Work Text:
“In lieu of
flowers, send
him back.”
-Andrea Cohen, Refusal to Mourn
The first petal fell on a hunt in Ohio.
It was innocuous. Quick. Just a wheezing cough between blows, then a tiny pale violet thing fluttered from his breath to the filthiness of the barn floor.
(Of course, it had to be a barn.)
A flower petal, he realized. It had probably hitched a ride on his jacket or something and got knocked loose during the fight. But it was tinted with red, and the vamp who’d been trying to run him down couldn’t help but stop and stare. Like wafting an irresistible, freshly-baked pie past someone’s face even though they were in the middle of a burger. Dean took advantage of the distraction and swung, eliminating the last of the nest.
He leaned against an exposed piece of rebar to catch his breath, wincing at a twinge in his chest. He was getting too old for this shit.
“Well, uh, why don’t you get the kids home, and I’ll clean this up?” Dean suggested, gesturing to the mess of masked heads and headless bodies.
“You sure?” Sam asked, tucking his machete back into his thigh holster.
“Yeah.” His battery was running low; he didn’t have it in him to put on his own mask and play nice for the kids. Didn’t have it in him to pretend at a lot of things lately.
Sam shielded the kids from view as he led them to the Impala, leaving Dean to build a pyre.
While gathering wood and bodies to burn, he spared one last glance at the petal that saved him. It was so innocent and out of place lying there amidst the slaughterhouse of a scene.
It felt wrong.
Outside, the blaze threw a column of smoke into the air. Though he was upwind, his eyes stung and watered. His throat tickled.
It never got any easier, burning bodies.
Unbidden, he thought of all the pyres he’d built before. Thought of—
Cas’ body next to Kelly’s. At least there had been a body to burn; they couldn’t say the same for Mom or Crowley.
They couldn’t say the same this last time, the very last time. There’d been no body to burn. There hadn’t been anything—
He coughed hard. He moved away from the smoke, hacking until something came loose in his lungs. When he pulled his hand away, another blood-tinged petal glistened in his cupped palm, gleaming like a twisted pearl from a sick oyster.
Dean stared at it for a long second before dusting it off, letting it burn to a crisp alongside the bodies. He turned his gaze to the city skyline until the fire was nothing but embers.
(Of course, it had to be Canton.
When he’d been here last, a time god warned him his future was covered in thick black ooze.
How right Chronos had been.)
When it was done, he went back inside the barn to grab the rest of their gear.
The first petal was still on the floor.
He kicked some straw over it as he left and tried not to think of barns anymore.
(Looking back, he wonders if dying there would’ve been the kinder death.
It would’ve been quicker, at least.)
***
Really, when he thought about it, the flower crap must’ve started before the vampire hunt.
Started with a pain and tightness in his throat that he attributed to silenced grief—there was never any goddamn time to grieve—which kept getting worse with each passing day.
Started that day in the dungeon, the second that Cas opened his big fat mouth, and Dean was too choked up to say anything real back.
Started back before then, maybe.
***
He collected a nice stash of the purple flowers—lilacs, he was pretty sure—and hid them in his nightstand. Hid them the way he hid hoarded food and cassette tapes and pictures. The rest he trashed or flushed or let fall to the ground when walking Miracle.
He’d been sitting in bed watching Tombstone on his laptop, trying to drown out his tell-tale wheezes with Doc Holliday’s, when the urge to cough became unbearable. He expected another lilac, but a clump of pale pink petals wet his palm instead.
Cherry blossoms, he recognized, like the ones that bloomed in Lawrence and rained over Mom’s grave, like the ones that got stuck in all their hair when they made a pit stop there on their way to blow up Amara.
(He’d actually thought he was going to die then. Accepted it, even.
Cas had offered to go with him. To die with him. All so he wouldn’t be alone, the same way Dean did for Sam when it looked like Lucifer was gonna win.
(You changed me, Dean.)
Maybe it had started then, when all Dean had offered in return was a smile Cas couldn’t see, a thanks, and a pat on the back.
Maybe it had started amidst all the dying greenery that Amara and the broken sun left in their wake, and a small part of Dean wished he’d accepted Cas’ offer.)
He let the petals fall to the ground.
And they never stopped falling.
***
Pollinating flowers—lavender, trillium, pansies—joined the garden incubating in his lungs next.
He couldn’t hide it from Sam anymore by then; he smelled like a goddamn florist’s shop. No amount of mints could cover up his perfume breath.
Sam did what Sam did best and researched, digging into the archives about curses. He found a name for what was happening to Dean buried in a book of Japanese lore, handed down from Bobby’s collection.
“I think you might have Hanahaki,” Sam said, nervously biting his thumbnail after he slid the tome across the library table.
“Hannah what?” He played dumb and let Sam prattle on, just to give him something to do.
What Sam didn’t know was that Dean had already been doing research himself, just with different books: old farmers’ almanacs, books about the language of flowers, books he didn’t like admitting he read.
Lavender—symbolic of queer identity.
Trillium—one of the flowers that birthed the term ‘bisexual’.
Pansies—well, that one was obvious. Not like he never heard the term in shady bars, tossed between the mouths of one drunk hunter to another before. It wasn’t necessarily thrown in Dean’s direction (they always assumed he was wholly and completely one of them), but it was enough not to give them a reason to think otherwise. To reflexively puff himself up, to lean into the fact that he liked women, to put on the skin of hedonistic machismo the way he put on Dad’s leather jacket.
Every cough felt like damnation. His room became a potpourri bowl of shame. Just like there wasn’t a body to burn, there wasn’t a body to bury, no grave upon which to set these flowers down.
He coughed up another bloom, and as he stared impassively at his blood-flecked palm, it hit him that he didn’t care anymore. Who he’d been when he was in his twenties had been dead and buried, quite literally, countless times now.
So while Sam stayed busy flipping through heavy tomes, scouring obscure Internet rabbit holes, and calling every hunter they knew, Dean dried out his collection of petals, cooked them to a mush in a cast-iron pan, and rolled the pulp into equal-sized balls. He pierced the dried balls to make beads, threading them through with wire and twine, until he had enough rosaries for every kind of prayer.
Red roses—love.
Prayer is a sign of faith, Cas told Dean.
(Started then, maybe.)
Green carnations—same sex love.
I prayed to you, Cas, every night.
(Started then, maybe.)
White calla lilies—divine love, death.
I need you to keep the faith for both of us right now, Dean had told Sam. ‘Cause right now, I… I don’t believe in a damn thing.
(Started then, maybe.)
Every cough felt like salvation. He didn’t have to hide anymore, or even do the work of admitting anything to himself. The flowers did that for him.
And they’d do it ‘til they killed him.
***
Sleep became difficult. Not that he ever slept through the night in the first place, but it was getting harder to breathe while lying flat, and it was hard to sleep sitting up. He was screwed no matter what he tried.
So he stopped trying.
He burned a fresh crop of morning glories gathering in his gut with a scalding pot of dark brew, trying to stay awake another day.
Morning, sunshine. Want some coffee?
(Started then, maybe.)
He fell asleep at the kitchen table anyway.
A phrase that didn’t belong to his memories, in a wretched whisper he didn’t recognize, from an entity he had never met, floated to him in his dreams.
I want you to suffer. I want you to go back to your normal life and then forget about this and forget about me. And then, when you finally give yourself permission to be happy and let the sun shine on your face, that’s when I’ll come. That’s when I’ll come to drag you to nothing.
He woke with tears streaming down his face and something clogging his airway.
In his brief sleep, sunflowers had crawled up his esophagus and out of his mouth, climbing toward the ceiling in a desperate attempt to seek some sun within the darkness of the bunker.
He scratched at his skin in similar desperation, his temple veins getting hot and tight from asphyxia.
Sam tripped over a stalk in the hallway as he ran in and hacked him free with a machete and with some painful, forceful yanking.
Dean didn’t sleep much at all after that.
***
Sam took a day trip to Hell to talk to Rowena while Dean watched the spell bowl, every once in a while pausing to prune back sunflowers so he could breathe through the thickness in his throat.
He wondered: if he went outside, would the flowers be satisfied enough to stop, or would they keep trying to climb toward the sun until they burned, like Icarus with his wings?
***
He had a few days of relief thanks to a pesticide inhaler that Sam and Rowena developed for him. It wasn’t a cure, just a temporary measure that killed him as much as it saved him. Like the way the first petal that fell had killed him as much as it saved him.
“Any better?” Sam asked hopefully.
I’m inhaling magical Monsanto, he wanted to say. In what world is that better?
“Dandy.”
He stifled another pansy from blooming in his chest.
***
They were eating dinner when Dean felt something get stuck.
He tried clearing it, but Sam shot him a subtle, worried look. When it lodged further, he stood up, hacking and pounding at his chest. Sam pounded on his back until the obstruction scraped up his throat and flew past his lips.
Huckleberries, still clinging to their twiggy vines, landed on his plate. With the artful way his blood decorated the ceramic, it looked like something a Michelin-star restaurant would charge an arm and a leg for.
He closed his eyes, his heart bleeding with it.
I’m your huckleberry.
(Started then, maybe.)
Sam slowly sat back down, giving him a look that he wasn’t ready to face.
***
Doc Holliday had nothing on him for the way he constantly sweated and coughed into handkerchiefs, spattering them bloody with botanicals, for the way he wielded garden shears the way he once held a gun.
“Hey, who looks better: me or Val Kilmer?” Dean joked as he wiped his mouth. He was getting better at pulling the flowers out intact until the nerve-like cluster of roots dangled from his fingertips.
Sam didn’t dignify him with a response.
***
“Dean… all the lore says one thing,” Sam said the next morning in the library. Dean kept trying to pitch softball hunts, but the only case Sam wanted to work on was Dean’s. “I know he’s not around to return your feelings, but maybe if you just say it out loud—?”
Dean couldn’t help himself. He started laughing.
Sam didn’t know that he was the one who hadn’t returned Cas’ feelings. Not verbally, anyway. He couldn’t. There had been no time.
(There’d been over ten years’ worth of time.)
(Started then, maybe.)
It was less a case of unrequited love than unadmitted love, and admitting it out loud or in his head felt pointless when the one he was admitting love to wasn’t around anymore.
He laughed until he coughed, and coughed until he threw up.
In his vomit, the eyes of black hellebores stared up at him, piercing in their judgment.
***
It wasn’t just his lungs that the petals were spawning from. He could taste it on his breath from somewhere deeper; he had been eating less as the space in his stomach became invaded by the flower du jour.
He could feel vines crawling up the trellis of his ribs, winding around his GI tract, constricting his liver. Sharp blades of grass dug into his spleen, and leaves tickled his bladder. He passed seeds like kidney stones.
When he coughed, he couldn’t tell if it was because his lungs were failing or his heart was.
It didn’t matter. Both were broken.
***
Once, he had an itch in his eye that wouldn’t go away, no matter how much he rubbed. When his furious, burning tears began turning bloody, he pulled his lower lids down in the mirror and stayed hunched over his bedroom sink until he was able to dig out what looked like a splinter at first—only it kept going, and going, and going, until he’d pulled a piece of dried corn stalk as tall as he was.
He pulled until it hurt to see, until he had enough to bundle into a little effigy, the way bored kids made. Only this one had distinctive, messy cornsilk hair.
Later, he coughed up a pair of perfect cornflower blue eyes.
He kept it on his nightstand on a bed of dried petals, surrounded by homemade rosaries, and talked to it in lieu of sleeping.
***
Poison combatted poison.
He coughed up brugmansia, inhaled glyphosate. Sneezed out white oleander petals, sniffed paraquat. It got to the point that Dean wondered if he should just swallow the plants back down, kill fire with fire. He was dying all the same, so what did it matter?
Belladonna made his stomach twist, and he spent a whole week on the floor of the bathroom, painting the porcelain all manner of scarlet as he thought of Charlie.
What, did you break up with someone, too?
What about Castiel? He seems dreamy.
He retched up a batch of foxglove in the kitchen sink, then grabbed a beer, pipetting in a few drops of an herbicidal tincture Rowena concocted for him. As he walked back to the den, he passed Sam’s room, where he could hear Sam praying—begging—angrily with Jack.
Dean would try, but the only being he ever wanted to pray to wouldn’t be able to hear him. He had nothing but a cornflower-eyed doll, a handful of rosaries, and an endless supply of mourning flowers. He could gather his bouquet of grief and play an eternal game of he loves me, he loves me not, if he wanted to, except he already knew the final answer.
***
Briefly resigned to no help on the Jack front, Sam agreed to a run-of-the-mill hunt. Nothing strenuous, just a rogue crossroads demon that Rowena had been unable to wrangle back to Hell.
Outside for the first time in days, bugs flocked to Dean like rotting fruit, taking harsher bites and sharper stings than usual.
He chalked it up to a bad summer or something until Sam pointed out they weren’t bothering him.
While they investigated the farm that bore the first signs of classical demon activity—cattle mutilation—Dean swore the grass beneath him stuck to his soles like Velcro, trying to keep him in place as they hopped the fence.
Cattle that had chewed placidly when Sam approached ran from Dean, faster than spooked horses, and the sheep followed suit.
The demon, when they found him, seemed to delight in the flowery smell of death Dean carried. Mocked them about their lack of an angel.
“He summoned me, you know. You and that kid you call God. They were working a case all by their lonesome. Funny—I thought I’d die before the angel did.”
Dean’s coughing ruined the exorcism, so Sam had to stab the demon in the throat with Ruby’s old knife.
On the way home, ravens followed the Impala.
Sam decided he didn't want to leave to hunt anymore after that.
***
Dean's skin started itching.
It was ignorable at first—really, any minor inconvenience since the flower crap started had taken a backseat to the fact that flowers were spawning inside him—until it grew to a systemic, full-body prickle.
“Dude, what’s up with you? Are you allergic to something you’ve been coughing up?” Sam asked when he caught Dean vigorously rubbing his back against a corner pillar like a bear against a tree.
“I dunno. Think I might have a rash.”
He wordlessly turned around and lifted his shirt for Sam to check, only to see his brother’s face go stone-cold stoic over his shoulder.
“What?”
Sam shook his head, pointing to the nearest mirror.
In the reflection, a fine patch of grass sprouted between his ribs and lower back.
“What the fuck?”
Over the next few days, the itching continued as he sprouted like a chia pet, blades of grass poking through his pores. It even started growing through his hair follicles, like green highlights.
When the itching finally stopped, he simply added self-mowing and weed-pulling to his daily hygiene routine and kept going.
***
The rare few times he was able to snag a few winks of sleep, he had dizzying dreams of gnawing teeth and a thousand eyes spinning around him; visions of what it might’ve been like to see Cas or other angels in their true forms.
Sam woke him up one night with two fingers to his inner wrist, interrupting one such dream.
“Wha—?”
“You were ice cold, Dean,” he hissed, like Dean was doing it on purpose somehow. Yet Dean could see the fear shining in his eyes, and knew Sam didn’t mean it. “I could barely feel your pulse.”
Dean sat up, rubbing his eyes and forehead, grimacing when his hands came away tacky.
It wasn’t sweat and tears—it was sap and dewdrops.
“Hey, I have a riddle,” Dean said before Sam left his room, satisfied that he wasn't going to die in the night.
Sam turned, crinkling his brows in question.
“What has a million eyes, a million teeth, and wings?”
Sam sighed. “I dunno, what?”
Dean couldn’t answer.
***
When Dean’s restlessness got the better of him, he sneaked out of the bunker for milk run hunts. A salt and burn here, a werewolf there. He was always quick, in and out, before Sam even noticed he was gone.
But every time he came back from a hunt, scraped up or cut up in some way, as hunts were wont to leave him with, his skin scabbed over with patches of bark.
***
There wasn’t a part of his body that wasn’t affected. Not an inch of his body that didn’t ache and bleed with loss, that didn’t bloom with the affectation of the words he’d been unable to return.
Chives grew on his left shoulder in the shape of a handprint, mirroring the blooming stain on the jacket Cas had touched last.
(Sam wore the pages of the Black Grimoire and Nadia’s Codex thin.)
Soil particles began seeping through the sweat glands of his feet. Soft grass grew in the shape of the footprint silhouettes he left behind.
(Sam tried contacting Sergei the shaman, who offered his condolences about Cas and Jack, but nothing else.)
Cattails and dandelions bloomed inside him and exploded out of his mouth, nose, and ears, in awful coughing fits that left his surroundings covered in pinkish sputum.
(Sam shouted at Jack until his own voice was hoarse and his throat was bloody.)
Dean remembered what it was like when Zachariah briefly gave him stomach cancer, right before Cas—blissfully, miraculously alive—had shown up and made him stop. Right before Cas had branded his ribs.
(Started then, maybe.)
This felt like that, but worse, compounded by the fact that Cas really was gone this time. Flora spread through him like a cancer, metastasizing.
If this shit was terminal, where was the end stage?
***
Lately, the flowers seemed slower to bloom. Instead, clumps of decaying moss began to fall from his every orifice.
He was unfurling knotted masses of moss at his desk—he felt more and more like what a cat must feel, coughing up a hairball—trying to identify what type they were, when he heard Miracle barking. It wasn’t her playful bark; this was more aggressive. Alarm-like.
Like she sensed an intruder.
He and Sam ran into the war room at the same time, guns drawn, aiming in the direction where Miracle was barking.
A fox stood on the map table, its head bowed.
“Did that… come from you?” Sam asked, horrified.
The creature blinked slowly, eyes narrowing into contentment as it sat down, face trained on Dean. Threaded through the fur of its flicking tail, strands of cornsilk glittered in the light.
Well. That answered that.
The fox started following Dean like a shadow, its predator eyes shining in every darkened hallway and crevice of the bunker, audibly licking its lips at night from the corner of his bedroom.
Miracle began to stay in Sam’s room instead.
***
Deep aches like growing pains began to keep him up at night. When he rubbed his hands over his shins, his knees, digging his fists into his hips, he could palpate weird, grainy lumps beneath his skin.
Google was no help, throwing suggestions like gout or osteochondromas back at him.
It wasn’t until he noticed the same grainy texture forming on his canines while brushing his teeth that he went to his personal Google, Sam.
“It looks like some sort of gem, almost,” Sam said in a mystified voice as he checked Dean’s teeth with a penlight. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say emeralds, but there are blue patches on your molars. And you say you think that’s the same stuff you feel in your joints?”
“Not just my joints. All over my bones, in random spots.”
“There’s nothing in the lore about Hanahaki causing crystal formation,” Sam said, all his nervous tics popping up at once. Nothing about what was happening to Dean was in the lore, but when had anything been so cut and dry for them? “I’m going to get a second pair of eyes.”
***
Eileen looked between the clumps of moss that Dean had been collecting, and the fox that bowed to her on arrival, and knew exactly what was going on.
“In Ireland, in the peat bogs where some corpses are buried, the bones grow similar crystals. It’s called vivianite,” she explained. “It makes the bones a bitch to burn properly.”
Sam’s fingers flew over the keyboard of his laptop. “The phosphate in our bodies can cause a chemical reaction in wet environments with high iron content, forming vivianite crystals,” he read aloud.
Dean was sure that if someone were to cut him open, they’d find his guts rearranged into a bog-like ecosystem. He could practically feel his organs pickling as Sam talked.
Eileen caught his eye, and without sign or words, they came to a mutual agreement.
***
Sam was getting testy, tired of the helplessness and of Dean’s refusal to fight. And between the greenery and wild animals overtaking the bunker, they all needed a break.
So while Eileen took Sam to her local crash pad, the Fitzgeralds hosted Dean and Miracle.
Dean watched the kids chase Miracle around Garth’s home, laughing and giggling as he barked. When Miracle dropped a stuffed toy in front of him, tail thumping the floor in anticipation, Cas Jr cocked his head.
Dean turned away, blinking dewdrops from his eyes.
“Why don’t you go with Garth, Dean?” Bess offered, in a tone that suggested it was more of a demand. This wasn’t anything she could fix with her family’s recipe full of cayenne, and it wasn’t something he could sweat out.
Dean obliged, following Garth down to the dreaded dental office.
“Hop in the chair, and I can get a better look at you!” Garth checked Dean’s teeth, testing to see if he could scrape off or at least sand down the pointier bits. “Well, aside from this stuff, how’ve your teeth been otherwise? You been taking better care?”
Dean didn’t know what the effects of using herbicides were on oral health, but it probably wasn’t great.
“As much as I can in this condition,” he lied.
“You know, I’ve been reading up about your condition. And if there’s anything you want to talk about that you feel like maybe you can’t talk about with Sam, I want you to know I’m all ears,” he said in that genuine, sincere, very Garth way.
It was tempting.
But it would be pointless. Not when Garth wasn’t the person he really wanted to talk to.
He shook his head. Another flower clogged his throat, and he had to hold up a hand, shoving Garth’s instruments away so he could sit up and cough it out.
Borrage—bluntness.
Can I tell you something? If you swear to never tell another soul.
(Started then, maybe.)
***
The first day they returned to the bunker, it was to buzzards circling overhead.
Their cries were so loud they could hear them from underground.
“Regret coming back yet?” Dean asked once they were settled in the war room with a pair of beers.
“That’s not funny, Dean,” Sam said tiredly.
It hadn’t been a joke.
***
Dean was in the depths of a blissfully dreamless sleep when he woke up suffocating on an obstruction in his windpipe so big that he couldn’t even yell out for help.
His temples pulsed hot, panic running through his system as he hit the cold stone floor of his bedroom. Whatever it was smelled and tasted of rot and death. His diaphragm spasmed ineffectually, desperately trying to pull more oxygen into his alveoli. It reminded him of all the times fuckwad angels and archangels took away his lungs, the sheer helpless panic of it.
This was it, finally. He was going to die. Spots speckled his vision, and a strange calm enveloped him as his extremities went numb.
Until Sam, beautiful baby Sam, ran in.
“Dean! No no no no, hey—!” Sam yelled, hauling him into a Heimlich, violently jostling him until it felt like his ribs would crack from the force.
The thing in his windpipe dislodged, and Dean lurched forward, retching and coughing it up.
As Sam sat him up and clapped his back hard—he’d have bruises there tomorrow—the spots disappeared from his vision, revealing something meaty and covered in blood before him.
“Is that…?” Sam stopped, sounding sick.
A Leviathan blossom.
“Huh,” he rasped.
The sight planted an idea in Dean’s head.
***
The idea bloomed and germinated as quickly as every other seed his body produced.
While Sam began dissecting the blossom (all the while voicing heretical thoughts of threatening to trap Jack into a new orb if He didn’t cure Dean, wondering if it would be worth the fallout), Dean quietly left the bunker, tracked down a lone vampire, and drained its blood into a few empty gallon jugs before decapitating it.
More than enough blood to turn him and to make the Campbell cure after.
He burned the body, the irony of the full circle moment not escaping him. It had started on a vamp hunt—
(Started before then, maybe.)
—and it would end with one.
All that was left to do was tell Sam.
And to take that first voluntary drink.
***
“Dean, what did you do?” Sam whispered in a horrified voice.
Becoming a vampire didn’t stop the flowers.
If anything, the buds became more violent: he painfully expectorated more Leviathan blossoms, with the added misery of knowing it wouldn’t kill him. He avulsed an apothecary of all the herbs and flowers used in witchcraft from his mouth. Rose thorns and brambles and yarrow root poked through his gums from his new fang pockets. Dean was surprised that fucking Audrey II hadn’t exploded out of him like a chestburster yet.
“What I had to,” he mumbled.
He tried joking, as he put the surplus away in their supplies, that at least they wouldn’t have to restock for a while.
The joke fell flat, as they always had lately.
Nearby, the fox licked its lips.
***
The acidic itch of vivianite fangs, sharp inside his gums, prickled as he waited.
“I don’t want to do this.” Sam, devastated and angry, didn’t have a choice.
“Sammy. C’mon. I’m dying anyway. ”
The buzzards circling outside grew louder as if in confirmation.
There was a look of resignation in Sam’s eyes that suggested he understood that if he didn’t do it, then Dean would find a way to self-decapitate.
If a monster dies in monster Heaven, where does it go?
Cas had posed the question once, but they never got an answer. The only person who would know the answer disappeared into the riddle, becoming the question.
It was the fruiting bloom of the idea that the first Leviathan blossom had planted; the last logical, desperate step either of them had. Best-case scenario, his idea would work. Worst-case scenario, Dean wouldn’t get killed, and Sam could find a way into Purgatory through the remaining reapers, use Dean’s bones to bring him back, and give him the Campbell cure. He’d be right back where he started, but maybe then he’d have at least had a break.
Because something, anything, had to be better than this.
Sam set his jaw, giving a curt, tearful nod. His hands trembled like every fiber of his being hated existing in that moment.
“You know this isn’t fair.”
“It’ll be okay, Sammy.”
It was a riddle. What had a million eyes, a million teeth, and wings? An angel. Purgatory. Both.
Sam let out a cry as he swung the machete.
The last thoughts that fired from one synapse to another as Dean’s severed head fell to the bunker floor:
Had this been what Benny felt?
Was that a begonia peeking out from his spinal cord?
***
It was quiet. Save for the wheezing whistle in his lungs, it was almost peaceful. The heat and stink barely registered past the taste and smell of the blossoms in his body; the far-off sound of growls and fights was like music to his clogged ears.
The last time he prayed in earnest, it had been here in Purgatory. The hard-sought Leviathan blossoms, which he’d now been coughing up with disturbing ease, had been their mission before it all went sideways.
Cas, I gotta say something.
I heard your prayer.
(Started then, maybe.)
He found the same tree he’d once kneeled by and rested against it, basking in the muted sun of Purgatory’s sky while he waited for the monsters to come for him.
***
After his second death, Dean woke in a garden.
He rolled over on a lush bed of grass. The faint scent of ripened blackberries beckoned from nearby bushes. As he stood, he felt small; the giant sunflowers were so tall they dwarfed even the longest ones he’d sprouted in the sunlessness of the bunker. He waded through a forest of tree-like stems, the kind a bean-stalk-loving giant would’ve found a home in, until he came across a clearing more bountiful than any botanical garden he’d seen on any field trip before.
It wasn’t until he realized that there was no sun at all, or any birds or bugs or sound, that he knew for sure this wasn’t just any garden.
It was the Empty.
And Cas’ sleeping form had overtaken it all.
He was recognizable by the shadow of wings drawn out on either side of him in a rainbow of flowers: lilacs, cherry blossoms, roses, lilies. His trench coat was nearly shredded, stuffed to bursting with blooms. Like straw coming out of a scarecrow, or a straw doll effigy.
Vegetation sprouted from every orifice—all the flowers, tracing out a map of Cas. A garden spilled from his mouth, pouring out the same lips that spoke the truth without shame.
A profession of all of Cas’ love, so strong it had flowered through the profound bond they shared.
The Shadow was pissed, or petrified—it was hard to tell. In Meg’s form, it lay awake nearby, but trapped in place by layers of interlocking vines. Her mouth, silenced by thick stems. Dean almost felt bad; Cas' love had smothered the Empty. Even unconscious, he was still throwing a silent rebellion.
When Dean lifted one of Cas’ eyelids, cornflowers, which had replaced his irises, peeked back. Like flowers trapped in resin marbles.
It was a bizarrely grotesque sight, but he’d never been more beautiful.
Here, at the epicenter, Dean could breathe easier than he’d been able to in months. Still, as he knelt to lean over Cas, he coughed out a single bloody petal.
A lilac.
He dug a clump of dirt from out of Cas’ ear and whispered,
“You idiot. I love you, too.”
When the words left his mouth, all his exhaustion pressed heavily on his shoulders. He stifled a yawn. The damp grass yielded to him, recognizing him as its own as he lay down next to Cas, leaning into the flower bed of his body.
He closed his eyes, settling into a warm peace he hadn’t known since before this whole thing started.
(Before then, maybe.)
Beneath them, the freshest petal withered.
Each petal after followed suit, echoing, he loves me, I love him too, he loves me, I love him too…
