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"Are you sure about this?" Dean asks, for what is probably the twentieth time in as many minutes.
"Yes," says Jack for the twentieth time in response, and Dean has to hand it to him, he still sounds extremely sure. "I've tried reaching Cas, but the Empty's hidden him deep within itself. It knows he's been resurrected before and it doesn't want it to happen again."
"And you can't—"
"I can't enter." Jack's mouth quirks in a wry smile. "The Empty is...even older than God. There are cosmic rules that govern it. Rules even I can't break." He glances over to the table, where Sam is bent over a yellowed scrap of parchment. "But I can bend them, with your help."
"I've never seen a ritual quite like this," says Sam. He touches the corner of the paper with something like reverence. "Where did you find—"
"Maybe we save the history channel special for later?" Dean complains. "Can you do it or not?"
He's being a dick and he knows it, but there's a frenetic buzzing in his head that started the moment Jack showed up and explained this harebrained plan, and it's growing louder with every second. Cas is so close. Cas is within reach. It hooks at his skin, tugging him apart. He clasps his hands behind his back to keep from drumming them anxiously on the nearest flat surface.
Sam straightens up and sighs, shooting Dean only the barest of dirty looks. "I can do it," he says.
"And Dean? You'll be the one who has to enter." Jack surveys him. "I won't pretend it's safe, or a guarantee."
Dean almost laughs. As if there were any way he'd say no, when there was even the smallest chance. "We got this, kid."
"You know, I am God now," says Jack. "You could probably stop calling me kid."
"Yeah, absolutely not."
Jack actually grins at that, and for a moment he does look like the kid they'd brought home that fateful day, all sunshine and uncertainty and floppy hair and barely-contained power. Then he sobers again. "You'll have to be quick," he says. "You won't have much time."
"Don't suppose you can tell me how much time," Dean says drily.
"Even if I could, time doesn't really...exist very much, in there." Jack shrugs his jacket on. It's the same outfit that he wore when he disappeared from that quiet suburban street yesterday, and Dean wonders if that's just the outfit he'll wear for eternity, now. "But I'd say it's approximately...not long."
"Where are you going to be?" says Sam, without looking up. He's focused on their shoebox of ritual supplies, sorting through the herb bundles and ceremonial blades and sticks of colored chalk.
"Providing a distraction," says Jack. He shrugs again. "The Empty would know the instant a human showed up on its doorstep. So...I'm going to summon it elsewhere."
Now Sam does look up, his brow furrowing. "Are you sure that's safe?" he says.
"It's alright," says Jack, reassuringly. "We're just going to talk. Cosmic entity to cosmic entity." There's that wry, ancient smile again, tugging at the corner of his mouth but making his eyes look somehow more serious. "But I can't keep it occupied with me for long."
"Yeah, so hurry, got it," Dean says. "Sneak into a giant vacuum dimension and find the one guy the Empty doesn't want found. Piece of cake."
"I'm glad," says Jack. "Start now." And he vanishes.
"Jesus," says Dean. "Kid needs to work on his briefings."
"It's ready," says Sam, who has been working instead of anxiously running his mouth, unlike Dean. Dean looks over and sees that Sam has ground a few herbs into a paste and is applying it with two fingers to the blade of a fairly substantial-looking dagger.
"That's it?" says Dean.
"The physical ingredients are more of a formality," says Sam, distracted as he taps an odd, syncopated pattern onto the dagger's hilt. "The real ingredients are the intent. Shut up and let me concentrate."
Dean mimes zipping his mouth closed, but Sam isn't looking—he's bending over the knife, his lips moving in the syllables of a language Dean can't identify, his jaw knotting with effort. There's a low ripple of power that races around the room like a trapped wind, a glimmer of bright color in Sam's eyes that could be just a trick of the light. Dean wonders, not for the first time and not, he suspects, for the last, how much of that power is coming from the invocation of the spell and how much is coming from Sam himself.
"It's ready," says Sam, turning around. In his hand, the dagger's blade flares gold for a moment, then quiets.
"Guess I should be glad you picked up so much from Rowena," says Dean. He unzips his jacket. "Alright, let's get this show on the road."
"Is it worth mentioning that I hate this?" Sam says as he steps over to stand in front of Dean, nearly toe-to-toe with him. They each put their left hand on the other's shoulder. Dean can feel the tension radiating from his brother, a coiled apprehension like a crackle of static energy.
"I know," says Dean. "But I have to—I have to try, Sammy. If there's even a chance, I—I have to do it."
"Yeah. I—" Sam clears his throat. "I know. I have to try, too. But I wish I—"
"You can't go, and you know it," says Dean patiently. "Someone has to be here to run the spell and you know damn well I don't have the chops."
"I guess," Sam mutters rebelliously. "I just hate—if anything, anything goes wrong, then you'll be—"
"Sam. Let's just get on with it." Dean is feeling his own trepidation, but he pushes it down and grins at Sam instead. "Sooner I go, the sooner I'll be back. With Cas."
Sam sighs. "There's one more component."
"Right, yeah, the secret," says Dean. "I was just going to use the time I spit in your—"
"It has to be about Cas," says Sam, in the tone he reserves for when Dean is being particularly dense. "And it has to be heavy."
"Heavy?"
"The secrets are the metaphysical anchor for you. So...yes. Metaphysically...heavy."
Dean blinks. "Well, fine. I guess. Uh. You go first."
Sam is quiet for a moment, his grip shifting on the dagger. "Um," he says. "When I first..." His voice catches a little, in a way that makes Dean look sharply up at him. Sam inhales and says, carefully, "When I first knew Cas cared about me, it felt like absolution."
There's a beat of silence. Sam looks down, hesitates. "I think about...everything that I've done, and I...I think part of me will always—feel like I'm unclean, y'know?"
"Sam."
Sam gives a little jerk of his head. He meets Dean's eyes steadily. His lashes are wet. "But there's so much—goodness, in Cas. It felt like, if he had faith in me, he must have been seeing goodness in me, too. Somewhere. And it—and sometimes I catch myself waiting for the other shoe to drop, right? I had that—that bullet in me from shooting Chuck and it felt all...wrong. And Cas saw it, and I thought to myself, this is it. It was just a knee-jerk reaction, but I just thought, this is where Cas decides I'm too unclean to live. This is where he puts me down."
"Cas would never—"
"I know," says Sam. "He never will. That's just it, though, isn't it? He's never going to stop having faith in me, and I...uh, honestly Dean, it scares the shit out of me. But. Yeah."
In Sam's hand, the dagger flashes again, another curl of gold light.
"Your turn," says Sam.
Dean puts his hand over the dagger. He thinks about Cas. About the last time he'd seen Cas. Cas's voice, thick with tears. Heavy with finality.
And he thinks, too, about all the other times—Cas soft and smiling over the rim of a beer, Cas pacing carefully through the Bunker's halls, Cas grumpy on the other end of the phone, griping about something or other. Cas dragging Dean back from danger, his face thunderous and fierce. Cas in a fight, twisting away from a blow or lunging to deal one of his own, moving like lightning, like grace made manifest. Cas in the passenger seat of the Impala, his brow furrowed, his gaze unfaltering. Cas looking at him like he—like Dean was—like Dean was worth—
"I love him," Dean says. "I'm...I love him, Sam."
Sam smiles at that, something soft and warm and lovely that lights up his face. Dean manages a watery grin in return, and waits for the dagger to glow. Nothing happens.
"It didn't work," he blurts, confused.
"Right," says Sam. He looks pained. "Well. That's...that's not really a secret, Dean, is it?"
"You—you—"
"For ages, yeah. Come on, man. I have eyes."
"Son of a...of all the....right, you know what, whatever." Dean swallows, resists the urge to take his hand off Sam's shoulder to rub tiredly at his eyes. "Alright. Okay."
"He loved me too," he says, finally. It tears at his throat, the sentence. "He told me so, right before the Empty took him." It's a knife in his gut, twisting up towards his heart, flaying him from the inside out.
"But I already knew. I think I've known for a long time. And I was too much of a coward to ever...god. Sam. I'm such a fucking coward. I knew, and I thought that he knew how I felt, and I figured we would just...never do anything about it. I figured it was just safer that way. Better. Because I knew I wasn't gonna make him happy. I mean, look at my fucking track record, I've mostly hurt him, haven't I? So—yeah, even if we weren't constantly running around dealing with one fucking apocalypse after another, it was never something that was gonna work. And I knew he was never gonna stay. I'm not—I'm not a person people fucking stay around for."
The dagger blazes gold, under his palm. Dean sighs and lifts his hand to at last scrub it across his face. His knuckles come away damp.
"Dean," says Sam, quietly, and he looks so utterly, heartbrokenly sad that Dean wants to turn away. He doesn't want to hear it. He doesn't want Sam to tell him that he's wrong, that Cas would have stayed—he doesn't want to think about the fact that he could have had Cas, that he could have had so much, that they could have had each other, for all that time. But Sam just looks at him with that dark, sad gaze, and all he says is, "Are you ready?"
Dean steels himself. Nods. "Do it."
"You better fucking come back," Sam says, and stabs him.
Dean feels the knife slide in, under his ribs, and he can't stop the punched-out sound that leaves his throat as his knuckles go white against Sam's shoulder. The knife feels hot, like someone's digging into him with a heated poker. But the surge it sends through his veins is cold: ice crawling through him, frostbite under his skin. He can feel Sam's hand tightening on his shoulder, holding him up as his knees threaten to buckle underneath him. A swell of vertigo makes him screw his eyes shut for a second.
He opens his eyes and he's not in the Bunker anymore.
Around him, under his feet, above his head, there's darkness. Impenetrable and inky. A darkness so absolute it seems solid, so that when he lifts his hand he's almost surprised he's able to move it through the void around him.
There's light, though. Barely noticeable, but present. A soft gold glow coming from the bloody wound in his side. Dean grimaces, cupping a hand briefly against his ribs. The pain is...not minimal.
"Castiel," he calls, low. It occurs to him, then, the absurdity of coming to this location and just looking around for Cas. He isn't sure what he expected—that the ritual would drop him right beside Cas, maybe? That Cas would just be visible right in front of him, or waiting and alert somewhere else, would hear him call and show up at his shoulder like always? Dean grimaces at the idea of traipsing through the Empty in aimless circles, trying to call out to Cas without waking up every other godforsaken thing in this place.
He turns around and there Cas is, lying at his feet.
"Cas!" Dean drops to his knees immediately, wincing as the wound in his side shoots out another flare of pain. Jack wasn't kidding about him not having long.
Cas is curled on his side, his eyes closed. There are dark tendrils winding around his forearms and ankles, like this...this place has made itself manifest, in order to tether him to it. Dean tugs at the bindings, tries to dig his fingers into them, but they may as well be made of iron for all that they budge.
He puts his hands to Cas's face instead, cups Cas's jaw and the side of his cheek and lifts his face a little, off whatever is passing for a floor in this dimension. Touches Cas's hair, gently.
"Cas," he pleads, again.
God, all those years he spent stealing tiny moments, little glances, small touches and brushes, because he'd decided that was all he was going to allow himself. It all seems so stupid, now. Because now it might be too late and he can't keep his hands off Cas, can't keep himself from helplessly running the tips of his fingers over the delicate bones in Cas's face with something that's half reverence and half despair.
He bows his head, hunches over until his forehead is pressed against Cas's. Cas still feels warm to the touch. Like he's just sleeping. Like he could wake at any moment.
"Come back," Dean says, softly, uselessly.
Cas's brow furrows. Slowly, his eyes open. He blinks at Dean.
"You, " he says, his voice completely devoid of surprise. Like it's the most expected thing in the world for Dean to be there.
Dean feels a soft laugh burst from his chest. There's a lump in his throat. "Hey," he says. "Hey, Cas, yeah. Yeah."
Cas makes no move to sit up, letting his head rest heavy against Dean's palm. "...you're not him."
He says it with a kind of quiet resignation, and Dean feels a deep pain in his ribs that's not just from the knife wound.
"What? No, man, I'm not the Empty. It's me. I'm here to get you out, but we don't have much time—"
"Dean would not be here," Cas interrupts flatly. He tips his head away from Dean's hand. "He could not be here."
"Cas, come on, if there's something I can tell you to make you believe me, just let me know what it is, alright? You want me to tell you the last movie I made you watch, or—?"
"I know you're in my head," says Cas, and the momentary testiness in his voice is so incredibly Cas-like that it might pull a chuckle out of Dean if the situation weren't so goddamn dire. "Anything I know, you know."
"Fuck's sake." Dean throws up his hands. "Me and Sam and Jack, we're trying pull you out of here, but you gotta work with me a little. I don't know how long Sam can keep the spell up."
Cas actually cracks a tired smile at that, his eyes drifting half-shut. "That's a good one. Not very original, though."
"Jesus—it's this place, isn't it," says Dean, and he can hear his own voice rising. Sam's going to kill him if he dies in here. "This fucking place is draining the life-force out of you, come on, Cas, please get up—"
"I was dreaming of you," says Cas, suddenly. "Of...him. Of killing him. Back when Naomi made me do it, again and again."
Dean opens his mouth. He tries to make words. Nothing comes out. That didn't happen, he thinks. That couldn't have happened. But he looks at the misery in Cas's eyes and he isn't so sure.
"I know you want me to suffer," says Cas, "making me relive these memories. But I think..." He studies Dean. "I think you don't realize that I was always reliving them, already. Over and over."
Dean wants to weep. He wants to break something. He wants to wrench out the heaviness in his chest and crush it in his hands. He wants to put his arms around Cas and uproot the sorrow in them both, clear space for something else to grow. But he doesn't know how to do that. He's never known how to do that.
That's the shitty truth of it, isn't it? He's always made the excuse that they didn't have time, with all of the shit the world insisted on throwing their way, but the truth has always been that he doesn't know how. He couldn't have turned himself into someone who could be with Cas even if he had all the time in existence, and he certainly doesn't have that luxury now.
"I'm not sorry," says Cas, abruptly, into the silence and the darkness of the abyss. He turns the dark blue of his eyes on Dean. "I have regrets about so much. But I'm not sorry to have loved him."
Dean hears himself make a single choked sound. The pain under his ribs spikes again and it's not as bad, not nearly as bad, as the pain in his chest, in his throat, in his heart. Everything he knows he could never be is clawing to life inside him, fighting to be let out. It won't work, he knows this—he doesn't work. But he can't—he can't not try. It's Cas. He can't not try.
"Alright," he says. He sits heavily, stretches out his legs in front of him. "Okay. Just listen, then, alright? Just—listen to me for a sec, and don't go back to—to sleep. Please."
Cas doesn't say anything, but he doesn't close his eyes either. Just stares at Dean unblinkingly.
"You scared me when you told me how you felt about me," Dean says bluntly. He picks at a loose thread on one of his cuffs. "I think I...I think I knew. Maybe not always, but for a long time. I knew you felt that way, and I just...I guess I thought we would just never bring it up. Because I figured, you're an angel, and I'm...well, I'm this." He makes a jerky, meaningless gesture towards himself. "I'm...just this."
"All the shit you said about me being...y'know. A good person, or whatever. I don't—" His voice cracks; he coughs to cover it, brushes a hand across his eyes. "I don't really know why you see that. Why you've always seen that. In me."
"And I didn't know, Cas." He swallows. "I didn't know you thought that I didn't...that you thought I wouldn't..." He squeezes his eyes shut, opens them again. Sighs out a breathless laugh. "I thought you knew how I felt about you."
"I know how Dean feels about me," says Cas. "I know that he cares about me, even if it isn't—"
"See, but you don't, though," says Dean. "Or you'd know that I'm in love with you too, you dumbass."
Cas closes his eyes. His mouth trembles for an instant before he presses it into a thin line.
"I love you," says Dean, and he feels his heart squeeze painfully at the words, because he's afraid. "Cas, I've loved you for such a goddamn long time. I was just scared. Still am." God, he's so scared. He's scared of Cas, and scared of himself, and scared at how immense the wanting inside him feels. He's scared of a future in which he fucks everything up, ruins Cas the way he ruins everything. In which he tries to have something he's never deserved. But for once, he's more scared of not trying. He's more scared of not having Cas at all.
"Please," Cas rasps. His voice shakes. "Please, stop."
"But why can't we have this?" says Dean. Another throb of agony pulses up from under his ribs and he grits his teeth, rides it out. "I want this. I'm scared of it, yeah, of breaking it like I break everything, but I want it. I want you."
Dean exhales. He feels dizzy, which could be blood loss or could be the weight of everything he just said, slipping off of his chest like melting snow.
Cas is still lying on his side, his dark eyes peering up at Dean, his face wet with tears. He reaches up, the coils of darkness around his wrist and forearm shifting like black vines, and presses a hand against Dean's cheek.
"You still don't believe it's me, do you?" says Dean quietly. It's ironic, really, that he's finally gotten his head out of his ass for long enough to actually tell Cas how he feels, only for it not to land. For Cas to believe it isn't real. The universe must be laughing at him.
Cas doesn't move his hand, but he looks away.
"I probably made things worse by saying all that, right?" Dean says. He can't quite keep the bitterness out of his voice. "Because the me you know—the me I was—that guy's too much of a fucking coward to say any of this shit." He feels a tear trickle free and slide down towards his chin, a streak of liquid heat against his skin. He turns his face into Cas's hand, closes his eyes. Kisses Cas's palm.
He hears Cas murmur, faintly as if from a great distance, "You're bleeding."
Dean feels himself listing over, like a sinking boat. He slumps over onto his side, facing Cas. His head swims; it's an effort to force his eyes back open. He puts his hand to his side and his palm comes away red. "Rough time getting here," he slurs at Cas, who is studying him with a nebulous sort of half-concern.
"If you were the real Dean," says Cas, frowning a little, "then it would be very foolish of you to linger. I...don't think you have much time left."
Dean huffs a laugh. A memory floats, unbidden, to the forefront of his mind. "Lemme...lemme bottom-line it for you," he pants. God, his side hurts. He lets his head drop, lets it rest on the strange featureless surface this dimension has crafted for them to splay out on. "I'm not leaving here without you."
Something hitches in Cas's breath. "I...Dean." His voice is hesitant, still. Doubtful.
"Cas," says Dean. He gropes forward, bumps his knuckles against Cas's chest. Presses his hand flat against it. "I don't have anything else. I'm sorry. I'm just me, and I'm not..."
He's failed, he realizes dimly. After everything, he's failed. He isn't enough, he's never been enough.
His vision blurs. He looks at the scarlet handprint he's left on Cas's chest.
"Cas, I never believed I was anything, until you believed in me." He doesn't have any right to ask. He doesn't have any right, after everything he's said and done, after everything he hasn't said and done. He digs deep, finds the courage to ask anyway. Gathers all the strength he has left, and lifts his hand. "Just one more time, alright? Believe in me."
Cas stares at him. Slowly, he reaches out. The dark tendrils wrapped around his limbs shiver for a moment, like they really are alive. And then they crumble into fragments, and then to ash, and then to nothing.
Cas presses his palm to Dean's. Wraps his fingers around Dean's wrist, grips it like it's a sword, like it's a lifeline, like it's real.
There's a blaze of gold light, burning away everything it touches.
*
Dean sucks in a lungful of air, feels himself falling, feels his back hit the polished floor. Everything is unbearably bright and unbearably loud—Sam's frantic voice, Cas's wordless cry. Hands pressed against his side, making him hiss in pain. Fingertips against his temple.
I've got you. A voice, calm, familiar. Not Cas's. Not Sam's either. He can't tell if he's hearing it out loud or in his head. Warmth expands suddenly in his chest—power channeled into his body by an endless river.
Dean jerks halfway up from the floor, the breath knocked out of him by the sudden and utter absence of pain. He props himself on his elbows, gasping weakly and screwing his eyes shut. When he finally lifts his head, he's met by Jack's clear gaze.
"You cut it close," says Jack, reproving. The last few flecks of radiant light fade from his eyes. Beside him, Sam has a hand over his mouth, his face pale and streaked with tears.
Dean moves his hand to his side. His fingers collide with another set of knuckles, another palm pressed over the spot where Sam had driven the dagger into him. He looks down, tracks his gaze back up the creased line of a tan sleeve.
"Dean," Cas stammers. His hair is tousled, his eyes wild with fear and shock. The handprint is dark red across his chest.
Relief surges through Dean, a crashing wave that makes his hands tremble suddenly. "Cas—?" He manages to reach up, manages to touch Cas's face. Cas is warm under his palm. Solid. Real. Here.
"Son of a bitch," Dean exhales, the words punched out of him, and he hooks his arm around the back of Cas's neck. Drags Cas toward him.
Cas—Cas goes. Cas is a celestial being forged out of grace and light and fucking starfire for all Dean knows, but he lets Dean pull him down into an embrace, lets Dean bury his face in Cas's collar and breathe in the cold scorched-prairie smell of him.
"You were...real," says Cas, slowly, like he's still wrapping his head around the fact. Dean can feel Cas's fingers digging into his shoulders.
"Yeah, Cas." Dean grips Cas tighter, clenching at the fabric of Cas's coat. "God, I thought I'd...I thought I'd never..."
"You came for me," Cas mumbles, into Dean's hair.
Dean laughs wetly, pulls back a few inches so he can look Cas in the eyes. "What, you thought I was just going to leave you in there? In a fucking void-dimension? You goddamn idiot."
"I...don't know," says Cas, wonderingly. "I...I didn't think you could. I didn't think there was a way."
"There's always a way," says Dean, and kisses him.
Cas makes a soft, startled sound that catches raggedly in his throat, and then he's kissing Dean back. He's kissing Dean back, and god, Dean thinks, he really is an idiot for not doing this years ago.
"I—you—" Cas pants as they break apart. His eyes are enormous. There's a smile curling the corners of his mouth, half-disbelieving, half-incredulous. "You—"
"Don't overthink it," Dean tells him, which is incredibly hypocritical because he can feel his own overthinking machinery kicking into high gear, laying out all the ways he could mess this up, all the ways he's going to mess this up. But—screw it, he thinks vehemently. Whatever he might mess up—whatever he's going to mess up—he'll figure it out. He's not going to be afraid—he refuses to be afraid of this. He's going to fucking try. He asked Cas to believe in him and so he's going to try.
Cas pushes himself to his feet. He catches Dean's hands on the way up, pulls Dean up along with him. His fingers curl into the cuffs of Dean's sleeves, like he doesn't want to let go.
"Cas—" Sam's there beside them suddenly, his face still a little ashen, only partially on its way to regaining color. Cas finally releases Dean's wrists, turning to Sam with a glad smile and immediately getting pulled into a hug that looks crushingly tight.
"Thank you," Dean hears Cas murmur, into Sam's ear.
"Yeah, man," Sam sniffs, wiping ineffectually at his eyes. "Any...any time."
Sam turns to Dean, looks him up and down. His lip wobbles.
"Don't you start," Dean says, seeing immediately where this is going. "I'm fine—"
Sam takes a few choppy steps forward and yanks Dean into his arms.
"Alright, okay," says Dean, around a mouthful of Sam's flannel. "Jesus...okay."
"Fuck you. You were in there for so long," Sam grits in his ear, "and I—I had to—had to hold the knife in you—"
"Hey, shh," says Dean. He wraps his arms around his brother, presses his hands against Sam's shoulder blades. He thinks about Sam left behind in the Bunker, maintaining the spell while...god, while having to hold Dean's body up, most likely. "It's okay, Sammy. We're okay."
Sam sniffs again, nods jerkily into his shoulder. Dean rubs a soothing circle into Sam's back.
He catches Cas's eye, over Sam's shoulder. Cas is standing next to Jack, and his eyes are on Dean, and his mouth is still curved into that wondering smile. Dean feels something split in his heart—not painfully, but sweetly, newly. Something soft and growing.
"We're okay," says Dean again, and he's talking to Sam, and to Cas, and to himself, and to the new god in their midst, and—really, to the world at large.