that he hadn’t heard from her since they got Kaia back.
Thumb hesitating, he finally slid the button to answer: “Claire? You okay?”
“Dean! Glad to know that your phone does, in fact, still fucking work.”
Dean knew an angry voice when he heard one, passive-aggressive or not. Perks of a John Winchester upbringing -- or maybe just perks of interacting with angry people all the time. Or maybe just perks of he, himself, being angry.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, voice sinking.
“What’s wrong? Oh, yeah, nothing. What could possibly be wrong? Both of my parents are dead, and the guy who killed my dad and proceeded to walk around in his skin for over a decade and tried to be his own father figure to me is now also dead, and I am apparently the last fucking person to hear about it.”
Oh, shit.
“Yeah, but everything’s dandy. His best friend didn’t even bother to call me to let me know that my not-dad dad was dead. Couldn’t even pick up the phone. No biggie, right?”
Grief washed over Dean like water, like he tripped off the side of a dock into the cold ocean.
“I thought it was weird: Cas isn’t returning my texts. But I thought to myself, hey. You know, let’s cut him some slack. Maybe he got a new number and didn’t know how to contact me. Or maybe he’s gravely injured and unable to come to the phone. Or maybe, I don’t know, he’s in another goddamn dimension again. How am I supposed to know, right? Somebody would call me if something egregious happened. But no. Sam’s just catching up with Jody casually, and she happens to ask, you know, ‘How’s Cas doing?’ and Sam just replies, ‘Oh, Jody, I’m so sorry. Cas died. Does Claire know?’ And you know what, Dean? I had no fucking clue ‘cause neither you or your shitty fucking brother bothered to call and tell me. I find out from Jody. Jody! Who didn’t even know Cas! They met months ago for, like, five minutes!”
“Claire-”
“And all I could think was that I thought, after everything we’ve been through, all of our stupid conversations about feelings and shit, I thought you and I understood each other. I thought, at the very least, you’d have the decency to call me and tell me he was gone.”
Dean’s throat burned. He croaked quietly, “I’m so sorry.”
On the other side of the phone, Claire breathed heavy like she was trying not to cry. “Little late for that bull, Dean.”
“I should’ve called you,” Dean whispered. He could tell her how blinded by grief he’s been. He could tell her that he’s been selfish, that Cas left him with a message that has been on repeat for the entire time he’s been gone that Dean can’t even think about anything or anyone else. He could tell her-
“You should’ve called me,” she replied, and he could almost hear the tears roll down her face.
Cas would be so upset with him for not telling her.
“I’m sorry, Claire,” he barely managed past the ache in his chest, the burn in his throat. “I’m so sorry.”
“Fuck you, Dean.”
She left him with the dial tone echoing in his ear. Letting the phone drop on the bed, he crumpled and dug his fingers into his face. So much for the trying-to-have-a-nice-or-at-least-cleaner night.
Desperately, Dean tried to get his breathing under control. In, and out. In, and out. But the breathing wasn’t working. If he didn’t get something to drink in the next five minutes, he was going to have another meltdown.
Don’t think about it. Don’t think about how much you fucked up. Don’t think about Cas being gone.
He started all but sprinting for the kitchen.
But, as an additional kick in the pants that he had forgotten about, Sam and Eileen were watching some movie as an at-home form of date night, complete with homemade pasta and vegetables from the farmers’ market earlier that week. Dean walked in on them in the kitchen, huddled close together over the counter, signing to each other with flour-covered hands. Sam signed something and nudged her shoulder, and she giggled in reply.
It was too suffocating. Dean had to get out of there.
Ignoring them, or at least attempting to, Dean stormed over to the fridge, tearing it open and tugging out the last six-pack left. He wasn’t even out of the kitchen before the cap of the first beer was off.
“Where you going?” Sam called behind him.
“Out.”
And that was that. With the six-pack of beer, now half-gone, and a brand-new bottle of the good stuff in the passenger seat, Dean drove and pulled from his beers until he found a gravel access road, where he parked and drank some more. The buzz quickly turned into full-on brain blurriness.
Even drinking, driving Baby around, and blasting Zeppelin at the maximum volume wasn’t enough anymore. The thoughts still persisted.
Over the years, Dean had lost dozens of people he loved. It started back with Dad, of course, because every issue Dean ever seemed to have had its roots with his father. He lost Jo and Ellen, and Ash, and Kevin, Charlie, Bobby, and everyone in between, and then they got Mom back, and then she died, too. Then, Cas was gone.
Dean wraps his hand around the neck of the glass bottle, cracks the cap, and takes two giant swallows of the dark liquor.
Cas wasn’t even supposed to be gone. Billie was gonna kill him, and then she was gonna kill Dean, and they would have both died trying to save the world from Death. Their bodies would be lying on the dungeon floor together, side by side, and Dean would have never known what Cas had felt.
But instead, Cas had made a deal, and in true Winchester fashion, he failed to mention it until it was too late to save him.
When Jack was dying, I made a deal to save him. The price was my life.
His big, blue, tear-filled eyes staring up at Dean. His grip on his shoulder, shoving him to the ground. The Empty appearing and swallowing him whole. Then, he was gone. Just like that. And he had forgotten to tell his not-daughter daughter that he was gone.
Dean couldn’t breathe. He needed out of this fucking car, and he needed out now.
With one fumbling hand, Dean threw open the driver’s door of the Impala and all but fell out of it. Half of the liquor spilled out onto the gravel, partially on Dean’s boots, too, but he managed to grab it and pulled himself up before it emptied. The cool rush of the night air brought some relief to his warmed face, and he took a deep breath. In, and out. In, and out.
The beer and whiskey never really seemed to help quell the memories of Cas dying, or of finding out that Mom died, or of any other loss, really, but he drank anyway. Maybe one day it would help. Maybe one day it would blur the lines enough. Maybe one day it would help him forget what happened, make the memories fuzzy around the edges.
All it seemed to do now is make him remember, make him angry.
He took another swig.
Whenever he drinks nowadays, Sam gives him this look, like a cross between a kicked puppy and a disappointed father. So fucking patronizing. It’s easier to drink out of the bunker anyway, especially with Sam back at home with the love of his life who Jack brought back from the dead.
Dean scrubbed a hand down his face. Despite the cold of midnight weather, his forehead beaded sweat. All he could think is Cas Cas Cas.
He didn’t even realize he’s saying it out loud until he heard it, his voice disembodied: “So you can bring everybody else back, but you won’t bring back your own dad?”
The night didn’t answer. Like every day since he walked away on the streets of Hastings, Minnesota, after he restored the world, Jack was radio silent.
Jack’s life for Cas’s. Jack’s life for Mom’s.
And Jack, now all-knowing and all-powerful, doesn’t fucking care.
It was his fault, Dean thought. Jack’s fault. Jack’s life for Cas’s.
I made a deal to save him.
“I get it, Jack,” Dean mumbled, taking another sip of whiskey as he went. He didn’t need to speak loudly to pray; in any case, Jack wasn’t listening. “I get it, I do. Not bringing Mom back. It was before Chuck came clean, and you apologized. I know you didn’t mean to do it, buddy.
“But Cas… Cas’s deal was to save your life, man. He died fighting Billie and the Empty. He died fighting Chuck. And I know, I get it, man, it wasn’t a part of Chuck’s snapping the world away. I know that. But it’s-” He had tears in his eyes and the hiccups now - “It’s not fair. It’s not fuckin’ fair.”
It’s not fair. It’s not fair. It’s not fair that Cas got taken away. It’s not fair that Jack won’t bring him back. It’s not fair that Cas got to confess, and Dean couldn’t say a word. He couldn’t make his mouth move. He couldn’t even think.
Goodbye, Dean.
It’s not goddamn fucking fair!
“You know, Cas fucking chose you!” Dean was yelling now, yelling into the empty nature. “He chose you, Jack! He turned his back on Sam and me for you! And now you can’t even repay him the favor. You can bring back the whole fucking world, but you won’t save him, too, and that’s fucked up! It’s fucked up! After everything we did for you, everything Cas did for you, and you leave him to rot !”
The breeze blew through the trees, sighing softly. Maybe Jack was sighing softly, too. How goddamn patronizing.
“Come on, Jack! I know you can fucking hear me!” Dean screamed. His throat burned again for the second time tonight with the effort to hold back the dam, but he took a swig of the whiskey bottle anyway just to find that it was empty. “Dammit!”
He tossed it aside, heard it thunk in the grass. Around him, the wind whispered. Jack didn’t speak at all.
---
THE DAYS THAT FOLLOW
“Dean?”
Sam is poking his head in through the door to the infirmary, and Dean waves him in. In the bed beside him, Cas had passed out again within moments of asking about Jack, his body unable to withstand the toll of recovering from the yank from the Empty and being awake at the same time. But he’s alive. He’s alive.
His little brother drops a plate of sandwiches on Cas’s bedside table, complete with two bottles of water and a consolary piece of pie. “How’s he doing?”
“He just woke up.”
Sam jerks his head to look at Dean, then back at the former angel fast asleep in the cot. “He was awake? Why didn’t you call me? We should check him for a concussion, and I really want to get a good idea of what his memory is looking like-”
“He’s fine,” Dean cuts him off. “I asked. He remembers.”
“He… remembers.”
One night, months ago, after about seven too many fingers of bourbon, Dean was a blubbering mess. Sam found him in the Dean Cave nearly unable to lift his own head, sputtering nonsense, and he had thrown him into a cold shower fully-clothed to sober him up. But the tears wouldn’t stop, and neither would his mouth.
Dean doesn’t remember exactly what he said, but Sam had cornered him the next morning asking about things that Cas had said in his final moments, and he blew up. He had punched Sam for less before. The two had grappled for a minute in the hallway of the bunker until Sam threw his hands up in surrender.
“I just want you to talk to me, man,” Sam had said.
“If you know what’s best for you,” Dean hissed back, “you won’t bring that shit up again.”
Dean had always been an asshole, and he knew it. All Sam was trying to do was look out for him. But Sam wasn’t there that night. Sam didn’t watch Eileen get taken away, the consequences of a deal that they didn’t even know about. Sam didn’t find out his best friend loved him and then watched him die within seconds of each other.
Dean’s grief was his own. He had to deal with it himself.
“He remembers the deal he made,” Dean says now, still staring at Cas’s closed eyes, “and that the Empty took him away.”
Slowly, Sam nods. “Did he say anything else?”
“He nearly had a panic attack asking if Jack was alive.”
“And what did you tell him?”
Sam’s got that look again, the one he’s had since Cas died, like he’s not sure exactly what’s gonna set Dean off. Dean can’t blame him. He’s sure Sam thinks he talked shit about Jack to Cas since that’s all he’s been doing to Sam these past months.
But Dean shakes his head and finally looks at his brother. “I told him the truth: that Jack is alive, and that he saved us and the rest of the world.”
Luckily, Sam understands. Dean didn’t tell Cas about Jack’s unresponsiveness. He didn’t tell him about all of the nights he prayed to no avail. He only told him what Jack had done, and that it was good, and it was the truth. For now, with Cas back, Dean could live with that truth.
Sam reaches out then, patting Dean’s shoulder gently, an I know what you did, and I know what it took for you to do it. He grabs the chair on the other side of the bed, drags it over, and takes a seat. For a while, they both watch the sleeping fallen angel.
“Cas is really back,” Sam whispers into the silent room.
He is, Dean thinks. Cas is really back.
---
WEEKS BEFORE
“Getting into the Empty should be easy enough,” Sam says. After endless days and sleepless nights, and books and lore and interviews and more books and back-alley meetings and dusty bunker closets and more goddamn books, Sam finally shook Dean awake this morning (or is it afternoon?) with new intel.
“Easy?” Dean asks, rubbing his temple. His head and neck still hurt from falling asleep at the library table, and he’s pretty sure he’s still hungover after running out of the bunker to avoid Sam and Eileen’s date three nights earlier.
Sam drops a huge tome down in front of Dean, open to a page with a bunch of random sigils and text in what looks like Latin, and points to one that looks familiar. “Recognize that?”
With some focus and widened eyes, the hazy edges of the symbols clear in Dean’s vision enough to place it. “It kinda looks like the one Cas used to open Purgatory.”
“It’s exactly it,” Sam says, “except for the symbols in the left, right, and bottom here. It’s the same shape in the middle, the triangles, the pitchfork lookalikes, all of it. We just replace those symbols, and we’ve got a doorway to the Empty.”
Dean scoffs and shakes his head. “Come on, Sam. When has anything we’ve ever done been that easy? Plus, didn’t the Purgatory door only work in, like, an eclipse or something?”
“Well, I said getting in was easy,” Sam replies. “I’m calling in a favor with Rowena since, technically, hell still owns the moon. We’ll have a lunar eclipse, and then we need the blood of a virgin and the blood of a native from whatever place we’re trying to enter. I’m hoping we still have some of Cas’s blood around here somewhere. I think that will count.”
“You think? You’re basing our whole plan here on a guess?”
“Dean, I’m not hearing any better ideas at this point.” Sam spreads his arms wide. “If you have any other clue on how to get into the Empty, or to pull Cas out, I’m all ears. We don’t have nephilim blood to pull out Cas’s essence like Nick did with Lucifer using Jack’s essence, and even if we did, I’m pretty sure we’d be stuck with a bodiless angel and no vessel. This is the best option we have right now.”
It’s a decent plan, really, without any feet to stand on. They don’t know if Rowena will cooperate; they don’t know if Cas is enough of a “Empty native” to qualify, much less if they actually have any of his blood; they don’t even have the blood of a virgin readily available at this point. Dean’s not convinced.
But he does have to admit that it’s much more of a plan than they have had at all over the past few weeks.
Sam is staring at him, and Dean knows he can read what he’s thinking. “If it doesn’t work, then it doesn’t work, and we keep looking,” Sam says. Easy enough for him to say. Cas is just his friend. Sam doesn’t need to quash any ounce of hope that this plan might work; if it doesn’t pan out, Dean’s not sure he’ll be able to put himself back together.
Dean pinches the bridge of his nose and sighs. “You said getting in was the easy part.”
Sliding the tome back to his side of the table, Sam nods. “Yeah. Once you’re in the Empty, it’ll know that you’re there. No human that I can find has ever been to the Empty, but my best guess is that, since you’re human, it will either try to eject you, or your presence will create a tear. I’m hoping Jack might prevent the Empty from ejecting you, so I think the tear will be how you can get yourself out.”
“So, the Empty will essentially have a portal that will let humans get out of it. Like Purgatory.”
“Exactly,” Sam says. “But I don’t know how you’ll find it, and I don’t think it would let angels pass through it. I mean, the Empty is meant to keep angels and demons there, but not humans, so it makes sense that there would be a way for humans to get out. A human would cause problems, and the portal is the escape route.”
“But it might not let Cas through.”
After a moment, Sam nods gently. “Not unless he was human .”
It’s risky, Dean knows. Not only dangerous — but also theft, in a way. Cas won’t be able to give his permission.
The question rattles around in Dean’s head like a marble in a pinball machine, ping-ping-pinging away. Would this be what Cas wants? Would saving Cas without his grace be saving Cas at all?
“I’ll keep looking into it,” Sam states as he shuffles some books around, “but right now, it seems like it might be our only option.”
“To rip out his grace.”
“To remove it,” ever delicate Sam counters. “If he’s asleep, it shouldn’t hurt him.”
“But we can’t even ask him if that’s what he wants. How does that make us any better from the people who tortured him? Or from Metatron, who ripped out his grace before?”
Sam raps on the table, then walks over to a set of drawers on the far side of the library. He rummages around for a moment, then gives a small “aha” and turns back around with a glass vial.
“We don’t destroy it,” he says, wagging the glass. “We remove his grace, and we store it in a vial, and we leave the vial in the Empty. Then, once he’s back, we start working on a way to get his grace out.”
It might somehow be the smartest and the dumbest plan the Winchester brothers have ever concocted. There are about five thousand unknowns, most importantly including whether the Empty will just allow Dean walk around in it in order to steal a sleeping angel from its clutches. How would they even begin to find Cas’s grace again after all of that, much less get it back out?
Dean’s face must show skepticism, because Sam finally throws his hands up. “I don’t like it either, Dean, but it’s either that, or we leave him in the Empty until maybe, one day, we might find a way to get him out with his grace intact. Or, hell, we ever try to pull him out as-is, and the Empty tears his grace from him in the process, or kills him again, and we have to start all over.”
It’s insane, truly. To bring Cas back to this world, they have to take away part of what makes him Cas. They have to remove the angel.
“Think about it,” Sam says. “It’s going to be a tough call, I know. But to get Cas back, we might have to leave a piece of him behind.”
Chapter 3: dean dreams of cas
Summary:
“Dean,” he had said, rocky voice rumbling, “do you mind if I’m alone for a moment?”
Dean would have rather been kicked in the chest by a horse than leave Cas alone, and it must’ve shown on his face. “I’m not going to fade away,” Cas had stated plainly. “I’ll be right here when you return.”
Dean had taken a nervous step or two. “Well, sorry if that’s hard to believe.”
Notes:
As always, thank you all for reading. Currently unedited - all mistakes are my own.
Chapter content warnings - brief homophobia by a parental figure (shocker - it's John), canon-typical violence (and alcoholism, frankly)
Chapter Text
“Patroclus has fallen - he whom I valued more than all others, and love as dearly as my own life? I have lost him.”
— Homer, The Iliad, as translated by Samuel Butler
“Because you were right when you said that people can’t always give us what we want from them; that you can’t ask them to love you the way you want. No one can be blamed for that. And the odds had been stacked against us from the start: we had no manual, no one to show us the way. Not one example of a happy couple made up of boys. How were we supposed to know what to do? Did we even believe that we deserved to get away with happiness?”
— Tomasz Jedrowski, Swimming in the Dark
YEARS BEFORE
Dean could never be sure when his father found out he liked men, too.
He played up his crushes on girls for years, known as the flirty new guy in every brand new town Dad forced them to stay in. He hooked up with girls in janitors’ closets, danced with them at lame parties thrown by trust fund kids, and took them out on dates to the movies and the all-night diners every town had.
In one of those small towns, when he was fourteen years old, he went over to a friend’s house to work on a history project, and the boy had kissed him, clumsy and rushed. Dean sat still, frozen in place. Then the boy pulled away, stared at Dean with wide eyes, and hunched back over their poster presentation. He hadn’t known he could kiss boys. He hadn’t realized, until that moment, that he ever wanted to, but now that he had, he wanted to again.
Dad had pulled them out of town that night, citing a haunting up in Maryland that needed immediate attention. Dean never saw the boy again; he couldn’t even remember his name. Maybe Dad knew then.
Years after that, there was another guy, Jacob. He and Dean became fast friends, spending afternoons in the Oregon sun skipping school to drink and shoot the shit along the riverbank. They horsed around and wrestled in the tall grass until one time, he ended up on top of Jacob, hips pressed to hips and chest to chest. Jacob had dark brown eyes, always smiling, and Dean kissed him then. Jacob kissed back.
He was the only friend he had ever had that Dean took back to the rundown motel of the month they were staying in. He thought it was safe -- Dad almost always came back later than he said he was going to, not earlier, and especially not by days. They weren’t even doing anything other than watching some Western, the two boys side by side on one of the motel beds and Sammy doing homework at the kitchen table. But Dad came home early, drunk and terrifying and covered in blood, and he all but chased Jacob out of the motel.
Dean never got the chance to say goodbye. Instead, he paid the price at Dad’s hand, and he never brought home another friend again. Maybe Dad knew then.
“No son of mine,” Dad spat, not finishing the sentence. He didn’t realize until years later what Dad meant.
In the days leading up to his seventeenth birthday, Dad proudly announced that Dean was ready for his first solo hunt: a simple haunting, two nuns that needed to be put down. Dean thought nothing of it. He kept his cool during the investigation, and he found the grave sites no problem, and it was a simple enough salt-and-burn. The only thing that stopped him cold was at the podunk library in one old newspaper: the nuns had been in love. They had been discovered. They had committed suicide, and Dean had to put them down again alone.
Dean spent the night of his seventeenth birthday watching the skeletons of two lesbian nuns burn. He got the message well enough. Dad had definitely known by then.
What had given it away? Dean always wondered how his father had known even before he did. Was he not cautious enough? Did he not talk about girls enough? Did he walk wrong, talk wrong, act wrong, stare at too many pretty boys or something? Or did Dad just have some sort of intuition that he was raising a son who liked other boys?
After the hunt, Dean didn’t kiss any other boys. The only interaction he would have with men in that way would be to pay for food in Sam’s stomach up until he left for Stanford, and only ever when Dad was certain to be gone. He didn’t leave enough money for the boys to get by, but he’d kill Dean if he knew what he did to get cash.
When Sam left for college, for California and his big law school dreams, Dad started sending Dean out on his own hunts, and they wouldn’t see each other for weeks at a time. For the first time in a long time, Dean didn’t have anyone scrutinizing him. It was like a weight had been lifted.
That was when he met Lee.
It started with a simple salt-and-burn in a small town in Texas, followed by a vamp nest two hours away, and he didn’t feel like packing up, so he stayed another night, and then another, until Dean, finally old enough to be out from under Dad’s thumb, settled down there for awhile. He had met Lee, gone on a date with a pretty girl he picked up at a bar, and hadn’t yet tried the whole menu of the diner with the sign outside that read “Best Burgers in Town.”
They became buddies quickly, going out to bars and hustling pool. Lee was a hunter, too, so Dean didn’t have to come up with explanations for the scars on his arms or the reasons he moved around so much. Lee understood because he lived that life, too.
He brought Lee with him on a hunt with Dad, and the three of them took out a pack of ghouls in under ten minutes flat. Dad liked him, liked that Lee filled the space that Sam had left in their little band, liked that Lee could match him shot for shot and punch for punch. The three of them went to the bars and diners, and they went home and bonded over old movies and horror stories.
Dean liked Lee, too, but in a little bit of a different way. He did everything he could not to show it: he sat three feet away from Lee at all times, wouldn’t even share a seat on the bed closer to the TV; he never shared beers or food at diners; he never even touched the guy other than to drag Lee out when a wraith had wrecked his leg.
But Dean had wanted to kiss him, and somehow, he’s certain Dad knew it.
When Lee broke his leg, Dad demanded they abandon him at the hospital. “He’s no good while he’s busted up,” he had said. “We’ve got demon sightings in Indiana, Dean. You wanna avenge your mother, or do you wanna stay here and play wife to your little fairy boyfriend?”
So they left Lee at the hospital. This time, Dean did say goodbye and got his cell number, but Lee never called. Dean never called him, either. They wouldn’t see each other for seventeen more years, when Dean was forced to kill him, when Lee became the very thing they hunted.
“I’m just makin’ sure you’ve got that head o’ yours screwed on straight,” Dad had said as they walked out of the hospital toward the truck and the Impala, side by side. “Not getting distracted by anyone or anything.”
“No, sir,” Dean mumbled.
He never did figure out when Dad knew, or how. He only figured out that he couldn’t like boys. It only ever got him into trouble.
---
THE DAYS THAT FOLLOW
The very first thing Cas wants -- or, rather, demands -- after becoming firmly awake and semi-mobile is to sit outside in the April sunshine.
Dean and Sam weren’t eager to let Cas move out of the infirmary, especially when they couldn’t be sure if Cas had sustained any internal damage or if his organs were functioning properly or, hell, if he even had to do human things (the guy still hadn’t taken a piss yet) or if he somehow had enough residual grace left over to cover those. But the longer he stayed in the infirmary, the grumpier he became, and even Dean had to admit that he was itching to get out of the fluorescent lighting and hospital-smelling room for a few minutes.
He hadn’t left Cas’s side at all yet, despite Sam’s oh-so-subtle hints that he could take some alone time or that “maybe a shower would make you feel better.” Sponge baths in the sink in the corner of the room were good enough to keep Dean from smelling too horrendous, and that way, he could keep his eyes on the former angel, even if all he was doing was sleeping. Dean couldn’t be certain that Cas wouldn’t disappear if he gave him even five minutes alone.
Finally, after enough complaining from Cas and a full assessment from Eileen (who, after walking through his vitals, had just shrugged and said, “Seems normal enough to me”), Dean finally guided Cas up the map room stairs and out the front door of the bunker with one arm tossed over his shoulder.
All of that had led to now. Cas sits in the grass across the gravel driveway, basking in the sun with his head tilted up and eyes closed. From the concrete steps by the entrance, Dean keeps his eyes trained on him. The Kansas sun beats down on his neck, unseasonably warm for April, and he can feel the pink burn forming above his shirt line. He doesn’t find himself caring.
Instead, all he can think about is Cas Cas Cas, who is quite frankly sitting too far away for comfort. He’s smothering the guy a bit, Dean knows that, but glancing away from Cas causes his heart to race and his hands to itch, to reach out and grab on and not let go until he can see him again. See him, or touch him, but no letting go.
Once he sat Cas down in the spot he’s in now, he started to lower himself down next to him until Cas touched his ankle.
“Dean,” he had said, rocky voice rumbling, “do you mind if I’m alone for a moment?”
Dean would have rather been kicked in the chest by a horse than leave Cas alone, and it must’ve shown on his face. “I’m not going to fade away,” Cas had stated plainly. “I’ll be right here when you return.”
Dean had taken a nervous step or two. “Well, sorry if that’s hard to believe.”
“Please, Dean.”
It wasn’t an unreasonable request, so Dean made the compromise of sitting fifty feet away and watching him like a hawk instead. Or perhaps like a stalker. He wasn’t gonna get bogged down in the details; the only people here to judge him were Cas, who doesn’t have a choice, his own brother, who can mind his own fucking business, or Eileen, who might be right but wasn’t here right now to witness this.
Only Dean had the privilege of watching Cas now, the sun shining on his face, the small upturns at the corners of his mouth, the grass brushing between his fingers.
A few springs ago, Dean had watched as Cas brushed his hands through grass in rural Alabama on a witch hunt, and little blue flowers popped up in its wake. Cas had smiled gently at them, then picked one and held it out to Jack, who was barely a year old. Awed, with wide eyes like an actual toddler, Jack had mimicked his father, and yellow flowers popped up in a line next to Cas’s blue ones.
Dean swallows harshly. It’s because of him that Cas can’t do that anymore.
The choice to take Cas’s grace, even if temporary, had kept Dean awake more nights than one. If they decided to remove it to get Cas out, would Cas resent them? Would he be okay with being human? What if they couldn’t ever figure out how to get his grace back? Would he be okay with being human forever? Was that truly the only solution to saving him from the Empty?
Cas watched the birth of the Earth, watched generations of humans walk upon it, watched empires rise and fall, watched animals survive and die, watched weather create and destroy and change. He had lived for billions and billions of years. Now, if they were lucky, he’d only live forty more. Dean had made that choice for him.
The thought ping-ping-pings around in his head like a marble in a pinball machine: What if Cas resented him for it? He would never say it out loud, Dean knows, but somehow the thought only makes it worse.
If only Jack agreed to intervene and save Cas himself. He could have pulled Cas from the Empty and kept his grace intact, and he wouldn’t have had to make the choice for Cas. Cas would be able to visit heaven, to see his son in his new job as the creator of the universe. He wouldn’t be stuck here on Earth with a fucked-up alcoholic and his smelly nerd of a brother.
Fifty feet away, Cas opens his eyes, looks down at his hands, and brushes them along the grass. Dean wonders if he was praying. Maybe Cas wanted to be away from the warding so he knew his message could reach Jack without any interference, not that the bunker’s warding would keep anything from God. Maybe he wanted to have the most direct line to Jack he could.
Cas had always loved nature. Perhaps this is where he feels the most at home, the most in his body, in his true body, not just the vessel he’s now trapped in because of Dean’s choice.
With a sigh, Dean rubs a hand down his face. All of the thoughts spinning in his head are bringing on another headache.
Cas looks over to Dean and gives him a soft smile. Dean’s head spins a little less. He smiles back with tight lips.
Leaning back to lay in the grass, Cas simultaneously raises one hand in a Come over here wave, and Dean is on his feet before he can even fully comprehend the gesture. Cas could ask for anything, and Dean’s pretty sure his body would react before he could fully understand what it is Cas is asking for.
“How’s it going?” Dean asks once he’s in earshot. Cas doesn’t reply; instead, his eyes are closed, and he pats the grass next to him. With a grunt, Dean complies, ignoring the flare in his bad knee as he bends and flops down.
They lay like that, side by side, for a while in silence, and okay, yeah, Dean can see why Cas was itching to get out. The sun is warm and pleasant on his face, and the more he breathes, the more his muscles relax, the calmer he feels, the less his thoughts ruminate.
“It’s a beautiful day for April,” Cas says eventually. Dean hums affirmatively. “I missed the sun.”
Suddenly, it’s beyond obvious why Cas wanted to be outside, and Dean mentally kicks himself. Despite having little idea how long Cas felt he was in the Empty for, it was months in Earth-time since Cas had seen anything other than that infirmary and the regret-filled darkness.
Dean turns his head and looks at Cas, who keeps his own eyes closed. There’s still a black smear behind one of his ears, a few globs in his hair. “I’m sorry it took us so long to get you out.”
“Don’t you dare apologize,” Cas replies instantly. “Thank you for saving me.”
With a heavy exhale, Dean turns away. “You don’t need to thank me. That’s what we do, right? Save each other?”
“Always.” He pauses for a moment, hesitates. “Although, I could do without the saving constantly requiring self-sacrifice by one or the other.”
Dean barks out a laugh. “Yeah, I could do without that, too. But no sacrifices this time, no deals. We got you out, no strings.”
Except for your grace.
A pang of guilt jabs into his side like a knife, and Dean quickly sits up, pressing one hand to it.
“Dean?”
Dean takes one shuddering breath, and then another. He presses harder into his side. “I’m sorry, Cas. I’m sorry we- I’m sorry I cut your grace out.”
Beside him, Cas sits up, and he flinches slightly as Cas’s hand comes to rest on his shoulder, the same one with the scar in the shape of his hand. “We couldn’t find another way to get you out without taking it out. I left it in a vial in the Empty, so it’s there, it’s not gone, we’ll keep working, Cas, I promise. We’ll get it out, and we’ll power you back up-”
“ Dean. ”
His chest aches, but he stops rambling and looks at the former angel instead. Cas’s big blue eyes bore into his, just as they have since the moment they met, since Cas read him better in five minutes than anyone ever had.
Cas wets his bottom lip, and Dean’s gaze falls to it like a moth to a flame. His face is close, closer than Dean can remember it being in a long time. He would barely have to cran his neck to kiss him.
“You saved me, ” Cas says. “You did what was required to save me from eternal damnation in the Empty, and I will forever be grateful. My grace is not myself, not anymore.”
Slowly, Dean nods. Even with his grace, Cas was possibly more human than any angel had ever been. When Cas lost his grace to Metatron years ago, he was still Cas in human form.
But like Metatron, Dean hadn’t asked. Dean had taken without Cas’s consent, and Cas was human without a choice in the matter.
Cas squeezed his shoulder like he knew Dean was berating himself. Maybe he did. “Thank you for saving me, Dean,” he repeats. After a silent moment, just staring at each other, Cas raises an eyebrow and adds, “This is usually where one would say, ‘You’re welcome,’ or in your case, make a sarcastic comment.”
Trance broken, Dean chuckles and pulls back, letting Cas’s hand drop from his shoulder. He immediately regrets it, missing the contact, but Cas’s sharp gaze on him quells it. How is he ever supposed to let this former angel out of his sight again? How is he supposed to live without Cas within fifty feet of him?
“Can I admit something to you?”
Dean inhales sharply, gut wrenching. All he can hear is Cas’s confession, Cas’s last admission of a deal he made to save Jack’s life, a deal he was executing to save Dean’s. “Okay.”
“I think I need to…” Cas grimaces. “Urinate.”
Dean laughs harder than he has in months.
---
SEVERAL MONTHS BEFORE
Negotiating with Chuck failed, and all that was left were the three of them -- Jack, Sam, and Dean.
They had pleaded and begged, something they swore they wouldn’t do just months ago, but now the world was gone. Now Chuck was destroying worlds beyond their own. If saving the world meant brother versus brother, a fight to the death, then they would do it to save everyone, to save Eileen and Cas and everyone they loved.
But it was too late. It was too fucking late. Chuck wasn’t looking for a deal anymore, and the world was almost gone.
So the boys had nothing else to do but return home. Dean drove. No one spoke; there was nothing to say. The radio had a broken tape deck, probably written in by Chuck just to get in a final punch, but there was nothing worth listening to anyway.
Eventually, they pulled up to the bunker, and they silently piled inside. Jack and Sam each headed off to their own rooms, and Dean followed suit after grabbing a six-pack and the bottle of whiskey left in in the middle of two leather seats in the library. He tried desperately not to think of the last time he had sat there, late one night with Cas, sipping on whiskeys and reminiscing.
Everything reminded him of Cas. Everything reminded him of what they had lost, from the empty roads with abandoned cars to the scattered belongings of various loved ones spread throughout their home. How was he supposed to live here, in this ghost town? How was he supposed to live at all?
Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, really, letting Chuck erase the entire universe. At least then Dean and his family wouldn’t have to keep sacrificing themselves to try and save it.
Gulping down beer like water, Dean threw open the door to his room and dropped the alcohol down on his bed. Memory foam mattress. He wondered if it remembered Cas sitting on the edge, watching as Dean brushed his teeth, talking about some simple salt-and-burn they took on before this whole Chuck mess started. He wondered if it remembered the fabric of his trenchcoat, or the sound of his rough voice, or the brush of his hands along the blankets.
He wondered how long he will remember Cas clear as day, and he prayed he doesn’t live long enough for the memory of his face to get fuzzy around the edges.
With two fingers, Dean wiped under his wet eyes. Jesus, he thought. Cas really fucked it up this time. He chugged the rest of his beer and twisted the cap off a second.
For the entire drive up to Hastings, Dean tried desperately to think about anything else other than what had just happened. He failed. No matter how loud the engine became or how fast he drove, all he could hear was Cas’s voice on repeat, telling him the kindest things about himself with that look on his face. You are the most caring man on earth. You are the most selfless, loving-
“Fuck!” he shouted. The beer bottle went flying and shattered with a crash, and Dean kicked the side of his bed so hard that the wood frame cracked. “Son of a fucking bitch!”
Dean’s chest heaved and shook with his breathing. His whole body felt like a live wire. What the hell were they supposed to do now?
Then, out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of red, and he slowly turned to look in the mirror.
In all of the driving, the sobbing, the planning, the yelling, he hadn’t noticed the mark left behind on his left shoulder.
Dean all but tore off the jacket.
He knew that Cas had left some blood on his shoulder, but he didn’t realize the shape of it, each finger and line perfectly outlined on the dark green sleeve. There was enough blood caked on that it was flaking off in pieces, but the handprint remained anyway. It had stained the jacket. No matter how many times he could possibly wash it, the handprint had set and would remain a bloody reminder.
He couldn’t take it.
His fists balled up in the green fabric, and with a yell, he threw the jacket with all of his might into the furthest corner of the room, where it swished and landed with a soft thud. Dean stared after it, and he couldn’t stop the small sob that escaped his lips.
Growing up in motel rooms, often locked in with Sam per their father’s orders, Dean watched a lot of movies. Sam preferred books, of course, because he’s a massive nerd, but Dean grew fond of the moving pictures, of watching old black and whites and new ones with CGI effects, of movies about cowboys and monsters and friendship. He had seen more movies in his first eighteen years of life than most people had by fifty.
At age fifteen, when Sammy was finally old enough to handle being left alone for a few hours, Dean snuck into a late screening of a film that starts and ends in a diner. Pulp Fiction goes out of order, telling a story about fate and redemption from different perspectives at different times. As the end credits rolled, Dean realized what it meant. Vincent and Jules started and ended their story in the same place, with the same briefcase.
Dean knew movies. He knew a goddamn circular narrative when he saw one.
In the mirror, just under his ruffled sleeve, the bottom of his biggest scar peeked out, soft and keloid and pink. The handprint from the first time he met Cas, and across the room laid the one from the last time.
“You know what divine intervention is?” Jules asked Vincent. “God came down from heaven and stopped those motherfuckin’ bullets.”
But Dean knew the man behind divine intervention, and even He couldn’t write an ending like this one.
---
THE DAYS THAT FOLLOW
“Dean?”
The hunter looks up from the pile of socks fresh from the dryer to see Cas standing in the doorway to his room. At Sam’s desperate insistence, Dean finally took time by himself to wash some clothes, including Cas’s potentially-ruined trenchcoat, and jump in the shower and shave. He only agreed after Sam and Eileen both promised to keep one eye on Cas at all times and left the trio in the Dean-cave with some Catholic smart-guy movie playing. Earlier, he had barely let Cas shower in the bunker’s locker room alone, too afraid that Cas would lose his balance or that he would lose Cas altogether, and ended up pretending to floss for fifteen minutes until the shower turned off, fleeing so Cas wouldn’t catch him being all-too-creepy or, even worse, overly worried.
Obviously, Sam and Eileen’s agreement meant nothing to two-thirds of the agreers.
“What the hell, Cas? You shouldn’t be moving around all by yourself,” Dean says as he grabs Cas’s free arm and starts to guide him to his desk chair. He was gonna murder Sam. Honestly, he even expected more from the future paramedic, too. Why would Eileen let him walk around the bunker by himself? He only woke up from the coma this morning and is still so unsteady on his feet-
“I’m capable of walking, Dean,” Cas protests, but he leans on Dean the whole way to the seat. “I’m human, not a glass doll.”
“Freshly human, buddy, and also freshly out of a coma.” He shakes his head, trying to rid it of What if he had disappeared and no one knew?
I’m so gonna kill Sam. Eileen, too.
Once he’s seated, Dean is slow to take his hands off of Cas, but Cas doesn’t seem to mind, or even notice. His gaze moves from wall to wall, from desk to bed, taking in everything. It’s the first time Cas has been near his room since he’s been back, but it shouldn’t look any different than it usually does.
Dean glances around, too, just to make sure. “You like what I did with the place?”
“You haven’t changed anything,” Cas says, lips pursed. Folding two socks together, Dean scoffs lightly.
“Yeah, Cas,” he says. “I was just joking. Did you need something?”
Finally, Cas’s stare stops moving and lands on Dean instead, blue eyes piercing as they’ve always been. His face is stoic, but he shifts from foot to foot and pulls at a string on his (Dean’s, formerly) sweatpants. “I was, uh… hoping we could talk.”
A tremor wracks through Dean’s spine, then twists itself up in his stomach. It’s an ugly feeling, out of his control. The last time Cas and he had a big talk, it was Cas who spoke.
It’s not like that. It’s not like that. No more secrets, no more deals.
What if he disappeared, and no one knew because no one was watching him?
“Only if you help me with these socks,” Dean replies meekly.
Slowly, Cas nods, then leans over and picks up a matching set. For a long moment, the two of them pair and fold socks in silence, the only sound being quick thunks of the sock pairs hitting the bottom of the laundry basket.
“I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you about the deal I made with the Empty.”
Somehow, it’s both exactly what Dean expected Cas to say, and not at all what he anticipated. He keeps folding socks and ignores the twinge in his jaw.
Cas grabs another pair, folds them, and tosses them. He copies the motions with a second before he speaks again. “I was afraid that by telling you, you would try find a way to get me out of it, but I didn’t want out. I was afraid that trying to dissolve the deal would allow the Empty to take Jack again.”
“Jack died anyway,” Dean bites. “What did it matter?”
“Jack’s death at Chuck’s hand did not invalidate the deal I made to save his life the first time,” Cas says softly. Like always, he doesn’t rise to the bait of Dean’s wrath. “I just want you to understand why I did it, and to know that there are no other secrets I am trying to hide from you or from anyone.”
I love you.
The first words on Dean’s lips are: We would have found another way. We would’ve found another way to bring Jack back and to save him from the Empty. We would have found a way to cut the deal without letting Jack get taken.
But Dean and Cas have done this song and dance for their entire time together. Cas killed Billie the reaper, and Dean insisted there was another way. Cas killed Belphegor when he was swallowing souls, and Dean said Why does that something always seem to be you? When he helped Sam remove the mark of Cain and released the Darkness, and Charlie died, Dean begged for there to have been another option. Cas invoked his deal with the Empty to swallow Billie and save Dean’s life so that he could save the world, and it left Dean sobbing on the dungeon floor.
But Dean knows better now: there weren’t other ways, because these were the ways that they chose. Many were the choices Chuck guided them into making. If it hadn’t been one way, it would’ve been another, and the ending would have been the same. Cas made the deal that he made to save someone he loved, the boy who was his son, and Dean had made the same choice time and time again, too, usually for his baby brother that he raised like a son.
“I do understand,” Dean whispers. And then, because he thinks Cas needs to hear it, he says: “I know it wasn’t Jack’s fault either.”
With the release of a weighted breath, Cas’s shoulders drop. Cas always did care more about Jack than himself.
Between them, it’s enough, at least for now.
In the silence that follows, the two men fold socks, occasionally passing one back and forth when they end up with matching sets between them, until the laundry basket holds them all. If you told Dean two decades ago that an angel would fall from grace, give up his own family, and end up coming back from the dead after dying for Dean -- and Jack -- to fold socks in Dean’s bedroom, the younger version of himself would have laughed in your face.
Now-Dean just peers at Cas, hoping that folding socks is enough for him. He hopes that folding socks fulfills the now-human angel enough to make falling worthwhile.
“Can I admit something to you?”
Smacked with deja-vu, Dean grins. “What, you gotta pee again?”
The former angel sends a small smile back. “No, not right now. I, uh…” Cas looks away, glancing all over the room, anywhere except at Dean’s eyes. “I am feeling trepidation in regard to… sleeping.”
Who could blame him? After ages in the blackness of the Empty, Dean is certain that sleeping alone would scare him enough to go without it for days on end. Even without knowing the full extent of what Cas experienced in there, Dean spent enough time wading through the viscous darkness to understand it.
But Cas has to sleep. Just by looking at him, with dark bags under his bloodshot eyes and a slight sway in his step, the guy is dead-tired on his feet and just got out of a three-and-a-bit day body shutdown.
Selfishly, a little voice in Dean’s head begs him to keep Cas close for his own sake, too. After months without the former angel, with just the last confession to rattle around in his head at night, his fingers itch to reach for Cas, and tremble when Cas leaves his direct line of sight.
“You can stay here,” Dean blurts before he can chicken out. “I mean, if you wanted.”
Clearly nervous, Cas shifts his weight back and forth on his feet but keeps his eyes trained on Dean’s. “I don’t mean to impose-”
Dean shakes his head. “No. No more of that. From now on, we’re saying what we need, alright? Both of us.” He swallows, takes a deep breath. “I would… I want you to stay in here, if you also wanna.”
Cas stares at him, and stares, and stares, and Dean can’t decipher it, but it looks a little bit like an emotion that would overwhelm him if Cas said it out loud. He seems to know that, too, because Cas just whispers, “Okay.”
So it’s settled. It feels right.
“Figure you need to borrow some clothes to sleep in, right?” Dean says. Finally finding something else to do with his hands, he turns away from him, pulls open one of his dresser drawers, and sifts through clothes. “How’s a t-shirt and long pants?”
“That’s fine, Dean.”
Pajama pants are easy to find, the first ones off the stack being a loose set of navy blue ones, but Dean digs around for a good t-shirt until he lands on an AC/DC one that he’s worn and washed so often that the letters are almost entirely faded.
“Alright, buddy,” he says, turning around, “this is one of my fav-”
His breath hitches at the sight.
Out of the many emotions and feelings Cas is now enduring as a part of the human experience, shame is clearly not one of them, at least around nudity. Dean turned around just in time to watch the hem of the shirt pass over his head, exposing the long lines of his back. Cas’s skin pulls taut across his shoulder blades, then softens as he lowers his arms. His shoulders are broad, and Dean can almost track each of his muscles from hip to shoulder to elbow.
Fuck, Dean thinks. Cas really does have insane muscles under that trench coat.
“Dean?”
As if caught, Dean feels his face flush even though there was no way for Cas to know he was examining the curvature of his spine, the expanse of his waist, the pull of his shoulders, the edges of the Enochian tattoo wrapping around his ribs. “Yeah?”
Slowly Cas turns his head to barely peer over his own shoulder. “I’m not in any pain.”
Dean puffs and steps close enough to reach him. “Okay? I think that’s usually a good thing, buddy.”
“I just need you to know that it doesn’t hurt,” the fallen angel says.
Hurt? Dean could’ve sworn he got Cas out of the Empty with only minor scrapes and bruises, and Sam said he should feel some soreness after his coma and becoming human. But injured?
“What are you talkin’ about?” Dean swallows hard and sets his feet to try and steel himself for whatever gory thing Cas is hiding. “Turn around, Cas.”
Hesitantly, Cas turns, stopping once his whole chest is visible. Dean’s heart leaps into his throat.
With fingertips lining his collarbone and palm over his heart, there is a deep red scar in the shape of a handprint on Cas’s chest.
Memories from the Empty flash through his head: finding Cas, helping him up, dragging him through the portal. Fuck, Dean thinks again in an entirely new tone. I marked him.
Dean is barely cognizant as he lifts his hand, curiosity winning out over fear, his need to know for certain trumping self-consciousness. But he knows even before he reaches out. Cas just stares, unblinking, as Dean aligns his hand to the scar, placing it on Cas’s heated skin where Dean had touched to shake him awake, where Dean had touched to stabilize him as he carried him out of the darkness. It matches perfectly.
“I guess I was owed a scar like this,” Cas says quietly. Then, slowly, giving Dean a chance to step away, the former angel who once pulled Dean out of hell fits his own hand in the matching scar on Dean’s covered shoulder.
It is almost more surprising that he feels no different, other than the addition of Cas’s hand on his shoulder, his own on Cas’s chest. There’s no spark, no electric shock, no heaven-raining-fury, not even a nauseous flip of the stomach. Just Cas, holding him, and him holding Cas, and an ache in his chest. I did this. I did this. I did this to him.
Dean yanks his hand away, as if burned. Cas’s hand falls away from his shoulder, too, and Dean breathes, but the ache remains, almost worsens, like touching Cas provided relief in some way he hadn’t even realized.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “God, Cas.”
The fallen angel shakes his head before the words leave Dean’s mouth. “No. I don’t want you to apologize for something beyond your control.”
“ Jesus, dude, I marked you-”
“Dean.”
“It looks like a fuckin’ burn-”
“ Dean, ” Cas growls, cutting Dean off. “Did yours hurt when I pulled you from perdition?”
Slowly, Dean moves his eye line from Cas’s scar up to his eyes, then shakes his head. “No, but-”
“What is the issue, then?”
His voice fails. Dean doesn’t know how to articulate that the shape of his hand being seared onto a goddamn angel is beyond his comprehension and, at the very least, sacreligious, that the proof of his body on Cas’s, carrying him out of eternal darkness, will be etched into Cas’s skin forever, that My handprint is burned on your body for the rest of your life, and I don’t know how you can forgive me for that.
“You’re an angel,” Dean croaks, and it’s not accurate or quite frankly even close to what he wanted to say, but Cas searches his eyes for a moment and seems to get it anyway.
Gingerly, Cas takes Dean’s wrist into a gentle grip. “When I saved you from hell, I marked you. I branded the Michael sword. At the time, it was a known side-effect that whoever pulled you out would leave a brand, but as time passed, and I fell, it felt more and more sinful. It felt like marking you was like claiming you when you were not a possession to be claimed, even though the angels viewed you as an object and a vessel, as a means to an end.
“But I think differently now,” Cas continues, glancing to Dean’s own decade-old scar. He traces one of the fingers with his free hand. “It may be selfish, but it serves as a reminder of my purpose. Even when we are at odds, it is a reminder that we were connected, and that my story would always be intertwined with yours. You were someone that I saved, and in return, you gave me freedom and taught me what is worth fighting for.” He moves his hand from Dean’s scar to his own, ghosting over the imprint of his middle finger along his collarbone. “But now I have a reminder of my own. If I ever lose my way, I’ll remember who taught me my purpose for the first time.”
Dean trembles; each breath shakes. He wants to say a million things. He wants to respond to Cas’s confession, to say words that are still all jumbled in his own head but fashion them into something Cas will understand anyway. He wants to ask him if he still feels the way he did. But all he can think about is the scar on Cas’s chest, proof of the mortal, finite life that Dean has condemned him to. Did he save him, or did he sentence him to death again?
“Can we just-“
The words catch in his throat, and he can’t force them out. Cas waits anyway.
Dean takes a deep breath, and then another, but his throat feels like it’s closing in and his stomach twists again, and suddenly he’s back in the dungeon, and the black void that opened up to swallow Cas whole is closing, and he’s on the ground watching and not doing anything because there’s nothing he can do and it’s all happening so fast-
Dean closes his eyes. Cas drops his wrist. One last deep breath, and his eyes reopen, and he gestures with one flailing hand toward the memory-foam mattress, and he stammers, “Please- please.” It’s all he can muster. He prays to God - or not God, Jack, or to the universe, or whatever - that Cas will understand him anyway.
As he always has, even when the world was ending, Cas understands him anyway.
“Of course,” he whispers. “I’m not going anywhere.”
---
WEEKS BEFORE
Dean is dreaming.
He knows he is dreaming because Cas is standing before him. He has one hand clenched around an angel blade, the other tense at his side, and he’s mouthing something over and over.
Dean! Dean!
His own hands are covered in blood, wet and warm. It’s not his, and from what he can tell, it’s not Cas’s either.
He reaches out and clutches Cas’s trenchcoat, desperate. “Cas.”
Cas mouths Dean! again. Slowly, Dean's hands drag down the coat, leaving streaks of blood in their wake.
As if someone flipped a switch, Cas stops his silent repetition of Dean’s name, and his eyes fall on the man in front of him, like he reentered his own body.
“Dean,” he finally says, and Dean can hear it.
With his free hand, Cas reaches out and runs his fingertips over Dean’s jawline. He gently caresses his cheek, wanders over the slope of his chin, brushes against his 5-o'clock shadow.
Then, his face changes to a very not-Cas face, and he rears back with the angel blade-
“Cas!”
He wakes up as the blade makes contact. Heart pounding, he sits up in the darkness of his bedroom, glass bottles clinking as the sheet shifts. From the foot of the bed, Miracle gives him a grumpy look from being woken up.
It’s not real. It was just a dream. Cas isn’t here.
Cas isn’t here.
---
THE DAYS THAT FOLLOW
Dean is dreaming.
He knows he is dreaming because Cas is standing before him. This time, Cas’s lips form a tearful smile, the exact one he wore when he shoved Dean to the ground in the dungeon, the exact one he gave as the Empty swallowed him whole.
“No, no, no,” Dean says progressively louder, or at least tries to. “No!”
He can hear it, the sucking sound of the Empty as it opens and builds behind him, but he won’t turn to look. He can’t bear to look away from Cas, not this time. His blue eyes shine brighter than ever. This time, he doesn’t shove Dean away.
Cas’s mouth moves: Goodbye, Dean.
“No!” he screams, or tries to. Every cell of his body is screaming, burning, begging him to grab Cas and not let go, to save him from the darkness, or if he can’t save him, then to go with him. There is not a place in the universe that Cas could go that Dean would not follow him to. But dream Dean is paralyzed. He can’t reach out. He can’t even say goodbye.
He watches as the Empty crawls up Cas’s arms, his torso, his neck. The smile doesn’t disappear until the Empty covers it. The last color Dean sees is blue.
Then, he’s gone. Just like that. Just like before.
The dream shifts. Now, he is back on the dungeon floor, staring at the concrete wall where the Empty once was, where it pulled Cas through. His phone buzzes beside him, a constant hum, Sam calling over and over and over. Dean doesn’t pick up. He can’t bring himself to. All he can do is stare, and stare, and his body screams at him to get up follow him move save Cas come on get up go-
“Cas?”
Jack stands where Cas once stood in the middle of the dungeon, also looking at the wall.
Dean’s hands shake. His body trembles. Some part of his brain tells him, This is a dream. The thought does nothing to quell him.
“You didn’t save him,” Jack says. He won’t look at Dean. Stare, stare, stares at the wall.
Seeing Jack is like seeing a ghost. Actually, seeing Jack is nothing like seeing a ghost: unlike usual, Dean has no desire to grab an iron rod or scramble to make a ring of salt. Instead, some invisible knife drives in between Dean’s ribs over and over, sending bolts of pain that feel strangely like guilt across his chest.
After the darkness took Cas, Sam and Dean helped Jack defeat God by becoming Him. Cas’s three-year-old son absorbed the power of the ageless Creator to take over his role, but in a way that could be better, at least in theory. Hands-off. Humans with full free will to make whatever choices they desire. The theory was sound until he refused to bring Cas back.
“I didn’t know he needed saving,” Dean whispers.
Jack says nothing.
The worst part of the whole deal, seeing Jack now, in this space, after reliving Cas’s death, was not Jack accusing him of not saving him. It was that Jack was the reason for it. It had always been Jack’s life for Cas’s. Jack’s birth, Cas’s death by Lucifer’s hand. Jack’s safety in heaven for Cas’s eternal life in the Empty. Hell, even Jack’s death at Chuck’s hand before he started ending worlds drove a deeper wedge between him and Cas.
“He made a deal for you, Jack, to save your life,” Dean snaps. “Why couldn’t you save him?”
In true godly fashion, Jack says nothing for a moment, but he finally looks over at Dean. Loose strands of golden hair fall into his big blue eyes, just like Dean remembers. He looks younger in age, but has a gaze he’s only seen in angels, something faraway, something distant and removed. In this dream, Jack is wearing one of Dean’s old shirts and a pair of Dean’s jeans, hanging baggy from his hips. Now, more than ever, he looks like Cas.
“Why couldn’t you trust me, Dean?” Jack asks, eyes glowing gold. “Why couldn’t you love me?”
If this hadn’t been a dream, Dean isn’t sure he would answer, or if he would even know the answers, but this is a dream, and so he replies, “How could I, when all you ever did was take him from me?”
Jack doesn’t falter. In fact, it almost seems like he ignores the reply; it’s like they’re having separate conversations in tandem. “Castiel pulled you from perdition because God commanded it. It was the last command Castiel ever followed that did not come from your mouth.”
Dean tries to close his eyes, but this is still a dream.
“Even before I was born, you both altered the story that the Creator had written for you,” Jack continues. “After the Creator was gone, you chose to save Cas of your own free will. I would say it is because of who you are, Dean, but there is no author behind you anymore. You are free to be whoever you are, and free to want whatever you long for. You, and every human being, now have full control over the rest of your life on Earth.” The kid - God - cocks his head like a puppy does, like Cas does. “But what will you do with it?”
Dean startles awake, gasping like a fish out of water. He can’t breathe. He can’t breathe. He’s drowning and he can’t breathe-
Something wet shoves its way into his hand.
Dean jerks his arm back away from the edge of the bed, blinking rapidly to aid his adjusting eyes until finally he can see a tuft of white fur poking up over the side. Pressing his not-wet hand to his pounding heart, he relaxes back into his pillow and takes a deep breath.
“Jesus, Miracle.”
Miracle the dog looks up at Dean with saucers for eyes, the light from under the door glinting across them. His fur is slightly flattened on one side of his face from sleep, and his expression seems to say something like Are you good, Dad?
Scratching behind Miracle’s ears, Dean gives him a feigned smile in the dark that he hopes replies something like I’m fine, buddy, or at least Nothing to worry about.
Satisfied, Miracle settles back down, and Dean turns to lie on his back-
He nearly jumps out of his skin when he sees a body lying prone next to him. It takes longer than it should for him to remember Cas asking to stay in his room for the night. God, he’s losing his touch. A monster could sneak up on him and he would be none the wiser.
In the dark, Dean can faintly make out the gentle curls of Cas’s hair on the white pillowcase. Luckily, he didn’t wake up with Dean’s jerky nightmare movements and his moment with Miracle. Instead, his chest lifts and falls with each even breath, and his arms lay parallel to his torso. His sleeping position is just close enough to a corpse’s positioned body to be off-putting, like there is something not-human about him.
You didn’t save him.
But lying next to him is the very proof. Dean did save him, even if it meant a human life rather than an angelic one. Jack wouldn’t save him, so Dean did it, and now Cas -- or, at least, most of him -- lies here next to him, sleeping.
I did save him from the Empty, he tries to tell dream-Jack. I saved him when you wouldn’t, despite the consequences.
Before the Empty took him away, Cas made a desperate confession of a deal he had made. But it wasn’t the only thing that he confessed. If it had been a few months ago, or, hell, even a week ago, thinking about Cas’s last moments would be enough to send Dean straight to the kitchen fridge for a beer (or seven) or to the liquor he hid in his closet so Sam wouldn’t confiscate it.
Now, Cas is here. Cas is back. Cas made a confession, one of admiration and of love.
In the nights when alcohol wasn’t enough to quiet his head, Dean’s thoughts often ruminated on the confession, on the lonely nights he had spent as a teenager behind a dilapidated bar or at a dirty rest stop, on Jacob and Lee and Aaron and the boy from middle school, on his father, on the hunt where he had to burn the bodies of lesbian nuns, on the feelings he hadn’t let himself recognize since his early twenties. It was always so much easier to be with women. Loving both genders gave him the freedom to choose to only pursue what was “normal.”
Ever since meeting Cas, he had never let himself think about men like that.
Until, of course, Cas made a confession. After that, it was all he could think about. What would it be like to hold Cas’s hand? What would it be like to wake up every morning beside him? What would it be like to live the rest of his life growing old with him?
No son of mine, Dad had said. Just makin’ sure you’ve got that head of yours screwed on straight.
You have full control over the rest of your lives, dream Jack had said. But what will you do with it?
Maybe it’s the nightmare. Maybe it’s the memories. Maybe it’s months of touch starvation, of drowning in grief, of feelings he hadn’t even recognized within himself until Cas was brave enough to verbalize his own. The cause doesn’t matter.
Dean shoves every single thought out of his head, or locks them in a box and threw the key out the window, or just plain meditates until the only thing he can register is the sound of his own anxious heartbeat. With millimeter movements, Dean’s hand creeps closer and closer until finally his fingers ghost over Cas’s. He holds it there for a moment, glances up at Cas’s sleeping face, watches his chest rise and fall, and then, before he can chicken out, slides his fingers in between Cas’s own. His hand is soft and cool, and Dean gently tightens his fingers over his knuckles.
The mere act hits Dean harder than downing a bottle of melatonin, and slowly, slowly, Dean lets his eyes drift close, fingers wrapped firmly around Cas’s, palm resting on the other, the only point of contact between the two men.
The last thing he imagines is Cas’s fingers tightening around his own before sleep drags him under.
Chapter 4: dean puts out fires for cas
Summary:
“Come on, Jack,” Dean pleaded. “You gotta help us bring him back. I know you miss him. He was your dad. Please, Jack.”
To his right, a piece of paper fluttered to the floor and landed face-down, but something was written on the back that wasn’t there before. Slowly, Dean leaned over and pulled the paper closer. His stomach fell through his feet.
In Jack’s familiar scrawl, it read: The Empty will not harm you, but you must save him yourself.
Notes:
So sorry for the delay everyone. Please enjoy a new chapter and I promise the wait for the next one will be MUCH much shorter.
Chapter Text
“It is also then that I wish I believed in some sort of life after life, that in another universe, […] maybe he is that new puppy I see tugging at the end of my other neighbor's leash; maybe he is that toddler I saw running through the square a few months ago, shrieking with joy, his parents huffing after him; maybe he is that flower that suddenly bloomed on the rhododendron bush I thought had died long ago; maybe he is that cloud, that wave, that rain, that mist. It isn't only that he died, or how he died; it is what he died believing. And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.”
—A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara
“I thought I just really liked you as a friend, a best friend, because, like, I want to hang out with you all the time and I just love everything about you. But I kept wanting to… I don’t know, hug you and hold your hand, and then yesterday when you suggested it, I- I really wanted to kiss you.”
—Alice Oseman, Heartstopper: Volume Two
MONTHS BEFORE
“We need to talk.”
Dean frowned at his younger brother, pizza slice stopping halfway on the way to his mouth. “Heard of knockin’ first, Sammy?”
“Shut up, Dean.”
His giant sasquatch of a not-so-baby brother stood menacingly in the doorway to Dean’s bedroom, one hand still on the door handle and the other bunched up at his side. To Sam’s left, Dean had rolled the TV from one of the spare bedrooms into his own and was halfway through marathoning all the Val Kilmer movies in his DVD collection. Thank fuck “Real Genius” was on instead of “Prince of Egypt,” which Dean definitely doesn’t own.
Keeping his eyes trained on Sam, Dean slowly took a bite of his pizza. It always had been, and would continue to be, the best hangover food. “Thought you wanted to talk,” he mumbled in between chews, just to get a rise out of him. Sam grimaced - success.
In typical invasive-brother fashion, Sam wandered over to Dean’s desk, pulled out the chair, and folded himself into it, crossing one leg over the other. Between the legs and the shaggy hair and the button-down he wore, Sam oddly resembled a hippy therapist. He also let his beard grow out, much to Dean’s dismay. From his new seat, it was easy to see the ghost of a bruise lingering on his cheek.
Sam pressed his thumb into the palm of his opposite hand, his nervous tic. “I need you to talk to me.”
He knew the conversation would come, but even though he anticipated it, some visceral part of Dean recoiled. His pizza wasn’t appetizing anymore, but he forced himself to swallow and kept his eyes trained on Val rather than Sam. “‘Bout what?”
Sam just stared at him. Dean’s stomach twisted; his head ached.
“You serious?” Sam asked. “Do you seriously not know what I’m wanting us to talk about? You can still see where you punched me out, right?”
Teeth grinding, Dean kept his eyes trained on Val Kilmer. On screen, Kilmer said, “‘Rue the day?’ Who talks like that?” before being abruptly cut off by Sam ripping the TV plug out of the outlet. He slammed the cord down about as hard as you can slam a cord on the ground before resuming his glaring at Dean.
“I was watching that!”
“And I’m trying to have a damn conversation, Dean,” Sam snapped back.
Dean tossed the slice of pizza into the cardboard box resting next to him. “Fine. What? What do you want?”
“For one, you haven’t come out of your room for three days,” Sam said. “I know you’re avoiding me.” When Dean didn’t reply, he just pursed his lips. “Alright. For two, your drinking has gotten out of hand.”
Dean scoffed. “You ripped the plug on ‘Real Genius’ because you think I’m an alcoholic? What else is new, birds are flying?”
As he dragged a hand down his jaw, Sam shook his head. “Let me walk you through what happened the other night from my point-of-view. I come back from a wonderful night with Eileen. We went to dinner at a nice place near her apartment, then drove around to look at Christmas lights. Did you know it’s December now?”
He didn’t, but Dean kept his bitch face intact.
“And then I dropped her off at home and drove four hours back here from Kansas City,” Sam continued. “Didn’t stay the night. Couldn’t. And I was glad I didn’t when I got home and you weren’t responding. I hoped you were just asleep, but you weren’t in here. So I checked around, callin’ for you, no response. That’s alright. I thought maybe you fell asleep in front of the TV, so I checked your mancave.”
Dean’s bottom lip trembled. Dean-Cave, but he wouldn’t test his voice to correct him. He knew this story, sort of, in the bits and pieces he could remember: seeing Sam through wet eyes, a freezing cold shower, feeling drunk even hours and hours later.
“Found you there,” Sam said, voice cracking. “I don’t think I have ever seen you cry like that, Dean. I mean, I didn’t even know if you could see me, if you even realized I was there. It terrified me. All I could think about was what would’ve happened if I had stayed with Eileen that night: would you have gotten off that floor? Would you’ve drank yourself to death? Tell me, Dean.”
There were tears in Sam’s eyes at this point, and Dean couldn’t look at his baby brother anymore. Sam, however, had no such qualms, keeping an unrivaled stare on his brother. Dean could feel his eyes boring a hole into his head. Maybe they would drill deep enough to cut out the broken parts in his head, to burn all the parts that hurt the people he loves.
Sam audibly swallowed. “Seriously, man, I wanna know. I want you to talk to me. I need you to because I can’t keep constantly worrying about if you’re killing yourself, even if you don’t consciously mean to. I should be allowed to spend a night away from here.”
“I don’t need a fucking babysitter,” Dean snapped. Hell, he couldn’t even believe himself. His head pounded, a uncanny reminder of too many beers and too many whiskeys that got him into this in the first place.
“Then don’t make me act like one,” Sam snapped right back. “Clean up your own puke, sober yourself up, get yourself into bed instead of making me carry you because you’re too drunk to hold your own head up. Don’t take swings at me when I’m asking how you are. Don’t stay in your room for three days ‘cause you don’t wanna face me.” Leaning back, Sam hesitated, but he said it anyway: “You think that’s what Cas wanted for you?”
If his head wasn’t spinning, and if it wouldn’t prove Sam’s point about his anger, he’d be out of his seat. “Shut the fuck up, Sam,” Dean snarled. “You don’t know a thing about what he wanted.”
“Because you won’t tell me!” A tear slipped from Sam’s eye, but he didn’t wipe it away. “You know, he was my best friend too, Dean. You aren’t the only person in the world who lost Cas, but you are the only one acting like a dick because of it.”
He was angry. He couldn’t stop it. “I swear to God, Sam, if you don’t lay off-”
“What?” Sam sniped. “You gonna hit me again? Fine. Hit me again. But next time, you’re on your own because I can’t keep doing this if you’re not gonna talk to me.”
Dean swallowed, trying to get rid of the lump in his throat to no avail. He picked at a loose thread on his sweatpants. Out of the corner of his eye, Sam’s bruised eye seemed darker than ever.
“You don’t have to tell me any more about what Cas said to you,” Sam said quietly, finally rubbing the tears away. “It’s not my business, and I’m not gonna pry. But I really don’t think I deserve to get hit because I asked about it. You were a mess that night, Dean. I don’t even know that you remember what you told me. But don’t condemn me for asking.”
Just as with everything else, Dean only remembered bits and pieces of what he had choked out between broken sobs and excessive vomiting: most care-caring man on Earth, Sammy… goodbye, Dean, goodbye, Dean… He made a deal, Sammy, how could he make a deal?... sa- save Jack, but Jack died anyway… most selfless human being… why does this sound like a goodbye?... goodbye, Dean, goodbye, Dean… I love-
A sob rocked through Dean’s chest, but he didn’t let it come out his mouth. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t.
Deeming the conversation over, Sam dropped a photo on the bed by Dean’s knee. Even from far away, he knew which picture it was, the only one he kept in his wallet, the one he had clutched with a death grip just nights earlier, the one Sam must’ve held onto while Dean lost it under an icy shower: Cas, with a stupid little gas-station cowboy hat on, just hours after he came back the last time.
It took a death grip on his own thigh to keep from snatching it up and cradling it close. But Sam was halfway out the bedroom door by now, until he stopped briefly in the doorway.
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” Sam said, glancing back over his shoulder, “but I am the only person you have left. Jack is gone, Cas is dead, and you’re ignoring everyone else. So when you decide you don’t wanna be such a prick anymore, you know where to find me.”
Out the door Sam goes, leaving it wide open and the TV unplugged and his brother in shambles.
THE DAYS THAT FOLLOW
Cas seems to acclimate to human-hood pretty quickly. Easy enough, Dean guesses, after spending so many years with them, plus a short but terribly difficult stint as a human before, but still Cas settles in well.
Of course, being Cas, he still has moments: he burns some foods and eats others straight from the freezer because he doesn’t know how to properly work the microwave; he puts an overwhelming amount of toothpaste on his toothbrush, to the point that he has to spit about seventeen times during the two-minute process; he complains about having to “urinate” every single time he has to pee; he gets a stomachache from eating too many bananas in one sitting; he cuts his neck each time he shaves, to the point that Dean hands over (what was formerly) his electric razor; Sam has to take two bags full of shirts back to Old Navy in Kansas City because Cas doesn’t like the way they feel on his neck.
There’s also an incident with the toaster that nearly sends Cas flying through the roof (because it pops when it’s done, and “How was I supposed to know, Dean? Stop laughing!”) and forces Dean to use the fire extinguisher for the first time (because Cas decided three times toasted wasn’t toasty enough).
It’s hard to believe that it’s only been two days since he woke up, a week since Dean pulled him from the Empty.
After that first night in Dean’s bed, the one with the nightmares and the chick-flick moment, Dean woke up around eight and slid out of bed (which, although he would never admit it to anyone, was incredibly difficult because it meant he had to give up Cas’s hand). The former angel, however, slept for most of the day, getting up for lunch (see “The Toaster Incident(s)” and the banana bellyache), a fashion show (featuring the Old Navy clothes that Eileen brought up so he stops wearing Dean’s), and a Lord of the Rings marathon, but he passed out again somewhere during the second movie. Much to Sam’s dismay, Dean paused the second movie and insisted they wait until Cas woke up again to finish it. Dean ended up spending the night in the armchair next to him, waking up with a crick in his neck but more well-rested than he had been in months -- maybe even years.
Now, Dean sits in the library before dinner, scrolling through some random recipe blog site to search for meal inspiration. Less monsters to hunt means more time cooped up at home, and Sam begged him to cut back on all the sodium-packed fast food. Truthfully, he doesn’t even mind. Nothing beats a homemade burger, and cooking gives him something to do with his hands instead of reaching for a bottle.
“Why would you put chickpeas in chili?” he mutters to himself, clicking back off the site in favor of something with more meat and less rabbit food, Sam be damned. That is, until something flashes in the corner of his eye.
“Dean.”
Cas leans in the doorway, using the frame to hold himself up, and Dean flies out of his seat to give him a hand. “Dude, I told you to text me and I’d come get you.”
Even though he rolls his eyes, Cas lets Dean guide him over to a chair next to where Dean was. “I can walk. I’m human, not paralyzed.”
“Yeah, yeah. Talk to me again when you’re not leanin’ all your weight on me.”
Once he’s seated, Dean is slow to take his hands off of Cas, but Cas doesn’t seem to mind, or even notice. Instead, he tiredly gazes around the library, taking it in for the first time since the deal came to fruition.
“Last time I was here,” Cas murmurs, looking up at Dean, “Billie stopped your heart.”
Dean can remember the feeling like it was just moments ago, like a hand squeezing around his heart so hard it might pop. With a free hand, he rubs over the sore spot. “Yeah, don’t remind me.”
After Billie’s invasion and Cas’s sacrifice, walking in the bunker felt like existing in a ghost town. There was not a single spot that Dean could go without a memory of Cas popping up, and he couldn’t walk down the hallway to the dungeon for ages without a vice wrapping around his rib cage and a phantom fist in his chest.
Even now, with Cas in front of him, all Dean can remember is the angel with reddened eyes and a blanket around his shoulder, a curse from Rowena rushing through him, or the angel who tried to stop him without hitting back when he succumbed to the violence of the Mark, blood trailing down his face, or the angel who asked Jack to remove his grace to the brink of death so he could speak to the Empty.
Dean shakes his head sharply. The other versions disappear, and Dean tries to focus on the Cas that is here, the one who came back.
“What’s all of this?” Cas asks, glancing over the chaotic library. “A hunt in progress?”
“What? Oh, no. There haven’t been all that many monster sightings recently.” Dean shifts his weight on his feet, then sinks back down in his chair next to Cas. “This is all stuff related to, uh, getting your grace back.”
Looking up, Cas stares blankly at Dean. “My grace.”
“Yeah,” Dean replies and scratches the back of his neck. “You know, you’re human now. We couldn’t find another way. I figured we could get you out, get you breathing, and then we could go back. I left it in a vial in there. We can go back and get it somehow.” Dean gestures at the books scattered over the library tables. “We just need to find a way to get grace out of the Empty.”
Cas furrows his eyebrows, glancing around at the results of many late nights of reading and searching and more reading, and then he says: “No.”
Dean blinks. “No?”
“I’ve been thinking about our conversation outside yesterday.” The former angel slowly shakes his head. “No, I don’t want it.”
It’s Dean’s turn to stare. Thoughts fly through his head, bouncing off the sides with an almost audible ping ping ping, like marbles in a pinball machine. Why wouldn’t Cas want his grace back? To fall from on high, where he has any power Dean could dream of, where he could heal people and never grow old and smite the bad guys with just a press of his hand? Where he could appear anywhere in any world and even in various times with just a thought and a wish? Where he could go up to heaven and see his son whenever he could? Why would anyone give that up?
“You realize what you’re choosing, man, right?” Dean has to ask. “You’ll age. You’ll die in a few decades, if not sooner-”
“Dean,” Cas sighs. “I have been alive for millennia. I witnessed the birth of stars and the death of galaxies. I watched the evolution from animal to man. I have fought my own brothers and sisters in battles well beyond the ones we faced together, and I led heavenly battalions against Lucifer time and time again. But it is only the last twelve years that I learned how to feel, and how to love. I became a father and a friend because of the things that you taught me.”
The now-human man leans forward, a step into Dean’s space, and his blue eyes bore into Dean’s own. He’s close, but Dean wouldn’t look or shift away even for a hurricane. “I would much rather spend the last thirty years of my life aging and dying beside you than eons after having loved and lost you.”
There’s that word again, falling from Cas’s lips: love. Dean’s stomach twists, and for a moment he’s in the dungeon, and Billie is pounding on the door, and Cas pulls a knife out of Dean’s pocket because of course he knows where it is. Of course he knows where Dean keeps everything important.
If Dean were a braver man, he would tell Cas to stay close to him. He would tell Cas to open his ribs and read his soul because he is certain the words that he cannot bring himself to say are written loud and clear on it. His chest aches with it, but his throat closes over the words.
He prays that Cas knows he keeps everything important close to him. He hopes that Cas knows how Dean feels about him, and about everything he feels for him, even if he can’t find the words on his own.
“Okay,” Dean whispers, because he can’t force himself to say anything else at any other volume, “if that’s what you want.”
Leaning back, Cas nods firmly. “That is what I want.”
Would this be what Cas wants?
The marbles still. The pinging stops. Dean takes a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding since Sam let him in on the choice they’d have to make on Cas’s behalf. He may not have had an original choice, but given the one to get it back, he does not want it, and Dean can live with that.
Finally, Dean tears his gaze away, instead drifting over some of the open books he tried to read and abandoned. “You really made me read all of these books though, didn’t you?”
Cas smiles, small and bright. “As if I could ever make Dean Winchester do anything.”
Little does he know, Dean thinks, that Cas could make him do anything if he only asked. Dean would give up the world for him, and somehow, the thought doesn’t even scare him. If Dean were a braver man, he would tell Cas that, too.
WEEKS BEFORE
As was almost routine at this point, Dean sat on the edge of his bed, an unopened bottle of cheap bourbon held in one hand. The only way Dean could keep track of days and nights in the windowless bunker was by listening out for Sam’s movement around the bunker, and his bedroom door had clicked quietly closed down the hallway less than an hour earlier. He wasn’t embarrassed about the drinking, but it was easier to sleep during the day and drink himself dizzy at night so he didn’t have to cope with Sam’s disappointed looks or attempts to drag him out of the bunker or cajoling into eating some new veggie of the week. It was easier, after that argument a few nights earlier, to avoid Sam altogether.
Now, of course, it’s night. Now, of course, Dean planned to crack open the bottle and blast some Metallica through his headphones until he was so overwhelmed he couldn’t form coherent thoughts.
But before he could crack the cap, something caught his eye — a hint of blue poking out from underneath a stack of books and random paperwork on his desk.
Dean’s breath caught in his throat.
With Jack’s physical size, it was always difficult to remember that the kid was only three years old before he took over as the new God. But then the kid would open his mouth, or give a little wave, or generally do something that a twenty-something year old wouldn’t do, and his youth would slam into Dean like a subway train.
The blue paper proved his age. In the time after the world disappeared, but before they defeated Chuck, Jack had paced back and forth in front of Dean’s room, back and forth for nearly half an hour, and Dean was about to yell at him to knock it off when he tentatively shoved it underneath Dean’s door.
In white and black crayon, Jack had drawn a pretty realistic depiction of Miracle, the dog who had only been in their lives for minutes before Chuck erased him from existence, too.
Now, Dean pulled the paper out from under the stacks on top of it. There were a few small creases, but Miracle was still as white and chipper as he is in real life now. He thumbed over Miracle’s smiling face, then traced the corner where the kid had signed his name with the K backwards.
“To Dean,” it read on the back. “We’ll bring Miracle back, and everyone else, too. Love, Jack.”
At least the kid could follow through on one promise. He should have qualified it with an “almost.”
Without looking back, Dean sat on the edge of his bed, still clutching Miracle’s drawing tightly. “Jack,” he whispered without knowing why. He looked around his room, covered in empty bottles and paperwork and books packed with lore, and with a single nightstand on the one side of the bed he slept on.
Cas’s son, the new God. The three-year-old, the all-powerful nephilim. How could Jack be two drastically different things? How could he balance them? How could Dean have been so hard on the kid who drew him a crayon picture of a puppy, who wanted so desperately to be loved? Why did he have to treat him like his father had treated Dean?
“We lost him, too,” Sam’s voices echoed in his head. “I want him to know that I’m still thinking of him, and that we love him.”
Cas would be so angry with him for the way he treated Jack.
Suddenly, before he could even process it, his mouth was moving seemingly on its own. “Hey, Jack,” Dean whispered. He didn’t even know what he was planning to say. Praying out loud always made it easier to pray at all; at least then, he’d be sure the message could be heard, whatever ended up coming out.
“I hope you’re okay, kid,” Dean said, and he meant it. “It’s a big job you took on, and I’m sure it hasn’t been easy. Hopefully you’ve got some angels helping you sort everything out up there.”
He scoffed. The only angel the kid could really need was his own father. “Some angels” would never amount to Cas, that much is certain. But Dean shook the thought away; he wasn’t praying to condemn Jack. Not this time.
“I’m, uh, not sure if you did something, but there’s a lot less monsters now, so if that was you, thank you. We’re, uh, me and Sam, we’re grateful for the breather, man.”
Truly, this whole prayer thing couldn’t go worse. He couldn’t even believe what he was saying. Dean clenched his fists. What was it that Sam had said he prays to Jack about?
The crinkle of the drawing reminded him: home.
Dean took a deep breath, rubbed his jaw. “I know Sammy’s told you already, but you- you’ve always got a home here, Jack. I know- I know your father isn’t around, but we’re your family, too. Sam would love to see you. I just… I don’t wanna be the reason you don’t come home to visit.
“I know you’re hands-off now, but you can always come visit, even if it’s for five minutes or whatever. We would love to have you here. And I’ve been angry, and I’ve said things to you… and I won’t lie. I meant them. But I had- I have this habit of laying into you when I get angry. I know that’s not always fair to you. I’m sorry I couldn’t have been a better uncle or role model or whatever to you. I didn’t mean to take my anger out on you all the time. I just- I want you to come home, if you want that, too.”
With a sigh, Dean opened his eyes and had to wipe away a runaway tear. “Man, I’m no good at this. I wish Cas were here. He was much better at the whole father-figure thing than me.”
Cas Cas Cas. Cas, who made a deal to save Jack. Cas, who died to save Dean.
Dean swiped under his eyes. “I guess I just don’t understand, man. Please. I know you’re hands-off, but why does that have to mean Cas, too? He died to save us, man. Me and you. And he gets to rot in eternal regret for it?”
He could hear the sucking sound of the Empty opening up, the rush as it came to swallow Cas whole. He could hear Billie pounding on the dungeon door. He could hear the clink of the glasses as he and Cas make a toast late one night, when just the two of them are awake. He could hear Cas’s grumbling voice saying “Dean,” somehow simultaneously a reprimand and a show of faith.
When he blinked, he could see Cas’s smiling, tearful face. I love-
“Come on, Jack,” Dean pleaded. “You gotta help us bring him back. I know you miss him. He was your dad. Please, Jack.”
To his right, a piece of paper fluttered to the floor and landed face-down, but something was written on the back that wasn’t there before. Slowly, Dean leaned over and pulled the paper closer. His stomach fell through his feet.
In Jack’s familiar scrawl, it read: The Empty will not harm you, but you must save him yourself.
THE DAYS THAT FOLLOW
Dean molds the kitchen around him like a second skin now that Cas is back.
Beyond holiday dinners and meals when they knew they’d be home for a while, likely recovering from an awful hunt with more severe injuries, Dean picked up cooking again. He had been a pretty creative chef as a kid, finding a million and one ways to spice up Kraft box mac-and-cheese, adding everything from chopped hot dogs to marshmallow fluff to appease a younger brother who wouldn’t eat the same thing twice in a row. But life on the road for so long caused fast food habits, and more often than not, takeout was easier than cleaning out the fridge after an extended time away.
After Chuck was gone, Sam and Dean spent more time in the bunker than ever. When Dean didn’t have a raging hangover and could manage to pull himself out of his self-made bed of depression, he’d putz around the kitchen again, even splurging once on a fancy cast-iron griddle for the stove. He only used it a few times, but tonight, with more than just his brother to feed, what better time to try it again than now?
After peeling and cutting up potatoes for french fries, Dean decides he doesn’t like where they keep the potato peeler, then that the spot for the stove utensils is just too far from the actual stove, and hey, the silverware has never been that easily accessible, and the next thing he knows, the island and the table are both covered in everything out of random cabinets, bins, and drawers so he can rearrange it.
But he has absolutely no idea how to put it all back.
“Fuck,” he mumbles.
Hell, maybe he should just go get Sam or Cas. Maybe they’ll have opinions on what good spots for each thing might be. Mind made up, he turns away from the mess and starts for the library where he left Cas with his laptop and unadulterated access to the Internet.
As he turns the corner down the hallway, Dean shakes his head. Who is he kidding? Cas probably doesn’t even know what half of the utensils are for, and Sam will just be pissed that he decided now was the right time to reorganize the kitchen he had been using with Eileen for months-
“Yeah, we gotta put all these books back at some point since we don’t need them anymore,” Sam’s voice echoes from the library. “Dean’s finally left you alone for a bit, I see.”
At the sound of his name, Dean stops short just before the doorway so the two men in the library can’t see him.
“He has been very… concerned,” Cas replies amiably.
Sam snorts. “So, slightly overbearing?”
Fuck off, Sam.
“I would prefer worried, or perhaps apprehensive. Although he doesn’t believe I can walk on my own.”
He probably could walk on his own, but then Dean wouldn’t be allowed to touch him. He would have no excuse to feel Cas’s arms through his trench coat and through his sweater, the warmth of his body proving that he’s alive. He’s alive, he’s alive, he’s alive. Cas Cas Cas.
“Yeah,” Sam sighs. A chair squeaks against the wooden floor as it is pulled away from the table, likely to make room for Gigantor to sit down. “Definitely worried. He wouldn’t leave your side at all while you were in the infirmary. Slept in a wheely-chair and everything.”
A moment passes quietly, almost long enough that Dean steps out to reveal himself, but now they would notice that they didn’t hear him approaching, and fuck, has he really committed to this whole eavesdropping thing?
“Dean was losing his mind before we got you back, man,” Sam says. There’s a lilt to his voice, like he’s trying to play it off, but Dean knows his brother better than anyone. “He, um… There was a point a few months after everything played out that I thought I was gonna lose him, too.
“Lose him?” Sam must nod, because Cas follows it with a harsh, “What do you mean, lose him?”
Memories of drunken nights and reckless driving and throwing himself headfirst into supposed monster dens flash through his head. But Dean had a handle on it for the most part. Sure, he lost control sometimes, like that night Sam dumped him into a cold shower, but he was only hurting himself.
At least, he thought he was.
“You know how he gets when he loses someone. He gets impulsive and angry. And we haven’t been encountering very many monsters, so there hasn’t really been a good way to distract him or release some of that anger.”
“Why was he angry? You two defeated Chuck. It would not have been possible without him alive. I have no regrets.”
“It’s not your fault, Cas. I don’t mean to make it sound that way. But I think he felt a lot of responsibility for you dying. You know how he is. Like, I think he feels guilty about Jack, and the way their relationship was, and the burden that Jack had to take on as such a young kid. But more than that, I know he felt the guiltiest about how things played out with you.”
“With me?”
“Yeah. You know, the whole sacrifice-yourself-to-the-Empty-to-save-him thing.”
“I made that deal to save Jack, and Dean needed to stay alive to kill Chuck. He knows that.”
“Sure, yeah. But I think he feels guilt about the consequences of the deal.”
“It was my choice to invoke it-”
“It was, I’m not saying that it wasn’t,” Sam amends again. “Look, man. I don’t know the whole story; Dean never told me in detail what happened that night. He told me that you made a deal with the Empty to save Jack when we brought him back, and that you told him some things, and then the terms of the deal were invoked. And I’m sure that whatever you said was meaningful and needed to be said, but it really screwed him up, too. To the point where I wasn’t sure he was ever going to drag himself out of this pit of despair he was stuck in.”
Dean closes his eyes and presses a hand to his aching chest.
So, now Cas knows. He knows what an ass Dean was while he was gone. What a legacy, Dean Winchester. Cas calls you the most selfless, loving man he has ever known, and when he dies, you treat everyone around you like shit, Sam most of all. Not to mention Jack, who he can’t even properly apologize to now, or Eileen, who has had to put up with his shit via Sam and his feelings, and Claire. God, Claire.
He got so wrapped up in his own shit, he didn’t even realize how much he hurt the people around him. They won, for Christ’s sake, and yet Dean is the one who made it feel like the worst thing that could ever happen.
“I’m just telling you all this so you’re aware of it, not to make you feel responsible for what he felt,” Sam says after a pause. “I think he feels like losing you to the Empty was his fault. You guys just need to make sure you’re on the same page, or he is never going to stop beating himself up for whatever happened that night, and I can’t lose my brother. Not after everything.”
The confession punches the air from Dean’s lungs. In his head, Sam is fifteen again, dragging drunken Dean home from a bar fight after he hustled some forty-year-old losers. They didn’t even need the money that time. He did it for the thrill, for the fun of it all, and Sam was the one who had to suffer for it. Sam was always the one who had to pay the price.
“I just…” Sam trails off. “I want you to know how much losing you hurt him. You’re important to him, to both of us. We missed you like crazy, man.”
Briefly, they fall silent until Castiel replies, “I understand. Thank you for telling me.”
Each rib feels like it is cracking, caving in on itself, but Dean can’t convince his feet to let him leave and take him away from the torture of his brother’s words. Instead, he lets the wall catch him, closing his eyes again like being blind will keep the world from tilting around him.
Because that’s all it is, isn’t it? He ruined himself, became Sam’s responsibility, and then he couldn’t live with that still, so he pulled Cas from the Empty all for himself. He always was a selfish bastard. He couldn’t even save Cas with his grace. He didn’t even think about what might happen to Cas once he got topside; he just knew that Cas being back with him- with them would probably be something he wanted.
Happiness isn’t in the having, Cas had said. But what if the happiness was in the having? Having him back? In Cas having his own life back, free from Chuck’s thumb, to choose to do what he wanted, to continue to choose free will, to maybe choose a life here on Earth? To choose a life with the Winchesters?
Saving Cas was the right choice, even if it had been a selfish one.
Right?
“You haven’t been in his room yet, have you? I don’t think he’s gotten a chance to clean it up.”
If he hadn’t been kicking bottles underneath his bed while Cas showered two nights before, Dean would whip around the corner and strangle his kid brother.
Thankfully, Cas seems to agree that that night was their little secret, because he says, “I’m not sure Dean has ever been one to redecorate.”
Goddamn it, the kitchen. He had completely forgotten that’s what put him here in the first place.
Sam laughs. “It’s good to have you back, Cas.”
Dean hopes Cas thinks the same.
He can’t bring himself to eavesdrop any longer. As quickly as he can, Dean quietly shuffles back to the wreck he made of the kitchen, taking care that neither man could hear him. He doesn’t need any more of Sam’s pity or sympathetic looks. He doesn’t need to hear any more about how he fucked up Sam’s life for the past year, or hell, even longer. He’s been fucking up Sam’s life ever since he went back to get him from Stanford.
How can he ever make it up to his baby brother, to Eileen, to Jack, to Jody, to Claire, to everyone he hurt while trapped in a living coffin of his own making?
Dean rubs his eye with one hand, harsh enough to see spots of light. His phone weighs heavy in his jeans pocket. Seven texts individually sent out to Claire, all with no response. Maybe he should just call her and insist she come and see Cas for herself. Maybe she just doesn’t believe Dean. Hell, maybe he’s blocked, or she switched numbers. Wouldn’t be the first time someone changed their number to get away from him, not even the first family member.
God, how pissed would he have been if Dad had died without telling them? How pissed would he and Sam have been to find out from somebody else, and to learn that everyone else knew before he did?
He taps the phone against his hand a few times and sighs. Finally, he unlocks it, scrolling through his contacts until he finds her name, and presses ‘Call.’
As expected, it barely rings once, an automated voice ringing out to ask for a voicemail, but that’s what Dean hoped for. At least she didn’t block his number.
“Claire, hey,” he says quietly. He glances behind him just to make sure he is really alone. “I know you’re angry with me, and you have every right to be. I just- he’s back. We got him back. And I know he would love to see you. He, uh, has his phone back, too, if you’d wanna just shoot him a text or something. He’d be over the moon, really. Or just show up here. We’re at the bunker still.”
Glancing around the kitchen, Dean’s eyes fall on the photos on the fridge, added by Jack over the years to “make it feel more like home.” Among various selfies of the kid with any of the three of them, a few of Miracle doing dog things, one blue paper with a crude drawing of Miracle, and one of Mary with her arms around her seated sons, there is one of the brothers and Claire, Alex, and Jody, taken of them around the dinner table in Jody’s house. Claire and Dean sit across from each other, identical annoyed looks lining their features at having to take a photo instead of cramming Jody’s incredible lasagna into their faces.
Once upon a time, he was exactly like Claire, in his early twenties with rage pouring out of every crevice and a torn-open heart that yearned for someone, anyone, to cradle it. He wouldn’t forgive the person responsible for his parent’s death, either.
Jack, he thinks, and it ruins him.
Dean closes his eyes, breathes deeply, and prays that she is a more forgiving kid than he ever was.
“You’re always welcome here, kiddo, you know that,” he says quietly to her voicemail. “I hope you know that.”
He takes one breath, and then another, and then hangs up the phone.
WEEKS BEFORE
“He told me he loved me, and then he died.”
Sam flinched in surprise, then seemed to recover, only to be surprised all over again by the content of Dean’s words. He was sitting at the library table with his laptop and a notepad, clearly making a list for some kind of ritual.
Sam looked like he wanted to say something, like he always does, but instead, while keeping his eyes on Dean, he closed his laptop and nodded.
Dean swallowed around the rock in his throat, fought against everything in his body screaming at him to shut up shut up shut the fuck up no one wants to hear about your problems no one wants to hear that you’re getting blasted because some angel said you were worth living for-
“Cas,” Dean clarified, even though he didn't have to. He clenched his eyes shut. “He told me that I was good, and that I changed him, and that he loved me. Then he pushed me out of the way, and the Empty took Billie, and it took him, too.”
Audibly, Sam took a steadying breath. Dean focused on it, on any sound he could hear, even the clinks of the fridge down the hall and the whoosh of the heating system and anything he could hear so he didn’t have to see Cas getting taken over and over and over again, so he didn’t have to open his eyes and look at his brother’s pitying expression.
“I didn’t say it back,” he continued, voice cracking. “I think he died without ever hearing anyone tell him that they loved him.”
“He knew we loved him,” Sam interjected softly.
Dean swiped under his teary eyes, finally opening them but looking anywhere except at Sam’s face. “He died believing I was a better man than I am. I just… I don’t know how I’m supposed to live with that. Knowing that he sacrificed himself for someone that wasn’t worth saving.”
“That’s not true, Dean.”
Dean scoffed. “Fuck you. We all know he should’ve been the one to stay alive. Jack needed him.”
“That’s not true, Dean,” Sam repeated. “And I could argue with you all day about why, but we both know damn well it won’t convince you.”
Sometimes, Dean forgot that Sam could read him almost as well as he could read Sam. He really hated that about his brother.
“So how about this,” Sam said. “Cas made a sacrifice that you had no choice in, but one you now have to live with. He chose to summon the Empty because he loved you, Dean, and he thought that you were worth saving, even if you don’t think that. But you didn’t get a say. He made the choice for you, so stop beating yourself up for something you cannot be responsible for. And killing yourself with recklessness and drinking is a real shitty way to honor Cas’s sacrifice.”
If Dean had about an ounce more energy and will, he would’ve lunged for Sam’s throat. But he was exhausted, and frankly, it was a shitty thing to do: throw his life away after he was given another chance by the sacrifice of his best friend.
The piece of paper in his hand started to feel heavy with emotional weight, so he sniffed and tossed the paper toward his brother. With a furrowed brow, Sam finally glanced away from him and pulled the paper toward himself.
“I prayed to Jack again,” Dean said quietly, “and he sent me this.”
Sam read the note once, twice, three times, then looked back at Dean with wide eyes. “Dean.”
“Did you read it?”
“You can’t be serious.”
Dean just raised a single eyebrow.
Sam shook his head. “Going into the Empty by yourself? It’s practically suicide, and, given your emotional state right now, I don’t trust you to make that call.”
“Well, Jack says it’s not,” Dean replied. “Look, Sam — I’m getting Cas out with or without you. You asked me to talk, and I talked. This is me with the olive branch. Now, are you gonna help me or not?”
Sam stared at him, and stared, and stared, and then sighed. “I’ll keep looking into it.”
It’s the closest to a yes he’d get, and something that’s not quite relief washed over Dean. Hell — he almost smiled. But the grief and the guilt reared their ugly heads and sunk deep in his chest, and his fingers itched for a drink, so he turned around and walked back toward his room.
“Merry Christmas, Dean.”
Dean stopped, and almost looked back. He couldn’t quite make it. He was too afraid that maybe he would look back and not see Sam at all, but instead see his little brother, baby-faced and innocent, the boy who still believed in Santa Claus and didn’t know anything about monsters, who still believed their dad would come home in time and drink hot cocoa and unwrap presents with them, who still believed in fairytales, who still believed that Dean was the best big brother a kid could ask for.
“Merry Christmas, Sammy,” he mumbled, and then walked away.
AngelandHunter1 on Chapter 1 Sun 22 Dec 2024 04:01AM UTC
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