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The first thing that hit him was how much this felt like a goodbye. It didn’t make sense. They should be running, planning, trying to find a way out of this, not stopping. When had things ever gone right when someone had gone off and made plans without someone else? Wasn’t that how apocalypses started and monsters roamed free? Isn’t that how they broke everything over and over again?
The second thing Dean noticed was his heart was breaking. Or, he noticed Cas’s heart was breaking first. There were tears in his eyes and he was so sincere, so brutally honest. It felt too final. To open that damn and say all that. All those things they thought and skirting around and never acknowledged, never dealt with. It’s what had worked for them all those years.
But now; now there was a goodbye that was ripping his heart out as Cas was ripping himself out of the playbook, calling to the Empty to take out Death and making sure that Dean heard every last word of this final goodbye as he left. There was pain in the beautiful defiance of every emotion he’d bottled up for years, and now Cas was spilling it all out. All those wonderful, horrible truths, all that honest reflection, all that cruel happiness. It filled that space between them, the space that had felt like nothing until Cas started talking and opened up a crater between them. There was too much distance, too much space between them, and Cas had to know as he spoke that Dean would never be able to cross it in time. He would never be able to hear everything and process it and do something in time to stop this.
Then he felt it. The second Cas was gone Dean felt the hollow emptiness fill his heart, stopping it slowly with every thudding heartbeat. It was too late. He stared blankly at the place where his best friend had been but a moment ago. The place where his world shifted all at once and not at all. He knew. He always knew. The words now just clung to him and made him listen to what he had always ignored. The words hung in the air even as the tension drained out of it.
He was alone. No Death, no Empty, no Cas. This was a new kind of death, one he had felt far too many times in the time they had got together. This hurt more. Those had been deaths. This felt like goodbye.
There had been no time to say it back. To say any of it. To stop him, to tell him, to… Dean still didn’t have the words. What was the point now? Would Cas even hear his desperate cries if he opened his mouth and let it all come pouring out? The words he could say to match that painful confession, the things he could respond with. They held too much weight and his tongue was lead in his mouth. He’d watched Cas save him, leave him, love him, and done nothing about it. The screams echoed in the chambers of his mind and yet the icy numbness couldn’t force a single one out into the open.
Nothing was in the open anymore but the lingering goodbye that felt like the aftermath of the explosion. And left behind, hit with the full force of the blast he thought he would never have to face, Dean fell to the wall and drowned in all those words he didn’t say, couldn’t say and now would never say.