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“I think I just need some time.”
Dean claps him on the shoulder and hurries after Cas’s retreating shoulders deeper into the bunker, no doubt to update him on the situation with Jack. A situation that Sam can’t really even begin to think about right now.
Instead, he reaches into his jacket pocket and toys with his phone. He’s been putting off this phone call for a week now, but he can’t anymore. Mary is going to start wondering why she hasn’t heard from Maggie and all of them.
Trying to ignore the sick feeling in his stomach that seems intent on crawling up his throat, Sam lifts the phone to his ear. It rings a few times before she picks it up. Each time, Sam considers hanging up and trying again later, some time when his legs don’t feel like they’re going to give out beneath him.
“Sam!”
Sam can tell that she’s faking the brightness in her voice--the encounter with Dad had thrown her more than she cares to admit--but it still stings to think that he’ll be the one to rob her of it.
“Hey, Mom.” Sam gives up the ghost and sinks into one of the chairs. His left foot begins to jiggle up and down. “I’ve got some news.”
She can probably tell from his voice that something is wrong, but she doesn’t pry. Instead, she sits in silence, a slight hitch in her breath the only indicator. Sam loves her for it.
“Michael is dead.”
A sharp inhale on the other end of the line, and suddenly, Sam remembers that Mary spent nearly six months with Michael and his goons back in Apocalypse World. He knows that lightness she must be feeling all too well.
“How?” Something rustles--she must have gotten up. “I mean, last thing I heard, you were trying to recreate that egg thing Ketch tried to get to you. No offense, but I didn’t exactly have high hopes.”
Considering he’d been trying to reverse engineer the thing from notes written in 1842, Sam can’t really blame her for that.
“Yeah, no egg. It was Jack.”
A thud. Sam isn’t quite sure if she’s dropped the phone or thrown something. Then, he’s met with a series of crinkling noises that he thinks might be Mary packing up a bag.
“Mom--”
“I can be there in three hours. Two and a half if there aren’t any cops on I-70.”
He tries to protest again that there’s no point, but Mary steamrolls right over him.
“Somebody’s got to talk some sense into him. He can’t use his powers like that--his soul is too important.” A pause. “Sam. He still does have a soul, right?”
Sam closes his eyes, pinches his nose where a migraine is beginning to gather. He’s been getting them more and more lately, and he can’t quite tell if it’s age or stress that’s bringing them around. Probably a combination.
“I think so. But he’s--different. Somehow.”
A car door slams. Sam tries not think about how that means that she has a go bag packed.
“There’s something you need to know before you get here.”
Mary fixes her mascara in the rearview mirror of her truck once she finally pulls up outside the bunker. There’s still a few smudges on her cheeks by the time she gives up and fits her key into the lock.
“Sam.”
Her voice warbles a little more than she would have liked. He’s sitting hunched over the map table, as if the weight of the world were pushing down on his shoulders. Which, Mary supposes, is probably pretty damn close to the truth.
“You didn’t have to come all the way out here,” he says hoarsely.
“Of course I did.”
Mary has spent the last two years feeling like she’s been drowning. Her only focus had been trying to keep her head above water. But she thinks she’s finally figured out how to tread, and now she finally feels like she can toss a floatie to someone else.
She hurries down the steps and lets Sam melt into her arms. His shoulders shake, so she squeezes tighter.
“They trusted me,” he says into her shoulder.
“They had a choice.” Mary rubs a soothing circle into his shoulder blades. “You offered them a normal life. But they decided that they wanted to fight Michael.”
Her throat swells up at the thought. Many of them had stayed because they no longer remembered what a normal life was like. Or because they’d never gotten one in the first place.
“Dean told me--” Sam begins, but Mary shushes him.
“Dean’s great plan was to lock up the problem,” Mary says. “From what you’ve told me, that’s never once worked for you.”
One night, more than a little tipsy and exhausted enough to sway when he’d stood up, Sam had told her about the apocalypse. Not the sanitized version that Dean had handed her when Amara had first raised her from the dead. The real one.
“I should have done something different.”
Mary nods. “Maybe. But Sam, you made the best choices you could with the information you had. And by giving them that choice to leave, you did all of the saving you needed to do.”
She can tell he doesn’t quite believe her, but he finally lets her go and steps back.
“You must be hungry,” he says at last. “I think Dean left some leftovers in the fridge, if you want them.”
Mary offers him a wobbly smile. “I’d like that.”
“Dean.”
He nearly jumps out of his skin when Cas’s hand lands on his shoulder. He’s been jumpy ever since Michael vacated his head--there’s a part of him, he thinks, that fears that Michael will be back and ripping his body away again.
“Glad to have you both back.”
But one look at Cas’s face makes him fall silent. He’s not about to get more information about Sam’s cardigan-wearing days.
“Cas--are you okay?”
“It’s not me. It’s Jack.”
Cas glances around the room, and though the library is empty--Dean tries to avoid thinking about why, exactly, it’s empty--he beckons for Dean to follow him. He leads the way down the hall and into his room. Dean winces a little bit. Cas has recently painted it yellow, and it sort of gives him a bit of a headache. At least it means he’s been feeling more at home in the bunker.
“He killed Felix.”
Dean stares. “Felix? Who’s Felix?”
Cas gives him such a derisive look that Dean is shocked it doesn’t turn him into a pile of ash on the spot. Felix. He’s reasonably sure that they don’t know anybody named Felix. Wait--no.
“The snake?” Dean frowns. “What? He didn’t give him the right food or something?”
He’d figured that Felix would get hungry enough to eat whatever Jack gave him eventually. And surely he hadn’t managed to starve to death already?
Cas shakes his head. Somehow, his face has lost a bit of color. Dean didn’t even know that Cas could pale.
“No, Dean. He wanted to reunite Felix with his owner. So he--he killed him.”
Dean thinks about the Rit Zien, all those years ago when Cas was human. An angel that sought out suffering and snuffed it out the only way that it knew how. That angel hadn’t been able to see the difference between temporary suffering and the kind that needed to be ended.
From this story, Jack can’t tell the difference, either.
Cas deflates, sinking on to to the comforter than Dean had tried to convince him not to buy. The pale blue clashes horribly with the yellow he’d insisted on.
“I’ve made a horrible mistake, Dean.”
Dean shakes his head. “Hey, it wasn’t your decision to bring him back. Well, not yours alone. Sammy and I have to take responsibility for that, too.”
Well. Dean, anyway. He thinks that the weight of more responsibility might just crush Sam right now.
“He’s never been fully human,” Cas continues, as if he hasn’t heard a word that Dean has said. “What if the half that’s Lucifer takes over?”
He suddenly looks about a decade older. Dean lowers himself to sit beside him.
“Hey. Nature and nurture, remember? I think Jack’s proven by now that he’s way more than what nature made him. He’s a good kid.”
“It’s his goodness that worries me!”
Cas lurches to his feet and begins to stride unsteadily back and forth across the room. The lamp on his nightstand flickers. Dean glances nervously at it. Cas hasn’t lost control of his powers like that in a long time.
“What if the next person that he tries to ‘save’ is Sam?”
Dean almost asks him if the air quotes around the word ‘save’ were really necessary. Then, he decides that it’s probably not the most relevant part of that sentence.
“Look, he’s not gonna target Sammy. He’s fine.”
Cas’s mouth twists. “Dean. A man was shaken out of Chip’s control by remembering that cell phones exist. It took me reminding Sam of himself, me, Jack, and you to bring him back to himself. I think there’s a part of him that--I don’t know. Preferred it. Not having to think. Just being happy.”
Dean wants to laugh it off, tell Cas that Sam lost the bug for a normal, happy, but ultimately fake life a long time ago. He thinks back to his brother calling the bunker home for the first time, about the way he’d finally said that he’s content with where they are.
Then he thinks about Sam on his knees for the thousandth time, cleaning a friend’s blood off the floor in the very same bunker he’d called home,
Okay. So maybe they’re not all happy.
“We’ll figure it out, Cas. All of it. We always do, right?”
Cas doesn’t look at him. “Right.”
Why does he get the feeling that there’s something Cas isn’t telling him?