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It’s over.
It’s over, it’s over, it’s over, it’s over, it’s over.
Dean repeats the words in his head, because if he doesn’t, he’s going to lose it. Lose what? He’s not sure. His remaining thread of sanity, maybe. Or his ability to stop himself from hurling every item in the Bunker’s kitchen on the floor.
If it were really over, if they’d really beaten Chuck’s last challenge, if they’d really escaped the rat race they’ve been stuck in since day one, then he’d feel something , wouldn’t he? Relief. Peace. Instead, he’s every bit as empty as Famine—as Chuck?—had said he was all those years ago.
Winning would feel like cooking Mom a full meal, no nostalgic Winchester Surprise anywhere in sight, and teaching her to make a pie. Like playing catch with Dad like they did before the fire, talking about nothing important. Like watching a smile spread across Sammy’s face, not one of those pinched, drawn things that have been twisting his features for a decade. Like teaching Jack how to drive, properly this time.
Like telling Cas—well. It doesn’t matter now, does it?
Because Mom and Dad are dead, and Sam just killed the first person in years that he’s actually made a genuine connection with, and a demon wearing Jack’s corpse waltzed it into Hell and never came back, and Cas is gone.
This isn’t what winning is supposed to be like. So what does victory even mean, really?
He’s no philosopher. He’s a guy with a car, a couple guns, a kid brother, and a plucky attitude. Nevermind all the things he doesn’t have. He’s gonna take this victory and he’s gonna enjoy it, damnit. Somehow.
One quick trip to the store and a Google search set him up for the evening. As he’s making his way back to the kitchen, he stops by Sam’s room to listen. It’s quiet, and there’s no light streaming from the crack under the door. Maybe he’s asleep, but Dean knows better than to hope that that’s the case.
Once he’s back in the kitchen, Dean sets about making cookie dough with far more intensity than any reasonable person should. Take that, Chuck. Name one manly man in the whole fucking canon that celebrates his free will with making cookies. If there’s any proof that he’s no longer being yanked around like a dog on a chain, like a puppet on a string, like any number of stupid metaphors that don’t even begin to cover how he feels right now, it’s there.
Right?
By the time he takes the last batch out of the oven, it’s nearly three o’clock in the morning. The stillness of the bunker, which usually comforts him, feels heavy and oppressive. He burns his fingers on the edge of the last pan as he withdraws it from the oven.
Typical.
On his way back to his room, he sets a tray of the warm cookies outside of Sam’s. Like it’s some sort of consolation prize for making their only friend leave.
“Samwise, I know you’re the king of deluding yourself, but the math here isn’t hard.”
Sam can feel the breath on the back of his neck, but it’s not warm, not like breath should be, and his own warm breath catches in his throat. He closes his eyes, tenses his shoulders. This isn’t real. This isn’t real.
“You’re dead,” he tells the voice, because if he tells himself that it’s just a voice, there won’t actually be someone there when he turns around. “You’re in the Empty.”
“Yeah, sure,” the voice—he’s not naming it, he’s not —says, “keep telling yourself that. You know I’ll be wherever Chuck wants me to be in this little drama of yours, right? You know this, Sam, or you’d turn around and face me.”
Sam knows better than to turn around. After years and years and years of this, he knows not to fall for the goading. But he does, and Lucifer smiles. Sam takes a deep breath, but it doesn’t stop the way his heart is throwing itself at his ribcage like it’s trying to escape.
“I’ll make sure to say hi to Little Red for you. She’s in my territory now, you know.”
This is his poor, screwed-up, exhausted brain spitting old footage, cobbling it together like a trailer for a horror movie.
“She sacrificed herself,” Sam finds himself saying. “She sacrificed herself for the world. If that doesn’t deserve Heaven—”
Lucifer smiles, then, and the words die on Sam’s lips. “It’s cute that you still think any of this is about deserving.”
And then Sam jerks awake, his heart still pounding. He’s managed to twist the sheets around his legs like a mummy, so he takes a second to untangle himself. It’s a long enough process that his breathing has slowed to a normal rate by the time he’s done.
He has to swallow back bile, but he manages to stop himself from vomiting on to his floor. Sam lets his head drop forward to hang between his knees, which causes the angry wound in his shoulder to yell out. His head spins, but he can’t tell if it’s pain or leftover vertigo from the dream.
He hasn’t had one like that since Dean killed—truly, permanently killed—Lucifer.
He’d called Rowena that night, hands still shaking as he searched for her name on his phone. She’d asked for Lucifer’s heart (“Never know when something like that will come in handy, Samuel), and he’d had to decline, seeing as Nick had been using it. Funny, that. It probably would have been better for everyone that way.
He’d been able to hear her relief over the phone, buried as it was in the familiar lilt of her voice. She’d promised a night of toasting his death until they were both well and truly drunk. (“So, two drinks?” he’d teased, and she’d grumbled something about draining wine casks before his great-grandparents had met).
Right. They’d never get that now.
He stretches out on his bed again, on top of the sheets this time, wincing as the motion pulls on the bullethole. He doesn’t get back to sleep before his alarm goes off three hours later.
This particular twenty-four hour diner apparently isn’t open twenty-four hours a day—they close at three and reopen at six. The waitress, when Cas points this out to her, shoots him a glare and then proceeds to take over thirty minutes to get him the coffee he’d ordered.
He can’t taste it, of course, but it would be rude to sit here and order nothing. Besides, the slight tingle on his tongue from the caffeine is something, at least. A tiny distraction from the gaping hole in his chest.
During the brief time he’d been human, working at the Gas ’n Sip, he’d passed the long nights when there’d be hours between the customers with daydreams. Fantasies where Dean would pull up outside, walk in with his hands deep in the pockets of his coat. He’d say that they’d managed to lock both Heaven and Hell, returning angels and demons to their places for good. He’d say that it was over, that Cas could come home.
He’d say he needed to finish his shift, and Dean would roll his eyes, but he’d gather the seriousness from Cas’s voice and stay by the register for the rest of the evening. He’d buy dozens of packs of gum as he chewed his way through them, and he’d flip through so much of a magazine that Cas would insist that he buy it, too. He’d keep up a quiet stream of chatter until, at last, Cas clocked out.
Dean would kiss him in the parking lot.
Stupid. Because now, at the end of it all, there’s no going home. There’s no quiet conversation at the dinner table or long nights marathoning movies or painting his room in the bunker a pretty robin egg blue.
Certainly no kissing in the parking lot.
Now, it’s the end of it all and he doesn’t have everything. No purpose in Heaven. No life on Earth. No place to call home.
He’ll head to Jody’s tomorrow morning, once he’s pulled himself together. He can show Claire cat memes in person, watch her roll her eyes. Help Patience with her math homework, listen to Alex’s nursing stories, lend a hand in the kitchen when Jody’s busy at work. He doesn’t think she has the heart to turn him away, even though he’s not the usual sort of wayward soul that finds itself at her doorstep.
It’s not much of a plan, but it’s something. It’s enough to keep him preoccupied while he waits for the sun to rise, anyway. The waitress returns three times to fill his coffee cup while the sun slowly creeps back to the horizon, and when he leaves her a forty dollar tip, her eyebrows vanish into her hairline.
By the time he hits the road, there’s a weak sort of sunlight spilling over the highway. And even though he feels like someone hollowed out his stomach, he has to smile.
He’s part of the reason the sun is still shining, after all. No matter what else he’s lost, nobody can take that from him.