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Cas earns more than one confused look as he gets in line at the photo center at the WalMart in Smith Center. They’re probably used to seeing the same dozen faces there. Cas offers an awkward smile and resolves to send one of the Winchesters next time.
“This isn’t some weird shrine, is it?” the pimply cashier asks as Mary Winchester’s smiling face prints out.
“She’s dead,” Cas says.
The kid actually freezes, nervous eyes flicking from Cas’s basket, complete with the beer and a copy of People Magazine—he thought he’d seen Mary read one, once—to his coat, to his face.
Ah. That probably wasn’t the best way to put it.
“She’s my—sister.” Cas clears his throat. “Yes. She’s my sister. And she’s dead. We’re having her wake today.”
The kid blanches. “Oh my God. I’m so sorry. Please don’t fill out a negative survey. I swear I didn’t know.”
He looks more frightened at the thought of upper management than he did at the possibility of Cas being a stalker and/or killer.
Cas does his best to reassure him. “It’s fine. We—uh. We don’t look much alike.”
The kid stuffs the photos into bags as quickly as possible. Cas pays with a credit card that refers to him as Jim Uhura and heads back to the bunker. When he arrives, Dean is setting out some of the photos they had already. Cas places the beer on the table, but Dean doesn’t acknowledge him.
“I have some more photos.”
Still, no acknowledgement.
Cas knows better than to press. Instead he gets to work setting out the photos alongside him. He and Dean work in silent tandem until the entire map table is covered in photographs. The only sign Dean gives that he’s paying attention is a sharp intake of breath at a photo of him, Mary, and Sam sitting on part of the grassy hill that makes up the top of part of the bunker.
“She was a good woman,” Cas says once the silence becomes too much.
It’s funny. Years ago, as a proper angel, he could have stood the quiet forever.
“She wasn’t what I thought she’d be.”
The quiet admission takes Cas by surprise. He lowers himself into one of the chairs. Dean settles on top of the table, holding the photo of Mary he’s had since he was a child.
“Part of growing up, I guess. Finding out that your parents aren’t everything you thought they were. God knows it was like that with Dad.”
A laugh bubbles up in his chest. Cas wants to reach for him, but he doesn’t.
“She was sharp,” Dean says. “I mean, smart, yeah. I can see where Sammy gets it.”
Cas wants to comment that Dean inherited the brains, too, but it’s probably not the right moment for that.
“But I also mean—prickly. She sort of reminded me of Bobby, sometimes. Our Bobby, I mean. Half expected her to call Sam and me idjits.”
Cas smiles at that. It wouldn’t have surprised him, either.
“And she—she snorted when she laughed. Really laughed. I thought she was going to snort beer out of her nose when Sam told her about Dad and the Grand Canyon.”
Dean wipes furiously at his eyes. When Cas lays a gentle hand on his shoulder, he doesn’t flinch away. Instead, he leans in to the touch. Cas rubs small, soothing circles into his arm. He wants to lean in further, to hold Dean like he wants to.
But that’s a little too close to happy, and Dean has suffered enough today.
“It’s going to be harder than it was. Remembering the woman, not the memory,” Cas says softly.
Another few quick blinks don’t manage to completely clear the tears away from his eyes.
“Yeah.” Dean scrubs a hand across his face. “Yeah.”
Dean is a man of inelegant solutions. Sam will spend days teasing with the Gordian knot, trying to unravel it. Dean sets his jaw, takes a swing, and cleaves it in half. Trouble is, the sword usually works a hell of a lot better, and Sam’s left with numb fingers and wasted time.
Dean’s words ring in his head—you’re gonna be so damn sincere—as Sam pours out another glass of whiskey, trying to keep his hands from shaking. The alcohol probably isn’t helping, but Sam suspects that he’d be trembling anyway, even without the aftertaste burn in his throat.
Because this choice, like so many others before it, isn’t really a choice at all.
It doesn’t matter that a part of Sam still thinks of Jack as the kid who’d tried so hard to even lift a pencil with his powers, just because Sam asked. He still thinks of the boy stashing bloodied tissues in the trash can until he couldn’t anymore. No matter how hard Sam tries, he can’t reconcile that kid— his kid, he meant what he told Lily Sunder—with the second creature to reduce his mother to ash.
At the memory of still-warm embers, Sam tips back his glass again. Her picture stares accusingly at him from the table. Sam flips it over.
Their rules have always been the same. Monsters can be tamed. Rehabilitated. But when they step out of line—well. Game over.
Except—
Except not always. By that logic, Sam should have been dead at twenty-six with demon blood still drying at the corner of his mouth.
“We’re not killing him,” Dean says from the doorway, as if he can somehow read Sam’s mind.
He’d left Sam alone with his thoughts some time ago. Sam can’t quite tell how long it’s been. Long enough for Dean to be frustrated with his wobbly resolve, at any rate.
“Yeah.”
Sam’s hand shakes badly enough that he doesn’t trust it to pour another glass. Instead, he drops it on the table. If Dean notices the gesture, he doesn’t comment.
“When has locking up our problems ever solved them?” Sam asks.
His memories from before the Cage always feel a little distant. Like videotapes of someone else’s life. But the memory of standing in the blazing sun in Bobby’s junkyard with the Horsemen’s rings in front of them has never felt clearer. Sam clenches his fist on the tabletop.
He needs to pull himself together. To calm down, to think rationally. Jack is the most powerful being they’ve ever met. He’s on a killing spree. He killed Mary. This shouldn’t be a deliberation.
The voice in his head sounds an awful lot like Dean.
“Got any better ideas?” Dean asks drily.
Sam’s getting a headache. He drops his head into his palms and presses the heels into his eye sockets.
“I don’t like this,” Sam says.
“You don’t have to like it.”
Sam’s stomach rolls uncomfortably at the thought of what this will mean.
“Do you think—” He has to clear his throat to continue. “Do you think God felt like this when he locked Lucifer up?”
Locking up a wayward son, Sam means. He’s played God before, but it has never ended well.
Dean snorts. “Chuck?” He steals Sam’s glass and tips it back. “Bastard probably didn’t spend half the time angsting that you have already.”
Sam swallows past the bile in his throat. He thinks of the endlessly spinning fan in Bobby’s panic room, of the yawning crater in Stull Cemetery, of fire.
“I’m ready.”
It’s a lie.