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“Something’s bothering you, Samuel.”
They’re back in what had been, until very recently, the health classroom. Sam has been in enough high schools in his life to know that this one is pretty typical, down to the posters on the wall showing the difference between a smokers’ lung and a healthy one and the CPR dummies in the closet. Only the two cots on the floor that he and Dean have claimed are out of place.
Well, he and Dean had claimed. Right now, with the way that Rowena is unpacking her suitcase—how many outfit changes did she bring with her?—Sam is willing to bet that she’s laid claim to his.
“The shoulder? It’s fine.”
Rowena’s eyes narrow. “That’s not what I’m talking about.”
But her gaze darts to the place where the bullet wound keeps on festering. The weird pain from before has faded, but Sam knows better by now than to assume that it’ll stay away. He shot God. There’s got to be a few consequences coming down the pike.
“Although,” she continues, her focus never wavering, “I would rather like a look at that.”
Sam wants to argue that it’s fine, but before he can even get started on the right words, she gets to her feet and pushes the collar of his shirt aside. She hums appreciatively at the sight of the anti-possession tattoo, but the trail of her fingers stops cold at the edge of the festering.
“I’ve never felt anything like this before. It’s—ancient. Foreign.”
Sam steps back, letting his shirt fall back into place again. “Yeah, well. Nobody’s ever shot God before, so.”
She shakes her head. “I’ve never quite seen anything like you, Sam Winchester.”
The way she says it, it almost sounds like a compliment. Funny. All his life, Sam’s been trying to be anything but unique.
“There’s a story there, then. You shot God.”
He’s been giving the Sparknotes version to other hunters for the last couple of days as their little network has started to pull people in to help out. It’s not like he can explain Jack—it means explaining Kelly, and Lucifer, and why they’d let him out again, and Amara, and—well. The list goes on. But Rowena was there for all of that.
“You remember Him. Chuck.”
She raises her eyebrows, the corner of her mouth quirking. “Are you asking me if I remember God, Samuel?”
“Right, yeah. Well, He and Amara reunited. Became one again. The Darkness and the Light and whatever. But when everything with Jack started going wrong, we started looking for Him again.”
At that, Sam has to scoff at their past selves. Running to Chuck like asking Him for help had ever done them any good. He can’t decide if it’s better or worse now knowing why Chuck had never so much as lifted a finger.
“He showed up. And He told us that that only thing we could do to save the world was to kill Jack.”
Rowena’s mouth thins into a sharp line. In the brief time she’d known Jack, Sam knows, she’d grown rather fond of him. It’s easy to do.
Was easy to do, Sam reminds himself.
Whatever.
“So you—” She jerks a hand over her throat.
Sam shakes his head. “He was playing us. Chuck, I mean.” He can’t quite meet her eyes for this part. It’s what he’s been keeping from the other hunters, the bit that he wishes he could rip from his mind and forget. “Turns out that everything—the first apocalypse, the Leviathan, Lucifer back again, all of it—everything happened because he made it happen. He set up the chessboard, and we played. And then he killed Jack, started this whole ghost mess, and bounced.”
When he finally gets the courage to look up, Rowena is staring at him, her mouth slightly open.
“Well,” she says after she pulls herself together. “That’s a bit of a doozy.”
He has to smile at that. Doozy isn’t quite the word he’d use, but it sums things up pretty well. “Yeah. Tell me about it.”
She pushes back her curls as she sinks back on to what had been Sam’s cot, eyes locked dead ahead as she ponders it.
“So. The way that I’ve changed—it’s because He wanted a new ally for you?”
Sam lets out a breath. It’s been hard, these last few days, to avoid that kind of thinking. There’s a part of him that just wants to give up in the face of it all. Any growth, any change, how much of it was him?
“No,” he says at last. “No, Rowena. I think that was just you.”
She smiles as she gets to her feet. “Good. Now, come along, Samuel. We’ve got work to do.”
“You haven’t slept.”
Dean wipes a hand over his face and keeps staring down at the book he has open on his lap. More than one of the evacuees has given him a strange look at the sight of what looks like an ancient textbook, but one of Dean’s well-practiced authoritative glares has sent them scurrying away so far.
“ Dean ,” Cas says in the voice that means he’s about to start lecturing.
“I’m fine.”
Okay. He’s not fine, exactly, but he’s functioning about as well as you could expect in a situation like this. Seeing Kevin has dredged up guilt he thought he buried a long time ago, and he can’t shake how similar the situation with Jack was to that one.
“You’ve been on that page for twenty minutes.”
Dean snaps the book shut. “You’ve been staring at me for twenty minutes?”
Cas shrugs. Dean doesn’t know what he’d expected. This is the guy that used to watch over him while he slept, after all. The memory of that long ago conversation makes the corner of his mouth twitch. They’ve changed a lot since then.
Chuck has made them change a lot since then?
This whole situation makes his head hurt. He’s many things, but a philosopher is not one of them.
“You’re not going to fix this by running yourself into the ground.”
Dean shoves the book away. “I’m not going to fix this, period. I can’t. It’s too big.”
And he’d thought everything else was cosmic before. Turns out Michael and Lucifer, the Leviathan, the other worlds, all of it, was just part of a story. Reality TV for God himself. He always hated that shit.
“Of course we are.”
Dean stares at him. “You believe that, Cas? Really?”
Because this time, Chuck said it was the end. He’s done with cooking up the next big bad just to watch them dance. Done with throwing obstacles in their way and smirking to himself as they tried to mount them. If God says he’s done, isn’t that it?
With every other obstacle that they’ve faced, Dean has been able to tell himself that they’ll get through it because they have choices. Free will. But now, with that in the toilet, he can’t summon the energy to fight back.
“You think Chuck was controlling everything?”
Dean scoffs. “He told us, Cas. He was.”
Cas shakes his head. “He wasn’t controlling me when I watched you rake leaves.”
As far as Dean can remember, he’s never done that in his life. “What?”
Cas smiles, but it’s faint. “When you were with Lisa and Ben. I watched, sometimes, to make sure you were safe. To make sure nothing came for you.”
It should feel invasive, but it’s Cas. It just feels—well. Like Cas.
“Chuck wasn’t controlling you when you looked for me in Purgatory. He wasn’t controlling either of us that night when I worked at the Gas ‘n Sip when we fought the Rit Zien.”
“Cas, that night—”
Cas continues as if he wasn’t interrupted. “He didn’t control us when you fought off the Mark to keep it from killing me. Or when I held off Lucifer to protect you.”
Dean can’t take much more of this, but Cas’s gaze has him all but pinned to his seat, unable to move.
“He didn’t control the way I felt when I thought I’d lost you. Or the way you felt when you thought you lost me.” Cas takes a step forward, pulls Dean up until they’re only inches away from each other, nose to nose. “And he doesn’t control the way I feel about you right now.”
One of his fingers grazes Dean’s cheek, and despite himself, his eyes slip closed. When they reopen, Cas is somehow even closer.
“I meant it, Dean. We’re real. This is real. We couldn’t control the situations around us any more than anyone else could. But this—he didn’t manufacture this.”
Cas leans forward, and his lips just barely touch Dean’s before he pulls back.
Dean finds himself smiling, even though only a few minutes ago it was the last thing he could imagine in the world. “Was that real?”
Cas smiles back. “Want to try again to find out?”
It’s not a solution, Dean will admit, but it beats the hell out of trying to pull the answer out of some old dusty tome. Some of his doubt, though, must show on his face.
“Even if nothing else is real, this is,” Cas says softly, tilting Dean’s chin up with his finger. “We just have to believe it.”
“Yeah,” Dean says, “Okay.”
And he does.