Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

183 days before Christmas

There is music coming from the walls.

Dean notices it one afternoon when Sam has gone out for a grocery run. It’s been maybe two weeks since they kicked Chuck’s ass and Jack fixed the world, and things have been pretty quiet, but not unnaturally so. With no world-ending cataclysms, their network of hunters is back at full strength, leaving him and Sam with less to do. Monsters aren't gone or anything, but Dean is left wondering how much of their caseload before had been drummed up by Chuck, trying to keep them busy or teach them “lessons.”

Only now there’s music coming from the walls.

He thinks he’s heard it before, but just kind of assumed it was Sam watching a movie in another room or something. The acoustics in the bunker are pretty weird. But now it’s just him and his dog at home alone and the call is coming from inside the house.

The music isn’t terrible, but it’s not exactly good, either, just some kind of light-jazz-elevator-music stuff. He doesn’t want it to be something to be concerned about, but nothing is supposed to be able to get into the bunker, and just about everything that’s ever managed it is dead or gone, these days. So chances are it is something to be worried about. Dammit.

He turns to the dog. “Miracle,” he says, “stay.”

The dog follows him down the hallway to the storage rooms, but balks at actually going into the artifact room where the music is the loudest. Dean doesn’t blame him. This is the part of the bunker they haven’t had much need for lately; run-of-the-mill hauntings don’t leave much demand for ancient treasures and shit. The room is still a mess from—well, from the last time anyone was in here. Dean picks up some scattered papers and puts a fallen crate back on its shelf. Then he notices the weird thing.

The door is still there.

He was sure they closed it. Pretty sure. They closed it, right? There are some serious drawbacks to having a portal to Death’s personal reading room in your basement, especially when Death hates your guts.

But the key is still stuck in the wall, the outline of the door around it, just like it was last time Dean saw it. No wonder the dog doesn’t want anything to do with this room.

Well, that can be fixed easily enough. He goes to pull the key from the brick doing its very best door-handle impersonation, but the key won’t budge.

After trying from several angles, he gives the key a final pull and it gives way—and the entire door comes with it.

Well. Shit.

At least he knows now this is definitely where the music is coming from. The library is as clean and bright and otherworldly as it was last time he was here, but with the addition of elevator music. No sign of Death—maybe a new one hasn’t spawned yet?

“Dean Winchester,” a voice calls from the other side of the stacks, “you may enter.”

He would really, really prefer not to, but he’s trying very hard not to piss off any new preternatural beings. And maybe it’s wishful thinking, but this one sounds less murdery than its predecessors. He steps through the door and walks between the shelves to the front desk, keeping his hands in sight as he approaches. Nice, non-threatening Dean Winchester, making no sudden moves.

Seated behind the desk is a being of ambiguous age and gender: motionless as the world's creepiest statue, dressed all in black, crew-cut silver hair, ancient eyes in a youthful face. There’s a nameplate on the desk; written on it in engraved script is a name, Brady, and in smaller letters underneath, they/them.

“Hi,” Dean says awkwardly. “Uh, Brady? Sorry to intrude on… whatever you’ve got going on here, but the door on our side is kind of… stuck.”

“I am aware,” they say. “I am working on a solution. In the meantime, we will be, in a certain sense, neighbors. I have no interest in revisiting old grievances. If there is anything within the scope of my power that I might assist you with, please do let me know.”

Dean really should know better than to ask for favors from monsters, but his mouth speaks before his brain catches up. “Don’t you have some pull with the Empty?”

They give Dean a look that is far too knowing for his comfort. “It is true that Death and the Empty are inherently linked, but there is a natural order to take into consideration. And as I said, I would not wish to replicate any past animosity. The previous… disagreement between Billie and the Empty left the ranks of Reapers depleted. I do not take this lightly. I hope you can understand.”

Yeah, Dean gets it. Don’t screw with the Empty. He doesn’t know why he even asked.

“Was there anything else?”

“Yeah,” Dean says before he can stop himself, “where’s that music coming from?”

Brady blinks and the music stops. “I am attempting to make the reading room a more welcoming environment. Some of our number harbor reservations about this space, since it has been defiled by such violence.”

“Okay, but where’s it coming from?”

“This is my space, I can manifest a wide array of sensory stimuli. If the sound is a nuisance I can attempt to adjust the decibel level, but the mechanics of it is… complex.”

Dean decides he doesn’t want to know what happens if Brady tries to turn down the volume without a knob. Probably better off not messing with it. “It’s fine,” he says. And because he just cannot seem to shut up, he adds, “A little bland, but, you know, fine.”

Brady nods apologetically. “I’m afraid my catalog is limited. When I visit the mortal world, it is rarely for the purposes of appreciating human music.”

“Well if it’s music recommendations you need, I can help you there.”

Brady perks up a bit, then frowns. “I cannot give anything in exchange, you must understand.”

Yes, he goddamn gets it already. “Sure, but you said yourself, we’re neighbors. Consider me your friendly neighborhood guy who has the best taste in music.”

They consider this. They nod, once. Dean is getting ready to launch into his whole classic-rock-is-the-pinnacle-of-music pitch when it hits him all at once that he is standing in a room where he and Sam each nearly died within the past month, and he’s chatting about music with an ancient unknowable entity that probably still doesn’t like him very much, whatever they might say otherwise.

What are you doing?

He needs to get the hell out of here.

“You know what? I’ll figure something out, alright? Great. Cool. Listen, I gotta go, but good talking to you. And I’ll be in touch about the tunes. Bye.”

He tries not to look too much like he’s running away. The door slams shut behind him, the key still stuck fast in the wall.

He takes on the task of picking out music for Death’s library as seriously as he takes anything, with the obvious exception of hunting, which takes precedence. They take care of a haunting just over the state line in Nebraska and Dean picks up a hardy old tape deck and a box of cassettes from a yard sale on the way back.

Sam gives him a look.

“What?” He’s still pissed Sam wouldn’t let him lend Brady the turntable because Reapers don’t experience linear time the way we do and how do we know they’ll give it back?

“Nothing. I think it’s great that you’re, uh, curating Death’s music collection. Maybe when you’re done you can teach wraiths to hustle pool.”

“Maybe I will. I got nothing but time, Sam.”

It’s clear Sam has something else on his mind, and when they get back home he finally says, “If this were… something, you’d tell me, right? Like if there were some kind of plan here?”

The question twists in his gut, a pain he didn’t expect and doesn’t entirely understand. “No plan, no scheme. Just keeping busy.”

He sorts through the yard sale box and and his own collection, accumulated over many years of designing quality soundtracks for cross-country drives. His tapes are mostly called things like “Road Trip #12” and “Awesome Stuff” and “Sam's Girly Mix.” (Sam swoops in to confiscate the latter at the last minute, good riddance). Dean sacrifices a few of the older ones to the donation box, especially the ones that seem to have a weirdly high percentage of Queen songs. He plans to give Death most of the yard sale stuff. (Opera. So much opera.)

He knocks before passing through the door to the library, out of some vague superstition that this might keep anyone on the other side from stabbing him on sight.

What are you so afraid of?

The elevator music is still playing, faintly, and there’s actually a not-Death person in the reading room shelving books this time, a young woman in a black sweater and pink hair who gives him a suspicious look and otherwise ignores him. So Death got at least one person to come back to work. Good for them.

Brady is at the front desk, poring over the thick tome of some poor bastard’s life. Dean knows the pages will be blank to his eyes, but he can’t help trying to peek.

“Dean Winchester,” Brady says, closing the book. “I was beginning to think you wouldn’t return to this place.”

So much for Sam's “no concept of linear time” theory. He eases the box onto the desk and sets the dusty tape deck on top. “Wanted to make sure I got you a good assortment of human music to go with your new, uh, style.” This he addresses to the posters now adorning the walls around the desk. READ! they exclaim in colorful letters accompanied by cartoon animals and at least one teen movie star whose name Dean has forgotten. Literally, what the hell.

“You didn’t have to go to such trouble.”

Dean is really getting tired of people insinuating he has ulterior motives in what is, admittedly, one of the more bizarre things he’s ever done in his life. “What else am I gonna do, in these post-destiny times, am I right?”

“I believe mortals have a number of pastimes.”

“Wow, thanks for the tip.”

The sarcasm is probably not wise, but luckily Death ignores it, instead examining the tape deck and prodding the buttons.

“It has batteries. Just pop in a tape and let her roll. I put extra batteries in the box, too.”

“That won’t be necessary. The batteries will not expire here. It is one of the advantages of being Death.”

“I completely can’t tell if you’re joking.”

Death pulls out one of the tapes, labeled Pavarotti. Dean decides to make himself scarce.

Sam finds him in his room later.

“Can you hear opera?” Sam asks. “Like, coming through the walls?”

Dean turns up the volume on his Walkman. “No, Sam, I can’t.”

Chapter Text

summer

Sam takes to playing his vinyls more often to drown out the music from the library.

It comes and goes, and it doesn’t all suck, and anytime it really starts to get to them they can go for a drive or for burgers or to find something to kill.

Occasionally they’ll be on a case, say, three counties away, and Dean will think he can hear the greatest hits of James Brown in the distance. He is 80% sure he’s imagining it.

Dean is in the kitchen, graciously tolerating one of Sam’s girls-playing-piano albums, when someone knocks on the door. The bunker door.

Dean is not thinking about the last time somebody came to the door uninvited, who it was that time, or who he may have thought it was. He’s completely not thinking about that, because he may not have many healthy habits, but he knows you’re not supposed to poke at an open wound.

Sam is busy cooking some monstrosity out of avocado slices and bread crumbs. Dean goes to open the door. The dog follows him, which makes him feel a little better about the whole thing even though it probably shouldn’t.

It’s Michael.

No, he realizes when his brain catches up to his eyes. Michael is dead.

It’s Adam.

“Hi,” says Adam.

“You’re not dead.”

“You guys thought I was dead? Again?”

“Michael told us you were dead.”

“Michael is gone. Weeks ago. Can I come in? Please? I walked here from town.”

A lifetime of paranoia says absolutely not.

Screw that, frankly.

He steps aside and lets Adam into the bunker.

He doesn’t immediately get stabbed or choked, which is a good sign.

“You hungry?”

While Adam eats Sam’s avocado concoction, Sam offers up a theory.

“God, the new god, put back everyone that Chuck disappeared. It makes sense that that includes Adam. He probably reappeared right where he vanished from, only without Michael because—”

“Because Chuck killed Michael,” Dean finishes for him.

Adam stares at them.

“Dean,” Sam says.

What? If it were him, he’d be glad to be rid of the son-of-a-bitch angel that had been riding around in his skin all this time. Except it’s not him, because it’s Adam, so technically Dean has no idea what he must be feeling right now. To lose someone who was that close to him for such a long time.

It probably sucks, even if Michael was a dick.

“Sorry,” Dean says.

“It’s… okay,” Adam says. “Look, I know it’s weird for me to be here. But I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

“You’re always welcome here,” Sam tells him earnestly. “Whether you just need a place to crash while you get your bearings, or, you know, if you want to stay.”

“I’ll have to think about it,” he says. “Thanks. For the food.”

The kid can put away Sam’s cooking without complaint, which is a point in his favor in Dean’s book.

Then he says, “The record stopped, but there’s still music playing.” Dean and Sam both look at the record player. “I’m not imagining that, right?”

“We kind of have transdimensional neighbors,” Sam says. “And Dean gave them a bunch of old cassette tapes, because he’s Dean.”

Dean is trying to figure out if he should be offended by this. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I mean you take it upon yourself to introduce inhuman beings to all the joys of the human experience, from bad music to bad food to bad movies.”

Dean is momentarily speechless. “Name one bad movie.”

“The Fifth Element.”

“Go to your room.”

Sam rolls his eyes. “Come on,” he says to Adam. “I’ll show you around.”

He’s not wrong, technically. Not about the movies, there is nothing wrong with Dean’s taste. About the other part.

He hadn’t really thought about it like that, but it was one of the fun things about raising Jack, back when raising Jack was something they were doing as a family and not just a seemingly endless series of tragedies and impossible choices.

And long before that—

Well.

The new Death seems… not so bad. Dresses like a twelve-year-old’s idea of a vampire, talks like a cross between a dictionary and a robot, is not actively trying to kill Dean or anyone he knows personally. A marked improvement on previous incarnations of Death. Dean hasn’t been back to the library since he delivered the stuff, but he was thinking about dropping in sometime just to see how things are going. He was thinking about dropping in on Death.

It’s possible that Dean needs more friends.

No, he doesn’t. He has his brother (possibly two brothers now, which may be one too many) and a job he loves (because he’s never seriously tried to do anything else) and, goddammit, he already has a best friend.

Had.

Had.

He cleans the kitchen. He walks the dog. He goes to bed. He dreams he’s chasing shadows in the dark, and the shadows are made of folk music.

Sam can make fun of Dean for being friends with Death, but Dean can make fun of Sam times a thousand, because Sam has a girlfriend.

It was one of the hardest things Dean has ever done not to laugh watching Sam cower at his cell phone, the day after the non-end of the world, trying to figure out how to answer Eileen’s texts. He put the phone down on the table, then picked it up again, then set it back down and turned it around for Dean to see.

The little bubble said, “I’m OK” and then another one said, “What happened?”

“Dude, just tell her what happened.”

Sam sighed, turned the phone back to him, and tapped out, “Chuck is gone. We’re safe now.”

She sent back, almost immediately, “I’m glad.”

Sam sat back in his chair.

Dean waits, but his brother makes no move to take the conversation any further. “Is that it?”

“You said to tell her what happened. I told her.”

“Yeah, but you and I both know that’s not all you want to say to her.”

“We literally just finished fighting God. I don’t know what I want to say to her.”

Dean rolled his eyes. “What is the connection between those two things? None. At all.” He grabbed Sam’s phone.

“Hey!”

“We should talk now that it’s all over,” he narrated as he typed. “Let’s… meet… up… sometime.” He showed Sam, who made a grab for the phone. Dean leaned away from his freakishly long reach. “Am I wrong?”

Sam seemed to be trying to speak without success for several seconds before he finally settled on, “No.”

“Alright then.” He pressed send.

Sam took one of the bunker cars and drove out to meet Eileen the next day, and they’ve been texting non-stop ever since and “facetiming” (or whatever the kids are calling it these days) most nights in Sam’s room. She hasn’t come back to the bunker yet, but Dean gets it and he's pretty sure Sam does too—trust is hard, especially when the person you’re trying to trust is yourself.

Over breakfast one morning, Adam asks, “Do you guys have wi-fi?”

It was Sam’s turn to make breakfast, so breakfast is smoothies that taste like health.

“Of course we have wi-fi,” Dean says.

“I don’t have a computer,” Adam says.

“We could probably get something secondhand if you need one,” Sam tells him. “What exactly are we talking about here?”

“I’m not sure.”

Dean feels like there’s a second conversation going on somewhere else, maybe inside Adam’s head.

He catches up with Dean when Dean is semi-secretly sneaking out later that morning to go buy some health-free food, and Dean winds up leaving him at the local library for a couple hours. On the drive back to the bunker, Adam says,

“I never finished college.”

“Is that what this is about? Lots of people don’t finish college. Hell, some of us don’t even go in the first place.”

“Yeah, well. I don’t actually want to be a monster hunter? No offense.”

Full offense, actually, because if this job is good enough for Dean and Sam and John and Henry Winchester, it should be good enough for Adam Milligan.

Get over yourself, Dean. This life isn’t for everyone.

“None taken.”

“When I was, you know, sharing my body with an archangel, the future didn’t seem to matter much. I mean, Michael never said, but I knew that he knew that something was going down with God. And he didn’t have a plan for after. Maybe he always planned on dying.”

Dean seriously doubts that, but the rest doesn’t surprise him. Michael didn’t exactly take his father’s betrayal well.

“Now I’m just me again. I died more than a decade ago, but now I have another chance.”

“And you’re gonna go back and do the same thing you were doing the first time around?”

“You really can’t imagine wanting something besides this, huh?”

Dean can imagine it, he just knows better by now.

Adam sighs. “I know it’s not going to be the same. Like, do I even legally exist anymore? But I had a life, and it wasn’t a bad life, and since I have no idea where to go from here, I figured I’d start from where I left off. Does that make sense?”

Not really.

If you could start over, how many things would you do differently?

“Sure, man. So, what do you need from us?”

Dean doesn’t need new friends, but he is working on figuring out the strange and foreign concept of hobbies. He’s cooking more, and at Sam’s insistence has even found some non-awful vegetarian recipes and occasionally listens to his brother’s dire warnings about sugar and cholesterol. He tries to train the dog, and Miracle sits on command maybe six times out of ten. He gets the little music wizard app on his phone to tell him what weird tunes Brady is playing in the library and starts reading up on music history. Knowing about an unsolved arson at a recording studio winds up saving their asses from a very pissed-off ghost—turns out nerd shit comes in handy, who knew?

With the pulling of a truly outrageous number of strings, and no shortage of favors called, Adam is declared legally not dead. There’s a whole sob story invented that Dean doesn’t bother to follow, possibly involving a cult. Adam enrolls in online college courses and gets a part-time job in town. He’s studying philosophy instead of biology this time around, even after Dean points out to him that being a doctor is probably going to pay way better and Sam tells Dean to leave Adam alone and let him follow his passions and they are sort of, almost, a family.

Without the threat of Chuck hanging over her head, Eileen comes to town for dinner a couple times a month. She’s still hunting, mostly living out of motel rooms and her car even though it’s obvious that Sam wants to take the Next Step. Dean teases him about everything in his relationship except that.

He knows what Sam is afraid of, because it scares the hell out of him, too.

Their lives are good. There are still bad days, things still go wrong, but it no longer feels like the world is about to end, because it literally isn’t. Their lives are good, for the first time in a long time, so why would they change anything?

Because sometimes it’s not enough.

Chapter Text

September

There are people on the edges of the hunting life, the ones who know the truth about the world but choose to stay out of the fight, but watch from the sidelines for fun or profit. The sort of people Dean grew up looking down on.

Dean meets Emily the Monster Consultant through Eileen. Sam is tied up with a witch-related thing north of Omaha, to which Dean wasn’t invited because he’s “unnecessarily hostile” towards witches, and Eileen isn’t exactly the biggest fan of witches either, so she offers to let Dean in on her case. Adam is two weeks into his semester and gets an even-more-intense-than-usual look in his eyes anytime you ask him how it’s going. Brady has been playing nothing but showtunes for the past three days. Dean agrees to go with Eileen on the condition he gets to drive.

Blond-haired, blue-eyed, sharp-dressed Emily the Consultant leers at his car, ignores his advice, and nearly gets herself killed in the process of stealing (or as she puts it, “rescuing”) two dogs from a nest of vampires.

What would a vampire even want with a dog? What happened to good old drinking blood and terrorizing the innocent?

“Back in his day, vampires were vampires,” Emily says, bleeding lightly on the backseat of his car as she mocks him.

“Are you calling me old?”

At least the dogs are cute. They’re dirty and scrawny and one of them is little more than a puppy. They’re skittish at first, but living with Miracle has taught him a thing or two and before he knows it the little one is sitting in his lap in Emily’s motel room and Eileen is showing her pictures of Miracle on her phone. Emily treats them to dinner, weird expensive vegetarian stuff, but Dean doesn’t turn down free food even after years of not technically being broke anymore, and anyway, she totally owes them.

She gives Dean her business card before she leaves. He has every intention of losing it, but Eileen gives him a Meaningful Look to rival one of Sam’s so he stashes it in the compartment with the spare knives instead.

Seems Eileen is trying to hook him up with more than just a case, and he doesn’t know how to tell her that he doesn’t really… do that, anymore.

They’ve had dry spells before but in late September they get so few calls that Dean is seriously considering summoning some shit himself just to have something to do. Sam decides the time is right to begin a project of cataloging everything in the bunker “so we know where it is when we need it,” which is fair considering the amount of crap they’ve bought, broken, lost, or bargained for, but sorting through boxes for some vague purpose of “someday” makes Dean feel like his brain is melting out of his ears. Adam is neck-deep in homework and apparently Dean baking loaves and loaves of bread is “distracting.” Dean and Miracle have covered all the countryside surrounding the bunker in a five-mile radius on their walks.

Eileen forwards him an email.

Would your friend with the sexy car be willing to watch my dogs for a weekend while I fly out to NC? I’m not trusting regular people with my babies. They bite (the dogs, I mean)

Please tell him I will pay him handsomely with the ill-gotten gains of my despicable occupation

The email concludes with a phone number and an address in Houston. That’s what, an eleven hour drive? He could make that in his sleep.

Sam takes a break from alphabetizing magical artifacts (c for cursed, d for do not touch, e for extra cursed) to give his completely unwanted opinion.

“This is the girl from the vampire thing, right? Just call her.”

Dean closes his laptop. “It’s a bad idea.”

“Eileen says she’s cute, she’s into the same stuff you are, and she gave you her number. What’s the problem?”

Oh, for the love of… They are not having the conversation Sam thinks they’re having. And Dean doesn’t enjoy the idea that Sam and Eileen are scheming about his love life. “I’m not a dog babysitter, Sam.”

“Is that what we’re talking about? The fact that this is work that doesn't involve killing things?”

“Yes, that is what we’re talking about. When was the last time you saw me all wound up over a chick? Woman. Whatever. I’m not you, man.”

“Wow, thanks.”

“Besides, she’s into my car, not me.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Fifty bucks says I’m right.”

“You’re on. Either way, I’m standing by my advice. Call her. You’re good for more than petty crime and killing monsters.” He’s looking at Dean with his big sad eyes and Dean completely cannot deal.

You are worthy of this.

“Fine! Fine, alright, I’ll call her.”

He half expects her to have changed her mind, but the relief in her voice is audible when she answers the phone. She calls him a lifesaver (more gratitude than she showed when he literally saved her life) and rambles about the dogs for a full minute, then tries to buy him a plane ticket, and when he refuses, insists she'll be paying for his gas mileage in addition to his time.

Another pair of sad puppy eyes meets his from across the room.

“One more thing,” he says to Emily the Consultant, “mind if I bring my dog?”

Emily bring the dogs out to greet him and Miracle at the car. They look a hell of a lot better than the last time Dean saw them, their short tan fur clean and shiny, their tongues hanging out like they’re smiling at him. The little one has grown in a few short weeks, and approaches him happily, but the mother puts her ears down and growls at the sight of Miracle. She relaxes a couple degrees once she recognizes Dean.

“This,” Emily says, “is why I won’t leave them with strangers.”

The dogs follow them around as she gives him a tour of the gigantic house she inherited from her grandfather. When Dean asks her how the old man made his fortune, she just raises her eyebrows. So, maybe he’s not the only one with a family business.

Emily’s dogs like Dean, but Miracle loves Emily, rolling over and showing her his belly at the slightest opportunity. Dean tries not to take it personally.

There’s a big fenced-in space out back, green and shady with trees. It looks so much more like a place for dogs than the dusty fields Miracle runs around on back home. Emily tells him how she stopped up all the puppy-sized gaps in the fence, how the mother dog, Juliet, tears through every toy Emily buys for her in a matter of hours. The vet said she’s two years old and the puppy is six months, that they were underfed but otherwise healthy when she got them, but they’re wary of everyone and everything and protective of Emily to the point of being a little dangerous and she wonders if living with monsters is something you ever get all the way better from.

What strikes Dean is how much she cares about this. The cool, detached girl he met on the hunt is gone. And he finds he’s thinking about it. About what it could be like to live a life here. About her. He hasn’t tried anything like this in a long time, and he’s not sure, if Sam and Eileen hadn’t been egging him on, if it would have occurred to him in the first place. Her intensity, husky voice, her slim hands gesturing to the world around her.

He realizes just what he’s doing. He’s trying. Trying to picture it, trying to want, rather than just being here and doing the thing he came here to do.

“Dean? I think your dog wants you.” Miracle sits at his feet with a stick between his teeth, and Dean was too caught up to notice, but probably not for the reasons Emily is thinking. Her smirk is all knowing amusement; there was no offense in her tone, but no flirtation, either.

“I hear you.”

“Good.” She smiles and he smiles back and he throws the stick for Miracle and the puppy gets to it first and it’s easy to just be two people talking about dogs, not a chronically single fortysomething and a hot chick who thinks his car is sexy.

Dean has always been pretty good at reading people.

Maybe you should have more faith in yourself.

“What’s the little one’s name?”

Emily rolls her eyes. “I call her Ava. But her full given name is Avalanche, because I made the mistake of letting my girlfriend pick.”

Dean has, for some reason he pretends he cannot fathom, had enough people come out to him in his life that he knows not to miss a beat here. “How come she’s not looking after them while you’re gone?”

“She works. And she doesn’t totally get what happened to them.”

Dean thinks that translates to “she doesn’t know what I do for a living,” but that’s her business.

She walks him through the complicated ritual of the dogs’ food and treats and shows him the drawer of takeout and delivery menus which would scream “single person” if he didn’t now know better. Then she’s off to the airport.

It’s one of the more relaxing weekends he’s ever had in his life. The first night is dicey when Juliet and Ava start to realize Emily isn’t coming back, but he follows the goddamn novel-length instructions Emily left for him and sits with the dogs in the big TV room and watches home renovation shows until they settle down. (The home shows are a key part of the arrangement—he tries switching to baseball for a few minutes, but the Royals are losing and Juliet gets agitated almost instantly, so he turns it back to the guys with the paint swatches.) Miracle, for his part, is utterly patient with the whole thing: Ava trying to climb all over him and Juliet refusing to let him in the kitchen when there’s food in her dish. Dean tells him (out of earshot of Emily’s dogs, of course) that he is the best dog.

Before he found Miracle he’d never been responsible for much other than his brother or the fate of the human race, but now he has this dog, and he takes care of him, and this friend, who trusts him with her own dogs. It’s absolutely terrifying, and the first time Juliet comes to him of her own accord and leans on his leg to demand affection, it is absolutely awesome.

On Sunday afternoon Emily blows back into town with gourmet dog treats for all three dogs and a hideous souvenir t-shirt for Dean. She writes him a check and he keeps his poker face on and does not whistle at it.

“You bring my boyfriend back soon, you hear?” she tells Dean as she scratches Miracle’s ears and the dog gazes at her like she hung the moon. With a nod to the Impala, she adds, “and my girlfriend.”

“Get your own,” he says, and herds the dog into the car for the drive back to Kansas.

Sam owes him fifty bucks.

96 days until Christmas

Chapter Text

Dean blames the postcard. Greetings from Ireland, best wishes from Mrs. Butters. One flimsy piece of cardboard, and Sam remembers that holidays exist.

Thanksgiving is fine, Dean can handle that, because it mostly involves roasted meat and pie and learning that Eileen has developed a fascination with American football.

According to Sam, it’s because she spent a week-long hunt with a die-hard Patriots fan and wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Considering the intensity with which she watches the screen, Dean figures her interest has more to do with the men in tight pants.

It’s an objective observation. Dean watches football on Thanksgiving because it's What You Do.

Adam emerges from his research cave for the promise of pie, of which they have three kinds, which Sam calls “overkill” and Dean calls “the entire point of this stupid-ass holiday.” Sam made pumpkin and Dean made apple and Eileen arrived the night before with Boston cream and the intention to stay the whole weekend and it’s freaking hilarious how Sam can’t even pretend to be mad about the amount of sugar in the pies after that news.

Emily the Consultant calls around ten. Adam has gone back to his books; Eileen is tucked up against Sam’s side at the far end of the couch; Sam is snoring gently, having fallen asleep halfway through a documentary show about zoo animals. Dean happily leaves the room to take the call. He really doesn’t want to find out if the baby sea otter is gonna die.

“I was thinking of starting a dog rescue,” Emily says in place of hello. They haven’t talked since Dean’s visit but she texts a lot, mostly from her many business trips and vacations, and Sam eyes him like he’s thinking of asking for his money back.

“Okay,” Dean replies, heading down the hall to the kitchen to get more pie. “Why?”

“Because I’m bored? And I like dogs? Why else do people do things? Anyway, you have a dog. Where did you get him?”

“He was a stray.” Miracle has followed him into the kitchen, where the sound of the television fades into country music while the dog gazes up at Dean with mournful, ate-dinner-five-hours-ago eyes.

“What, you just picked him up off the street?”

“The world was ending and he was one of the only living things left on the planet.”

“Okay, please don’t elaborate on that.” Emily texts him whenever she sees a cool car or meets a dog and he sends back stories about Miracle and pictures of weird or funny stuff he sees on the road. They don’t really talk about work, and it’s weirdly nice to have this thing that isn’t about violence or the makeshift life he’s cobbled together from the pieces of everything God tried to destroy. Emily won’t engage in conversations that have the big-G-word in them, which is one of the things Dean likes about her, even if it’s not the way Sam and Eileen were hoping he would like her.

“Can’t you just steal more dogs from vampire nests?”

It would be easy to just tell Sam that Emily has a girlfriend, but as long as Sam thinks Eileen’s matchmaking ploy might be working, it keeps him off Dean’s back about whatever other issues he thinks Dean might be having.

“I think those are in limited supply. What are you eating?”

“Pie.”

“My girlfriend made pie. For Thanksgiving I usually just do takeout, order the orphan special. But she had to go and make a meal out of it.”

“What kind?”

“What?”

“What kind of pie?”

“Oh. Pecan. Were your parents hunters?”

It takes him a second to catch up to the change in subject.

This isn’t really something they talk about.

“Sure. Grandparents, too.”

“Wow. Figures.”

“Excuse you.”

“Did you ever think about getting out? Doing something else?”

“Wish I could say I haven’t.”

After a long pause, she says, “She knows I’m not telling her everything. And I don’t know how long she’s going to wait.”

He’s going to need more pie to deal with this. He switches Emily to speaker, serves the last piece of apple pie onto a plate, and loads it up with whipped cream.

“Look,” he says around a mouthful of crumb topping, “nobody’s forcing you to keep doing—what is it you do? Run stock portfolios for demons?”

“No.”

“Whatever. You can have an early mid-life crisis and buy a Ferrari and adopt fifty dogs. But it doesn’t go away. Everything you know, everything you’ve done, it’s still there.”

The phone sits silent on the table as he finishes off the pie and puts the plate down for Miracle to lick the crumbs. In the distance but also all around them, Patsy Cline sings about leaving.

“Not everyone can deal with what we do,” he tells her.

“I don’t do what you do. I don’t help people.”

“Houston, I’ve done shit I don’t like to advertise, too. Sometimes all you can do is help yourself. This girl of yours, is she worth it?”

“Yes,” she says. No hesitation.

“Then give her the chance to deal. Especially if the pie is good. You don’t wanna lose that one.”

“I kind of hate pecans.”

“Well, for fuck’s sake, don’t lead with that.” She’s quiet again, but it’s a less terrible quiet this time. “You good?”

“Maybe. Probably. Thanks. You’re surprisingly good at the whole relationship advice thing.”

“Hindsight’s a bitch.”

And what is that supposed to mean?

Since there’s nobody but the faint twang of Johnny Cash to stop him, Dean starts in on the Boston cream, even though it’s basically cake.

29 days until Christmas

Chapter Text

The week after Thanksgiving, Sam goes out alone and comes back with an eight-foot pine tree strapped to the roof of his car.

“It’s a Douglas fir, Dean,” he says, and Dean watches with inexplicable and growing unease as Sam, with Eileen and Adam’s help, begins to deck the halls.

Adam, who spends most of his time in his books and in his own head, looks at the lights and tinsel with the least complicated smile Dean has ever seen on his face.

“It was always just mom and me at Christmas,” he tells Dean, who has finally failed to avoid this conversation. “But she always tried to make it special. Even when I was spending most of December bogged down with studying for exams, she came and dragged me out of my room to celebrate.”

What is there to celebrate? They kill a djinn outside Kansas City and Dean throws out his shoulder and it's still not enough to bring back the five teens the thing killed. The engine craps out on the way home and Dean, with his shoulder still fucked up, has to walk Sam through patching up the compression in the freezing dark.

So Dean’s not exactly feeling the holiday spirit.

Eileen doesn’t do Christmas, but she’s clearly entertained by Sam’s enthusiasm. He takes over Dean’s kitchen for a number of baking experiments, entirely too many of which are vegan, for fuck’s sake. Eileen has been staying with them on and off since Thanksgiving. She still does her own thing, takes her own jobs with the hunters she knows, but she keeps coming back to watch Sam bake cookies or do his secretive online shopping or hang shiny dollar-store baubles from the Christmas tree. The bunker was built to hold a lot more than four people, so having her around shouldn’t make Dean feel crowded, but it does.

One afternoon when Eileen has gone out on the trail of a ghoul, as a shitty pop cover of Jingle Bell Rock echoes through the bunker, Sam says, “I’m thinking of asking Eileen if she wants to have this be her home base. Like, permanently.”

“Wow, Sam, that’s real romantic.”

“Come on, Dean, I’m being serious here. I don’t want to make a big decision like this without consulting you.”

“She basically lives here already anyway. It’s fine, Sam.” As he says it, he knows it should be true. He’s not sure why it isn’t.

“I just never thought—” He breaks off, and he’s looking at Dean like he’s nervous of how Dean will react to what he says next. But he’s Sam, so of course he says it anyway. “I never thought I'd get the chance.”

“Just man up and ask her to marry you already,” Dean says.

Sam seems to maybe be choking on his own tongue.

Dean was mostly joking and figures Sam doesn’t have the nerve, but three nights before Christmas, Sam takes Eileen out to dinner, looking about as stiff as he did the first time they went out. Which, wow, was almost a year ago.

“You look constipated,” Dean tells Sam from the doorway of his room, as Sam straightens his tie in the mirror for the sixth time.

“I decided you were right.”

“I’m always right.” Dean leans against the door frame, wincing when he remembers his shoulder is still messed up. Sam shoots him a concerned glance, but doesn’t comment. “What was I right about?”

“It’s time to man up.” He pulls a little box out of his jacket pocket. He opens it, and Dean can see the ring sparkling inside.

A year is way too short to date someone before deciding you’re gonna marry them, right?

How would you know?

He keeps a smile on his face until Sam and Eileen are in the car, until Adam is out the door for his last shift at work before the holiday. Then Dean decides to treat himself to a little Christmas nog, heavy on the whiskey, light on the nog.

He’s asleep at the kitchen table with the empty bottle beside him when a sound wakes him up. A door, somewhere in the bunker, slams shut.

“Sam?” No answer. “Adam?”

No other sound. No, wait, that’s weird. The bunker hasn’t been this quiet for this long in months.

The music stopped.

It’s been a while since he felt the need to carry a gun in his own damn home, but he tucks a pistol into the back of his jeans and goes to the artifact room.

He’s relieved—at least he hopes he can be relieved—to see that it’s only Brady. Death. On this side of the door, inspecting the seams in the stonework.

“Hey, Brady, what’s up?”

“Dean Winchester.” They turn. “Do you have headphones?”

“Why?”

“We’ve had what you might call a ‘noise complaint.’”

“Have you tried turning down the volume?”

“The walls of the library are not… walls.”

“I… what.”

“Turning down the volume doesn’t work.”

“If the walls aren’t walls, why do the headphones need to be headphones?” Brady stares blankly. “Wouldn’t headphones defeat the purpose of a welcoming atmosphere?”

“Staff members could take turns using them.”

“Wait, a noise complaint from who? It wasn’t any of us, right?”

“No, it was from… another direction.”

“I’m gonna ask what that means, but I have zero expectation that you’ll tell me.”

They do not tell him. “I am taking measures to resolve the situation. But headphones would be helpful.”

“I’ll see what I can get you.”

Brady looks a little… something. Words Dean might use for a human, like tired or overworked, seem not to apply here, but Brady is… off.

“You okay?”

“Yes, quite. Being Death is a responsibility I take very seriously.”

“…Right.”

“I had an impeccable record as a Reaper.”

“Okay.”

“Just because we have always done things one way does not mean we should continue.”

“Are we talking about the music, here?”

Brady blinks at him, which is when Dean realizes that Brady has not, otherwise, blinked so far in the conversation. Possibly ever.

“We are talking,” they say, “about the universe. Which is, in a sense, the music.”

“You’re not going to tell me what that means, either, are you?”

They nod, slowly. “If you do not know, you will have to wait and find out for yourself.”

“Can’t wait.”

“You will have to wait.”

“I meant—never mind. I’ll be in touch about the headphones soon, alright?”

“Alright.”

Brady seems to be waiting for something. Dean says the first thing that pops into his head:

“Merry Christmas.”

Death looks from Dean to the red and green garland that for some reason is draped around the shelves even in this creepy-ass room. They tilt their head to the side and narrow their eyes and Dean feels a little sick to his stomach. Probably too much nog, that’s what it is.

“Merry Christmas, Dean Winchester.”

Chapter Text

Dean wakes up late the next day and is grateful for the empty kitchen as he nurses his headache with coffee and toast. He’s been having weird dreams again and if they keep up he’s going to have to start considering them omens, and he has had enough omens to last him several lifetimes.

He hears voices in the hall and leaves through the other door. He’s not avoiding Sam and Eileen specifically, he just can’t deal with people right now.

His no-people policy is put to the test when he runs into Adam in the bunker library. Adam is sitting with Miracle, who hurries over as soon as Dean enters.

“He couldn’t get into your room last night,” Adam tells him. “He’s been a huge pain in the ass.”

Dean doesn’t strictly remember going to bed last night, let alone shutting the door on his dog. Miracle shoves up against his legs, wagging his tail and looking up at him like you’re here, you’re here, I missed you so much. Dean feels like a grade-a asshole.

“Hey, pal, sorry about that. How about I make it up to you and we go for a walk?” Miracle goes absolutely hog-wild at the word “walk” while Dean grabs his coat.

Adam seems to zone out back to his homework and doesn’t remark on the fact that Dean has become one of those people who talks to their dog like it’s a person.

When Dean is almost out the door, Adam calls after him, “Merry Christmas Eve Eve,” and Dean doesn’t even chuck a bough of holly at him, because he is trying to be chill.

They get in the car and drive a ways until they hit a town Dean doesn’t recognize, then Dean picks a direction and they start walking under the cold, clear December sky. Dean is glad for his coat while Miracle with his thick, curly fur seems pretty impervious to the weather.

Miracle runs ahead and trots back to Dean and tries to pick up things he shouldn’t. They pass paved roads that lead off to gravel roads that lead off to homes where families are living their lives. Cars and trucks roar past him from time to time, cutting close enough to let him know just what they think of crazy people wandering on the side of the road.

He thinks probably none of them have something eating them up inside so big it feels like it could fill the sky if only they knew how to get it out. He’s had an archangel in his bones before but it didn’t feel like this, all rage and fear and a fire smoldering to embers and nothing left to burn. All leave and stay and reaching out and grasping air. The freedom of knowing he could get back in his car and drive all day and into night, nothing stopping him, he doesn’t have to do Christmas cookies or movie night or Sam getting married, just send them a postcard from Denver or Memphis or Yellowstone or wherever. Just drive and drive and it’s okay that there’s no home at the end of the road.

It’s okay, isn’t it?

A prayer to someone who’s not there anymore.

They head back to the car because Miracle seems to be finally feeling the cold. The Impala is in sight when Dean’s phone rings.

Is it too much to ask for a couple hours of peace?

“Dean? Where are you?”

“I took the dog for a walk.”

“You’ve been gone for four hours.”

“I also took the dog for a drive.”

There’s silence on the line, but it’s a Sam silence, so it’s pretty damn loud. “Are you gonna be here for dinner?”

“Figured I’d pick something up in town.”

“Okay. Guess I’ll see you later, then.”

He gets a burger from a drive-thru in town and only feeds Miracle one french fry because the vet in Lebanon said they’re not good for him. They’re probably not great for Dean either but free will means he can make his own informed decision to put delicious garbage in his body, especially when there’s nobody there but his dog to tell him he should be taking better care of himself.

You should be taking better care of yourself.

He gives the dog another fry.

He’s worn out when he gets back to the bunker, more than he would have expected. He goes directly to his room, this time remembering to let Miracle in before he shuts the door. With the dog at the foot of his bed and a fair bit less alcohol in his system, he’s hoping for a more restful night.

No such luck.

It starts as your standard annoying dream—Dean is wandering nondescript streets trying to remember where he parked his car. Then he’s in his car, driving, and someone is in the passenger seat talking to him.

It’s definitely someone, not just a random person, but every time he looks over and recognizes the face beside him, then he has to look away and forgets.

“Don’t you get tired?” they’re saying. “It’s the same shit over and over, wake up, live your life, lie in bed for a few hours so you can do it all again tomorrow. Don’t you just get fucking exhausted?”

It goes on like this, and it’s hard to focus because there’s someone else talking in the backseat and Dean can’t look at them no matter how hard he tries. The rearview mirror isn’t working, in the way things in dreams just don’t work the way they're supposed to; it just keeps showing him landscapes like out of a scenic photography calendar.

“—found it amusing—”

“Don’t you just wanna sleep?”

“Pretty sure I’m sleeping right now.” Dean gives up trying to know who he’s talking to and keeps his eyes fixed ahead; the road outside the car is black as night, the headlights just two meaningless spots of white in the dark.

“—the threads of existence—”

“Well, aren’t you clever? But even in your sleep it is so goddamn loud.”

“—all that binds us—”

“If you’ve got a problem with those guys in the back, you’d better talk to them, because I don’t think I can.”

The radio fades in and out—free jazz, Christmas songs, heavy metal guitar.

“All you have to do is let go,” his passenger persists.

“—the choice is yours—”

“Wouldn’t it be easier? You could be free.”

Then, a different voice from behind him, “That’s not much of a choice at all.”

Dean knows that voice. He turns and the car crashes or the world ends and he wakes up, tangled in the blanket with Miracle standing on his chest.

Chapter Text

When Dean walks into the kitchen, Sam jumps up from his chair and stands between Dean and the table. “You can’t come in here right now. Didn’t you read the sign?”

Dean backs into the hallway, nearly tripping over Miracle, who is sticking anxiously close to his legs. There is, in fact, a sign taped to the door:

WRAPPING PRESENTS. DO NOT ENTER.

“If you want your stuff, it’s on the map table.”

“What stuff?”

“The packages you ordered. Now…” And Sam literally shoos him out the door. Miracle stays in the kitchen, because Sam has food.

So much for a loyal companion.

The packages Dean apparently ordered are stacked on the table where Eileen sits, taking notes from a dusty old lore book. He’s not looking for the ring, but he sees it anyway.

“Morning,” she says. She doesn’t mention the ring. Should he bring it up? He so completely doesn’t want to. He looks at the packages instead.

“Shopping spree?” she asks.

“I guess.” He doesn’t actually remember ordering anything, but admittedly parts of Tuesday night are a bit hazy. Whatever crazy bastard invented two-day shipping, he’s not sure whether he wants to punch them or shake their hand.

“Are you hungover?”

“What?”

“Hung. Over.” She adds the sign for emphasis.

He’s definitely not, but after that dream, he feels like he could be. “Maybe. Are you engaged?”

She narrows her eyes.

“Maybe,” she says.

He frowns at her, because marrying his brother is nothing to joke about.

“Yes,” she says. Then she holds up her hand so he can see the rock. He takes a good look, like he hadn’t already seen it the other night.

“Good for you.”

“Yeah,” she says. “It really is.”

He takes his packages back to his room, because Sam would probably be pissed if he catches Dean not keeping his Christmas purchases secret. Not because he can’t deal with what is happening in this room. It’s fine, it’s great, he just needs to be somewhere else right now.

Apparently the night before last, presumably sometime after his chat with Brady, he ordered three pairs of socks with football players’ faces on them, a set of children’s books called Big Ideas for Little Philosophers, a freaking air fryer, a few other assorted and baffling items, and five, count ‘em, five Walkmans. Walkmen? He takes a moment to be thankful for Charlie and her magic credit card, because those can’t have come cheap.

So apparently he needs to go talk to Death.

The library is empty except for Brady, and silent. Maybe the Reaper librarians really did dig the music.

“Dean Winchester,” Brady says.

“Brady. Got your stuff.”

They nod pensively. “You can leave it on the desk.”

The area around the desk looks different again, this time not because of new decor but because the old stuff has all been torn down. There’s a knife-slash through the pretty face on the movie star poster and as Dean steps closer he hears a crunching sound—he’s accidentally tread on one of the skull lightbulbs.

“What happened there?”

“Nothing that cannot be fixed,” Brady says. They kneel down and pick up the string, and the bulb is whole again. Dean has rarely seen Reapers show emotions other than “vaguely pissed off” but Brady almost seems sad. “I will return the new devices as soon as the grievance is resolved.”

“Not necessary,” Dean tells them. “It’s a gift. You know, Christmas.”

“I am grateful.”

“No problem. What’s in ‘another direction’ from here, anyway?”

“What isn’t?”

“Right. Well. Bye, then.”

He turns to go, but his feet don’t move. Shit, did he really come here, here of all places, unarmed? How stupid can you get?

“My sincerest apologies,” Brady says, and Dean’s feet are promptly released, causing him to stumble. “Some habits are difficult to break. There is one more thing I wished to mention.”

Dean swallows the insults that rise in his throat. Always rage is his first instinct but he knows it’s no use here, needs to hold down his temper, needs to be better. Is better. Brady may look like a weirdo kid but they are still the latest incarnation of the most powerful being Dean has ever had to deal with. And, as far as Dean can tell, actually not a total dick this time around. He can handle this.

Old habits.

“What’s up?”

“I have traced the root cause sustaining the connection between the library and your world. It should be possible soon to fully close the door and remove the key on your end.”

“Oh,” Dean says. “So, like, actually goodbye, then.”

“You will still possess the key, should you require access to the library, but if you mean that our two dimensions will no longer be linked across the cosmic plane, you are correct.”

“Well, good to know, I guess.” He is not going to miss Brady’s stupid music, because that would be dumb. “What was it, anyway? The ‘root cause?’”

“An intricate confluence of events and circumstances spiraling out from the precise conditions under which you first opened the door.”

“You mean it’s my fault.”

“Only in the loosest sense. Cause is not equivalent to fault, Dean Winchester. Regardless, the final element will be resolved soon, and I believe we can expect a satisfactory outcome.”

Maybe, Dean thinks as he closes the library door behind him, that will be his weirdest conversation with Brady, because it will be the last one. It’s for the best, right? Probably shouldn’t be getting too friendly with Death.

The door doesn’t disappear, and the key still won’t budge. Yet, anyway.

“Dean?”

He turns quickly to see Sam in the doorway.

“What are you doing in here?”

“Giving Brady some more audio crap. The hell are you doing in here?”

“Trying to figure out why the music stopped. Are we giving Christmas gifts to Death now?”

“We are not doing anything.”

“Okay, are you giving Death Christmas presents? I mean, Death doesn't celebrate Christmas, right?”

“I’m pretty sure they don’t, they were just calling tech support on what happened to be the week of Christmas.”

“So everything’s fine over there?”

“Yup. According to Brady, we won’t be living at Death’s door much longer.”

“That’s great.” Then, in the most awkward segue ever, Sam asks, “Speaking of Christmas, I was thinking we could watch a movie over dinner tonight. Got any requests?”

“I don’t know, I still gotta wrap presents.” Sam gives him a look. “What? I got stuff for you guys, too.” Probably. If he can figure out which thing goes to which person.

“You’re not gonna eat dinner with us? Dean, it’s Christmas Eve.”

“Yeah, and?”

“And, we’re celebrating.”

“And I’ll be having my observing the holiday with my own personal tradition of sleeping.”

“Don’t you want to celebrate saving the world, you know, again? That this is our first year ever free of Chuck’s plan?” With a sheepish look to the side he adds, “How about the fact that I just got engaged?”

“Which is great,” Dean says. He’s being an ass again. He knows it, but there are these mistakes he keeps making, over and over. “Eileen is great, you’re great, the whole thing is awesome.”

“Okay, seriously, man, what is your problem?”

“I don’t have a problem. I am completely problem-free.”

“You know that’s bullshit. I get that marriage, commitment, that stuff isn’t your thing, but you’ve been distant and cagey for weeks, so what is it? You still don’t trust Eileen after all this time?”

“I trust her fine. She’s tough, she’s fun, she makes you happy, all of which is why I said I don’t have a problem and you can goddamn drop it now.”

“So why are you hiding in your room and hanging out with Death, the Death, rather than spending Christmas with your family?” Sam looks at the door, then back at Dean. His tone is softer but cuts just as deep when he says, “You’re allowed to miss Cas, you know. But I don’t think he’d want you to cut yourself off like this.”

“You don’t know a damn thing about what he would have wanted.” It comes out harsher than he intended, but Sam really shouldn’t have said his name.

Sam has gone full kicked-puppy in response to this outburst. “He was my friend, too.”

“You wanna know what my problem is, Sam? You’re the goddamn feelings expert so why don’t you take a swing at this one. Right down the hall from where you sleep every night is the room where your best friend told you he loved you and then he gave his life to save yours. On a scale of one to ten, how’s your fucking Christmas spirit?"

“Cas said what?”

“We’re not talking about this, Sam.”

“Dean—”

“I’m serious. Drop it.”

They stare at each other for what feels like a long goddamn time, until Sam finally looks away. He turns to leave. Making eye contact with the wall, he says, “We’ll save you some food, in case you decide to come out. Come eat with us. I mean.”

He basically flees the room. Dean mutters, “Yeah, you better run,” to the tinsel-covered shelves.

Chapter Text

Dean sneaks into the kitchen and grabs some wrapping paper. He takes the silver-and-blue striped one—it’s less obnoxiously Christmas. Sam seems to have learned his lesson, and doesn’t come poking around trying to get Dean out of his room.

Instead, Adam shows up.

“Wanted to make sure you got a bite to eat,” he says, and sets a plate of casserole on Dean’s desk beside the badly-wrapped presents, only half-done, because Dean is seriously not good at this, but at least he already got Adam’s baby philosopher books covered.

“Thanks, man.”

He waits for him to go, but Adam just watches him fail to tape down a flap of shiny paper.

“Dude, I promise I’ll eat. Don’t you have a movie to watch?”

“You didn’t listen to anything I said, did you?” When Dean just gives him a blank look, Adam says, “about the holidays?”

It takes Dean a second to remember their conversation from several days ago. “Something about homework?”

“You’re obsessing. Mom always said I got too focused on problems, too invested. She said I got that from my father, so…” He shrugs.

“So you’re here to stop me from obsessing. I’m wrapping Christmas presents. Holly friggin’ jolly.”

“For the record, Sam specifically told me to leave you alone. So if you’re gonna get pissed at someone, be pissed at me. But I can help, if you want.”

The tape comes unstuck for the fourth time. “Knock yourself out.”

Adam sits in the desk chair and takes the half-wrapped gift from Dean. “This is a… decorative shot glass from New Mexico? Who is this for?”

“Whoever wants it, I guess. I bought a lot of crap the other night that I don't even remember.”

Adam looks like he wants to say something, but he doesn’t. He just takes the crumpled piece of paper Dean has been wrestling with for the past ten minutes and expertly secures it around the glass.

“I was drunk,” Dean adds, probably unnecessarily, but in his experience it’s better to have these things out in the open.

“No, really?” Adam sets the little package next to the pile on the desk, where it makes Dean’s effort look even more pathetic. “Why don’t I help you with the rest of these, and then you can come join the party?”

“Oh, I get it. This was your plan all along.”

Adam shrugs. “If it works.”

“What are y’all watching, anyway?”

“Cartoons, I guess. Eileen hasn’t seen any of the classics. Sam was distressed.”

“Yeah, I don’t think so. You kids have fun, though.” He’s struggling to wrap a box. Shouldn’t boxes be easy?

“You hate Christmas, yet you bought all this stuff.”

“I don’t hate it.” A lifetime ago, when he thought his time was running out, he’d even managed to enjoy it for a minute there, but then his life just kept going. “Why do you like it so much? It’s cheesy cartoons and car commercials and religion—one you and I both have seen the nasty side of.”

“Because of the cheese and in spite of the bullshit. It’s like being a kid again. For a few days, it’s like none of it ever happened.”

“Ain’t that sweet.” Dean sticks a bow on top of the box and calls it good enough, then digs into his dinner.

“You know what I think?”

Dean stabs a piece of broccoli with his fork. “This should be good.”

“I think you think that your life is some kind of hell you were sentenced to when you were a kid, and that everyone off in the so-called normal world is living the dream while you're out here suffering nobly.”

“Why does it sound like you’re getting your psychoanalysis out of the Book of Michael?”

“Take a wild guess. Listen, since I found out about your world I’ve had all sorts of terrible stuff happen to me. I died, I lived in Hell for ten years with Heaven’s most self-important archangel, then I died again. Half the time it’s hard to believe any of this is really happening. But when I first got out of the Cage, I got to see the world in a way I never would have in my old life. I liked my old life, but it’s gone, and this is what I’ve got now. I have a ways to go before I’m totally happy with my new one. And I know you think it’s dumb, but this is why I chose philosophy, to try to make sense of it all. You have a family, a job you care about. That’s not nothing.”

After a long pause, Adam says, “I made a speech, didn’t I? I never used to make speeches. There’s a part of me that’s kind of Michael now, which is, honestly, so weird.”

“It’s not dumb.”

“What?”

“Your philosophy thing. If you like it, then it’s not dumb. It’s your thing.”

“Oh. Thanks.”

Adam finishes the last present. Dean tried to follow his lead, with some success, but it’s still pretty obvious who wrapped what.

“So,” Adam says as Dean scrapes the last of the cheese of his dinner plate, “are you coming to movie night?”

Adam has left him without a lot of excuses. Really all Dean has left is that it feels wrong. Everything has, for months now, but celebrating most of all. It feels wrong to celebrate when… That’s just the grief, though, isn’t it? He’s been down this road before. This specific road.

“Yeah, alright. Help me carry these?”

Sam and Eileen have finished eating, and they come to watch Dean and Adam pile the presents under the tree while Miracle sniffs each one to make sure it isn’t a treat for him.

“That’s, uh, a lot of presents, Dean.”

Dean tucks a long, thin box securely in the back of the pile, then turns to face them. “What can I say, I’m a generous guy.” To Adam, he adds, “Where are yours, Kris Kringle?”

“I’m doing mine after you old farts go to bed. Sam’s always out by ten anyway. Twenty bucks says he falls asleep in front of the TV.”

Sam looks indignant while Eileen laughs. “I’ll take that bet.”

Dean is on Eileen’s side; he thinks Adam is probably underestimating Sam’s affection for Snoopy. But he doesn’t get involved, just tries to think of it like this: these people are his family.

Adam was right, things could be better, but they could be a hell of a lot worse.

Sam clearly gets a kick out of introducing Eileen to stories that had been inescapable on motel TVs every holiday season when he and Dean were kids. He watches her reactions for a while, then gets engrossed in the Grinch and she shoots Dean a look like, can you believe this guy?

He thinks it must be the first time in thirteen years that Sam has let himself just enjoy the goddamn holidays.

He looks back at Eileen, trying to convey you’re the one marrying him with only his eyebrows.

She rolls her eyes, a little sheepishly. Sam is on the edge of his seat like he doesn’t know the little dentist elf dude is coming to the rescue. Adam goes to the kitchen in between Rudolph and Charlie Brown and comes back with a heaping plate of Christmas cookies, which he only reluctantly shares. Miracle begs for crumbs, and Dean’s pretty sure everyone has slipped him something by the end of the night.

These people are his family.

And he loves them. He loves them alongside all he’s lost, rather than in spite of it.

So maybe he kind of gets what Cas was trying to tell him.

Sam starts a little when the last cartoon ends, but he insists he wasn’t sleeping, he just closed his eyes for a moment, you know, to appreciate the music more. None of them can prove or disprove this, so Adam and Eileen call off their bet, and Adam heads for his room. Sam pauses in front of the Christmas tree, and Eileen, with a significant look first at Sam, then at Dean, carries on down the hall without them.

Ah. Here it comes.

“I’m sorry about earlier,” Sam says. “I didn’t know.”

Dean thinks he should have made a run for it when the credits rolled on Snoopy, but it’s too late for that now.

“It’s fine, Sam.”

He hopes that will settle this thing, but Sam is not so easily appeased when he feels like he has something to atone for.

“I’ve been so happy, these past few months, and I knew you were dealing with stuff, but it didn’t even occur to me that you were dealing with completely different stuff than I was. I thought—”

He stops himself, but Dean knows. “You thought Emily.” Sam grimaces. “Emily has a girlfriend,” Dean adds, because Sam isn’t wrong often enough that it stops being fun to rub it in when it happens.

Sam slumps into a chair and sighs. “Of course she does.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“I mean we thought we found you a nice girl with shared interests and instead we found you a nice lesbian friend.”

“I think she’s bisexual,” Dean says, a little based on some things she’s said but mostly to try out saying the word. He doesn’t make eye contact with Sam as he says it. “But I don’t think it would have worked out even if she were single. She’s a bit…”

“A bit what?” Sam prompts.

“Well, picture a girl version of me,” Dean says. The look on Sam’s face is worth the price of admission to this bitch-ass annoying conversation.

He reconsiders that opinion almost immediately when Sam goes back to the topic at hand:

“When you say Cas said he loved you, did he mean, like…”

“Yeah.”

“There are different kind of love.”

“He meant love. Like, you know, love.” He can’t seem to find the right words for this. “I know what he meant.”

“But you didn’t know before he told you. How he felt.”

“No. Wait, did you?”

“No,” Sam says quickly. “I mean. I didn’t know. But I guess I… wondered? I knew—I think I knew he loved you. I didn’t know he was in love with you, but I guess that was me making assumptions.”

Dean has spent the past six months Not Thinking About this for a reason. Because he knows, objectively, that wandering around his post-God life all pathetic is not what Cas wanted for him. But also, if he thinks at all about the concepts of “Cas” and “want” at the same time, he winds up wandering around his post-God life all pathetic, finally understanding what the hell this thing was between them only after it was gone, realizing that Cas was carrying this around with him every damn day for who even knows how long. Meanwhile all Dean had to offer was himself, all obliviousness and resentment and a lifetime of unexamined Stuff between him and other men fearing that if he looked at those feelings head-on, he might not flinch. It would be such a dick move to dispute Cas’s dying words, but he thinks if he could have him here, right now, the first thing he’d say would be, seriously, why me?

Cas is (was) (is) one of Dean’s favorite people in the vast multiverse, and Dean kind of thought he’d have better taste.

All of this is exactly what Cas was arguing against. Dean has been feeling a lot of things since Cas’s confession. Too bad worthy isn't one of them.

“Go on,” he says to Sam. “Ask me.”

“Ask what?” Sam says, a little too fast. He takes an intense interest in the Christmas tree all of a sudden.

“What you are so very loudly not asking.”

Sam says softly, “Were you in love with Cas?” He waits. Waits some more. Adds, “You don’t have to answer. But did it help to hear me say it?”

Weirdly, it did. “Come on, these cookies aren't going to eat themselves.”

“Those are for Santa,” Sam says, but he takes two and drinks the whole glass of milk.

And falls asleep at the table.

Eileen comes to check on them a little while later, sees Sam fast asleep, and goes to fetch a blanket.

“Watch out for Santa,” she signs, finger-spelling “Santa” because Dean’s vocabulary is still shit. He should really make more of an effort, maybe a New Year’s resolution.

Look at you, planning for the future.

Adam drops by a little later with an honest-to-Jack sack of gifts. When he sees Sam, he rummages in his bag and produces a headband with reindeer antlers attached. In wordless agreement, Dean puts them on Sam’s head and poses beside his brother while Adam snaps a picture.

Santa Claus is real, and he is Dean’s undead half-brother the philosophy major.

It must be close to midnight, and Miracle lies by his feet sleeping as soundly as Sam, but Dean isn’t tired at all. He feels wired in a way he associates with being on a hunt—the apprehension, not knowing what’s going to happen next, those times when something is coming and you just have to wait and hope you’re ready to meet it. Which is ridiculous. He knows exactly what’s going to happen. The sun will rise and they’ll open all these presents and eat breakfast, in that order because neither of his brothers have their priorities straight. He’ll get to see Sam’s face when they show him the reindeer photo. The world keeps turning. Something will come up, if not tomorrow then some other day, and they’ll go out and fight and save some more people. Sam and Eileen will get married and it will be stupid and romantic and Dean will probably cry and then never live it down. Adam will finally graduate and then they’ll all get to find out what the heck you do with a philosophy degree. The world keeps turning.

So why does it feel like he’s standing at the edge of something enormous?

The electricity blinks, once, twice. This is not unusual in the bunker, where the wiring is older than he is and Sam currently has approximately 10,000 Christmas lights menacing their generator. It blinks a third time, then goes out entirely.

Ten seconds… fifteen… one minute… this might be an actual problem. Something brushes against his leg, but it’s just Miracle, who whines softly in the dark. Dean reaches down to comfort him. Waits, ready to move as soon as he can figure out what’s going on. An attack, or just a snowstorm? Where are the weapons, the exits, can’t they have one good thing—

He hears a crash and can’t tell if it’s from somewhere in the bunker or outside, because it sounds simultaneously like a door slamming and a crack of thunder. He’s halfway across the room to the nearest gun cabinet in the dark, Miracle yelps and hides under the table, how can Sam possibly sleep through this?

The lights come back on, lamps and Christmas and all. The only sound in the room is Sam snoring.

There’s a body sprawled on the floor at Dean’s feet. There is a body. In a tan trench coat. On the floor in front of the Christmas tree.

Chapter Text

For what feels like ages all he can do is stare. If he looks away it might turn out to have been a hallucination or something, what he’s seeing might disappear, but he can’t bring himself to move closer and check, like, is that a corpse or a living, breathing…

“Sam,” he says, and it comes out all hoarse. “Sam. Wake up.”

Dean hears the chair creak behind him and can picture Sam flailing awake. “I’m up. What’s going on?”

“That,” Dean says.

Sam comes to stand beside him. “Is that…?”

“Find out,” Dean says. “Please.”

He feels pathetic, useless, but Sam doesn’t give him any crap for it, just steps forward cautiously and crouches beside the still form that lies face-down on the floor.

“He’s breathing,” Sam says, and so is Dean, even though he kind of wasn’t a moment ago.

“He’s real,” Dean says, more of a question than an observation.

Sam makes a face, then reaches out and gently shakes the shoulder of the body that Dean doesn’t dare think of as—

Nothing.

“Seems like him,” Sam says. “Except for, you know, inexplicably unconscious. How did he even get here?” He looks at Dean like he’s supposed to know.

“Lights went out, came back on, and there he was.” So Dean leaves out the part about the thunder and the fact that he kind of maybe had a premonition about this. It’s probably all in his head. This entire thing, actually, is likely just another crazy dream brought on by too much eggnog.

Sam seems to know what’s on Dean’s mind, because he stands up, walks over, and claps a hand on Dean’s shoulder. “This is happening. I don’t know what it is, exactly, or what it means, but it is happening to both of us—” he glances behind him, and under the table where Miracle is still hiding, “—to all four of us, and that is as real as it gets. So come on, we’re not leaving him on the floor. It’s Christmas.”

Dean checks the clock. So it is.

They carry him—Cas, Cas, Cas—to a spare room and lay him, or rather, drop him awkwardly, because he weighs more than a couple feathers, onto the bed. He lies there, like—well, the expression Dean would use is “dead to the world,” but apparently…

Not.

“I’m going to bed,” Sam says, and when Dean opens his mouth to say that there’s absolutely no way in hell he’s going to do the same, Sam cuts him off. “You don’t have to tell me there’s not a chance in hell you’re leaving this room. That much is obvious. I’ll come back to check on you in a few hours. Come get me if anything—I don’t know. If anything.” He looks like he wants to say something else, but just presses his lips together in a classic visibly-biting-back-stuff-I-know-you-don’t-want-to-hear Sam Winchester move.

And then Dean is alone with what he hopes to his new benevolent-but-hands-off god is a living, breathing Castiel.

Merry fuckin’ Christmas.

When he sits down the ancient desk chair shrieks loud enough to wake the dead but Cas doesn’t stir. He looks much like he did when Dean last saw him, much like he always does, except that time he was crying. Now he just looks peaceful. That was all Dean had ever allowed himself to hope for, that somehow, Cas could find peace.

It’s the first time he’s ever thought that maybe peace could be here, alive, on earth. But they aren’t usually so lucky.

Running on restless energy, he paces the room. He rummages through the desk drawers and finds nothing but dust and a yellowed stack of playing cards which, after an experimental game of solitaire, proves to be missing the ace of spades. He paces the room, fiddles with the snowglobe somebody (Sam) put on the nightstand, determined to give even the empty rooms some holiday cheer. He sits and watches Cas for movement besides the almost-imperceptible rise and fall of his chest.

He talks.

He doesn't say anything important, at first. He says, “I can’t believe there are even Christmas decorations in here. Sam is unstoppable.”

He says, “It’s supposed to snow tonight, six inches at least.”

He says, “While you were gone I made friends with Death and this crazy rich chick in Texas who wants to steal my dog. And my car.”

He says, “I got drunk the other night and ordered $300 worth of crap on the internet.

“I think some of it is supposed to be for you.”

He tells Cas what he got for Sam and Eileen and Adam and Emily and then since it seems appropriate he explains about how Adam got back to them, and then about the weekend he spent taking care of Emily’s dogs and the strange phenomenon of feeling satisfied with work that didn’t involve mortal peril, and then about how Eileen kind of moved in by accident and now she and Sam are getting married and Dean finally, like, two hours ago, figured out how to stop being weird about it.

He stops then because there’s nothing else he can say on that subject that isn’t veering into dangerous territory, even if nobody’s listening, even if Cas can’t actually hear him.

There’s a sound in the hallway and he forces himself to tear his eyes away from the bed to look at Adam, who has come to gape at Cas.

He hands Dean a glass of water.

Dean downs about half of it before asking, “What time is it?”

“Stupid o’clock. You look like hell.”

“Merry Christmas to you, too.”

“Sam’s doing research instead of Christmas,” he says, like that’s the most important thing going on at the moment. “He seems to think you did this somehow.”

“He doesn’t have a damn clue what he’s talking about.”

Adam tends to stay neutral when Sam and Dean go at it. He’s probably had enough sibling rivalry that he’s set for eternity. He watches in silence for a few minutes, with an expression that Dean has come to recognize as his here-and-also-elsewhere look.

“Okay,” he says, “no offense, but this is the most boring show on television. I’ll be in the kitchen, you want breakfast?”

Adam’s idea of cooking breakfast is thawing Eggos in the toaster and eating them plain while they’re still pale yellow and squishy. Even if he were offering pancakes and bacon Dean’s pretty sure he couldn’t eat.

When he’s sure Adam is out of earshot, Dean says quietly, “Hey, Cas, I don’t know how holy you are these days, but I could really use a sign right about now.”

When Sam comes back, he has Eileen with him, and several books.

“So, obviously, it’s hard to find a precedent for anything that’s happening, because with Chuck gone everything that happens is technically unprecedented, but I was trying to find anything in the lore for angels, Death, the Empty—”

Eileen signs, “Slow down.” Dean knows that one, because it gets a lot of use when Sam goes into geek mode.

“The door is gone,” Sam says. He puts the books on the desk. He’s breathing a little more normally now, and signing as he goes. He clarifies, unnecessarily, “the door to Death’s library.”

“Yeah, I wondered if it might be.”

“You did?”

“I thought I heard it close. Does it matter?”

“It does if the two incidents are connected. Look.” He pats his pockets and pulls out several inches of curly red ribbon.

“Why do you just have that?”

“It’s Christmas.” He goes to the door and presses the ribbon against the latch, then pulls the door shut, trapping the ribbon in place. “See, now if you try to lock it, you get caught on the ribbon, right?”

“And the ribbon in this metaphor is?”

“Well… you.”

“Last I checked I wasn't stuck in a door.”

“No, but you’ve been drawn to it. Like, for months, ever since… you know, and you’ve been having trouble with your shoulder—”

“Shoulder?” Eileen cuts in.

“Yeah, his left shoulder. Where Cas made a mark when he pulled Dean out of Hell. They have,” he tells Eileen solemnly, “a bond.” How does he even keep a straight face?

“That mark’s been gone for years. And I dislocated my shoulder two weeks ago on the djinn thing.”

“It was bothering you way before that.”

“Your theory is bogus. Cas summoned the Empty in a completely different part of the bunker, and when he was gone there was—” his breath catches, and he forces the words out “—there was nothing left. No bond, no ribbon, no nothing.”

“But Death went with him. Maybe that’s what kept the portal open. Maybe Cas sacrificing himself and dragging Billie into the Empty with him, with you here on this side, tied it all together. Brady must have figured out how to pull Cas back through.”

“Because I was so generous lending them music.”

“Maybe?”

“That’s a lot of maybes,” Dean says. And it doesn’t matter. All these moving pieces, the only thing making sense is that there’s no way this shitshow doesn’t come at a price.

Sam frowns. “You should get some rest.”

“Sam is correct.”

Dean does not let out an undignified yelp. Under the circumstances, any yelp would have to be considered dignified. He turns. Sam turns. Eileen peeks around Sam’s shoulder.

Castiel is sitting upright in bed.

Dean wants to say something, but he feels like he’s forgotten the entire English language.

Sam has less trouble. “About the door? Or that Dean needs a nap?”

Cas looks around, bewildered, eyes not focusing on anything. “Where am I?”

“You’re in the bunker,” Sam says slowly, but it’s like Cas can't hear him, like one of them isn’t really here. He stares off into the distance just long enough for it to be creepy and worrisome, then drops back down onto the bed, evidently asleep.

When it’s clear (at least, as clear as anything on this weird-ass morning) that Cas is not waking up again anytime soon, Sam says, “OK, time to go.”

Dean realizes Sam is talking to him. “Hell no.”

“He woke up. Meanwhile, you haven’t slept at all.” Dean is not going to sleep. Sam has to get that. “At least a bite to eat and a change of clothes.”

He can’t leave, he needs to be here, doesn’t want Cas to wake up confused or worse like he was just now. Only he can’t bring himself to say that.

Sam wavers, probably wanting to push it but also he keeps looking at Dean like he thinks he could break down at any moment.

“I’ll stay,” Eileen says. “He won’t be alone.”

Eileen doesn’t talk about those first few weeks after she got out of Hell, between when the gates opened and when she managed to make contact with Sam. She talks about Hell, sometimes, in a general sort of way, because everyone who lives here has been there, knows, and she never has to explain the horror of it. But the time when she first came back, a restless spirit wandering the world alone? She gives a tight smile and changes the subject.

So he leaves her there and lets Sam drag him (gently) out of the room. Dean washes his face, puts on fresh clothes, steals one of Adam’s Eggos, and goes to the storeroom to see for himself that the door is gone. It’s like it was never there. Sam has put the key back into its box for safekeeping and the wall is now conspicuously bare—the only part of the room where Sam’s holiday spirit didn’t quite spread—but otherwise unremarkable.

He passes through the kitchen again and grabs food more or less at random: a banana, a few more Eggos, a yogurt cup, two granola bars, a box of peppermint bark.

Adam objects to Dean taking this last item. “That’s for Christmas.”

“Today is Christmas,” Dean argues, and Sam gestures for Adam to leave it alone. Dean takes a couple candy canes as well. There is clearly a limit to how much Sam is willing to push him around right now, and Dean is so not above milking Sam’s Dean-is-going-through-something-right-now attitude for all it’s worth.

Then he goes back to Cas’s room.

“No change,” Eileen tells him, and he signs back a thank-you because that’s one even an idiot can learn.

Then she’s the one doing the dragging and she gets Sam to leave, though he shouts something over his shoulder about lunch.

His vigil feels different now, like he actually knows what he’s waiting for rather than just feeling around pointlessly in the dark. Cas woke up, he’ll wake up again. Dean brought food and water. He woke up. He’ll wake up again. Dean can’t even bring himself to pace when it could happen at any moment.

Something else happens first.

Chapter Text

Dean blinks, but in the heavy way of sleep, and the room is just a little too bright when he gets his eyes open. He hears that tinny elevator music again. Brady stands in front of him, watching.

“This is a dream, right?”

Cas is still conked out on the bed, but that could mean anything, in the grand scheme of the universe.

“More or less.”

“You did this?” Dean asks, gesturing to Cas.

“I resolved the situation. Understand, Dean Winchester, this is not a bargain; no deal has been struck. You owe me nothing.”

“So, what, you’re going to give him back, just like that?”

“This is not a gift, either. Castiel is an autonomous entity, and not a thing to be given. The choice was his.”

“Yeah? And what about Death, and the natural order, and all that crap you said before?”

“Natural? I am a natural phenomenon. My function is as essential as gravity, yet the Creator saw fit to give Reapers personalities. I believe He found it amusing. Now, with no guiding force to command the threads of existence—”

“There is a guiding force. Jack’s God now.”

“He has made clear his policy of non-interference, so the effect is the same. If I may continue? Chuck gave Death individuality, and in so doing, gave Death free will. You can see how that might cause problems.”

Yeah, Dean’s encountered a few of them.

“If even Death has free will, then all that binds us is what is possible. Therefore, if it is possible for Castiel to live, why should he not live?”

“You just said that if you—if Death has the freedom to choose who lives and dies, then it’s a problem. I’ve been down that road, it’s not pretty.”

“I did not say that I chose. Castiel chose. The only thing I chose to do was to resolve a minor inconvenience about a door. Imagine a single thread.” And a thread appears, glowing silver in the air in front of Dean.

“Ribbon.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Sam used a—never mind.”

“A ribbon, then.” The vision shifts into something a little more ribbon-y. “Strung across this room at chest height, so that you walk into it every day, so that you have to keep ducking under it and maneuvering your life around it. A trifling thing, to be sure, but an annoyance when you are trying to rebuild the entire network of reapers after significant metaphysical upheaval and after someone killed half the organization. If you could make arrangements for this ribbon to be relocated without dismantling the fabric of the universe in the process, I imagine you might have done the same.” They wave their hand and the ribbon contracts into a single point of light, then fades.

Dean’s pretty sure he would have risked dismantling the fabric of the universe for the possibility of seeing Cas again, except for the whole thing where he knew it would piss Cas the hell off. Brady says Cas chose this, and Dean doesn’t know what to do with that. After hearing Brady’s whole speech, he gets part of it, at least. It’s not just about string.

“The Shadow messed with your people, and you found a way to annoy it into solving a problem for you.”

Brady straightens their shirtfront and shakes out the cuffs, a nervous gesture, the most human movement Dean has seen from them. “I’m sure I did not say that.”

Then Dean finds himself pitching forward in his chair, and the room is back to normal: flickering old bulb overhead, Cas sprawled on the mattress, no neurotic specter of Death staring at him like he’s a particularly interesting species of insect.

Dean remembers when Cas used to look at him like that.

Wow, he has issues.

He rubs a hand over his face, still a little uneasy in the aftermath of the dream, and when he opens his eyes again he finds Cas’s blue ones staring back at him.

The first thing Cas says is,

“This isn’t real.”

Not is this real, or this can’t be real, or how can this be real. He sounds so damn sure. Dean actually runs through the list he keeps in his head—no missing time, all the usual aches and pains of existence, usual levels of weirdness. Like he and Sam were both thinking when Cas first showed up, they’ve had no end to run-ins with stuff strong enough to screw with reality that it’s hard to ever truly know, but the list helps.

“I’m pretty sure it is,” he replies.

“How can you be sure?”

“I didn’t say sure, I said pretty sure.”

Cas narrows his eyes. He still hasn’t moved except to barely lift his head. “If this were a dream or a trick you would not be pointlessly arguing semantics with me, but it could just be a very realistic simulation.”

“And see, that kind of bullshit right there is exactly why I say ‘pretty sure.’ It’s never gonna be 100%. Do you feel real?”

Slowly, Cas pushes himself upright. “I feel ill.”

“That would be a yes. Water?” Dean passes him the glass without waiting for an answer, knowing how Cas is when you offer him stuff.

Cas takes it and tries to drink it too quickly; he winds up coughing and sputtering. Dean reaches out but stops short of touching Cas’s back. Cas frowns at the still half-full cup, which has a little cartoon Santa Claus printed on the side. How come even their kitchenware is festive all of a sudden? “I think I saw Death.”

“Where?”

“Where what?”

“You just said you saw Death.”

“Did I?”

“You don’t remember?”

“I remember the darkness. The floor was cold, but the bed was comfortable. And you were speaking. Was there music, or did I imagine it?”

“There probably was music.”

Cas nods once, sits upright, and swings his feet off the bed.

“Whoa, wait a sec—”

“I am fine,” Cas says. He stands, takes a step, and very nearly falls on his face. He catches Dean or Dean catches him or probably both. The Santa cup clatters to the floor.

“Yeah,” Dean says. “You seem fine.”

“I forgot,” Cas says, more to himself than to Dean.

“Forgot what, how to walk?”

“No,” he answers, but doesn't elaborate. Well, at least he’s still conscious.

Dean eases him back onto the bed and Cas doesn’t argue. He sits on the edge of the bed and stares at the ceiling. Dean has to call his name a couple times to get his attention, and when he has it, it’s in the form of an annoyed glare.

“Food?”

“I do not need food,” Cas snaps, then gives the spread on the desk a considering look.

“Yeah, I know you don’t need it, but you were stuck in that hell-void for six months, so.” He offers Cas the peppermint bark, the banana, the shitty waffles. He just gets a deepening frown in response.

“Six months?”

“In case you didn’t notice, it’s kinda Christmas.”

Cas looks from the snowglobe beside the bed to the cup on the floor and back to Dean. “I will eat the yogurt.”

Dean passes him the little plastic cup and a spoon and watches him pick out the bits of strawberry and eat them, leaving most of the actual yogurt part in the cup.

“We won, you know,” he tells Cas, because it seems like he could use some good news.

Cas raises his eyebrows. “I had faith that you would.”

“Don’t you want to know how it went down?”

“If you want to tell me.”

So Dean tells the story, how everything was gone but him and Sam and Jack and Chuck, the archangel fistfight in the bunker library, how they realized what Jack was becoming. How it ended, with Jack putting back everyone Chuck had sent away, even the dog.

“You know I’m not really one for the whole spiritual thing, but I like to think it feels different. To have someone upstairs who actually gives a damn.”

Cas lets out a shaky breath.

“You OK?”

“I need a minute.”

Dean waits, not sure what exactly that entails.

“Alone,” Cas clarifies, and his expression is a million miles away.

In the hallway he thinks he should have checked whether Cas meant a literal sixty seconds or, like, an hour. He waits sixty seconds. He knocks his head gently against the door frame so as not to disturb Cas’s special alone time and waits another minute. He thinks about how much of an idiot he’ll look like if Sam comes by, and leans against the wall opposite the door instead. He is chill and nonchalant and completely fine. A little tired, but fine.

He told the story hoping it would help, but did he just make it worse?

Every little thing that Cas has done since waking up, Dean picks apart, catalogs, tries to fit them into the vast constellation of the Castiel he knows. It’s him, it’s really him, it has to be him.

So why is he shutting Dean out?

Sam comes by and raises his eyebrows at the closed door.

“He needed some time.”

“How much time?”

“Do I look like a mind-reader?”

“Think you could spare a few minutes to come tell us which of your completely unlabeled Christmas presents are for whom?”

Technically that would be better than standing in the freezing hallway waiting for something from Cas that might never come, but Dean doesn’t have to be happy about that. “You guys tried to start Christmas without me? Dude, that’s cold. Frosty the Snowman cold.”

“So you’ll come?”

He doesn’t have much to compare with except what he’s seen on TV, but their Christmas is probably weird as hell, the four of them sitting around the tree in the middle of the afternoon because they were too busy dealing with the ongoing metaphysical soap opera that is their lives to open presents in the morning like Dean is pretty sure normal people do.

Dean lifts each gift from the pile he and Adam wrapped last night (which feels like a hundred years ago), shakes some of them, tries to remember what’s inside, starts tossing them to people. A little bit random, okay. He’s left with a few that he knows were meant for Cas even though he’s pretty sure he wasn’t consciously thinking that when he ordered them. He places these aside and looks from Adam to Eileen to Sam, daring them to comment. They do not dare.

“Do we open them now?” Eileen asks.

Sam got everyone books because of course he did, but even Dean can appreciate the humor in a horror-themed cookbook even if it does proudly boast its healthy recipes. Adam’s gifts are all Christmas-y, and Dean can already foresee how much worse next year is going to be on the decorations front. From Eileen they each have a stuffed animal and a little certificate explaining that she adopted wildlife on their behalf.

Dean’s is something called a blue-footed booby. “I already have a dog, I don’t need a weird bird.”

“It’s a symbolic adoption, Dean. Like a conservation thing.” Sam has no room to be laughing; his is a moose.

Dean gives his stuffed bird to Miracle.

When all the other gifts have been unwrapped Dean is left with a cookbook, a Santa hat, a pile of things for Cas, and an abrupt need to be elsewhere. Adam is already deep in one of the books Sam got him; Eileen is wrestling with the packaging on her new socks while Sam unhelpfully helps. Then Sam’s eyes catch on something over Dean’s shoulder.

Dean turns.

“Uh, hi,” Sam says.

“Hello, Sam,” Cas says, in exactly the same tone he has always said those words. To Dean, he says, “It’s Christmas.”

“Uh, yeah. Actually, these are for you.” He gathers the blue-and-silver parcels in his arms, but Cas is distracted by the tree.

To be fair, the tree is bright and shiny and decorated with an absurd mix of ordinary store-bought sparkly stuff and traditional Winchester fixings like weapons and car air fresheners. So it’s kind of distracting.

Belatedly, he looks at Dean again. “You got me Christmas gifts.”

“Not on purpose,” Dean says, and he can feel Sam’s eyes on him, and he knows this is doing absolutely nothing to convince his brother that he didn’t know this was going to happen. Cas is now watching Adam, his eyes narrowed. Dean’s pretty sure he covered the whole Adam-and-Michael thing in their talk earlier, but it’s hard to say what Cas actually took in. “You wanna open them?”

Adam doesn’t look up from his book, so Cas turns his attention back to Dean, and the room feels crowded all of a sudden, and too warm. Cas says, “I didn’t get you anything.”

“You were dead, Cas, I don’t expect you to have gotten me anything.” This gets no reaction except maybe a slight increase in the intensity of whatever the hell is going on with Cas’s face right now. “OK, let’s go.” He puts the presents in Cas’s arms and ushers him out of the room.

Cas sits on the bed and stares at the presents.

“Using your x-ray vision, Cas? That’s cheating.”

“I don't have x-ray vision.”

Yeah, right. “You gonna open these, or what?”

So Cas does, as slowly as he ate the yogurt earlier. Carefully, painstakingly, like he’s not quite sure how. He holds each item like it’s glass (which most of them aren’t), considers it, and sets it gently on the nightstand. The road atlas, the shot glass, the fuzzy hat, the oven mitt with little honeybees on it.

Last is the long, thin box which, when Dean took it out of the postal packaging, was when he first started to realize what had been going through his head during his (still fuzzy) shopping spree. (Although, the winter hat with its Los Angeles Angels logo should also have been a clue.)

It’s a tie, blue like the one Cas is wearing, is still wearing, because he has never bothered with the concept of changing clothes if he can help it. This one has little tiny silver snowflakes embroidered on it. It’s supremely dumb. Dean loves it. He doesn’t know what he was would have done with it if Cas hadn’t shown up, because the only good answer is “wear it himself” and the only time he ever puts on a tie is to impersonate law enforcement, and he can’t impersonate law enforcement in a snowflake tie. It’s the same color as Cas’s eyes. It is a useless item, and he loves it.

Cas lifts it out of its box and traces his fingers over the fabric. “Thank you,” he says.

Then he picks that precise moment to do his freaky little blackout thing, which leaves him passed out, legs hanging off the edge of the bed.

Dean raises his eyes to the ceiling before remembering that the source of his problems was most likely not up there.

“Oh, come on!”

Chapter Text

Dean hauls Cas’s legs back onto the bed, then is struck by how not-alive he looks, unconscious on his back and fully clothed, suit and trench coat and shoes and all. Which, he is not going to try to take Cas’s clothes off while he’s out, that would be messed up, but at least he can do something about the shoes.

Of course Adam comes in while he’s in the middle of untying Cas’s shoelaces.

“I thought he’d be more comfortable,” Dean says defensively.

Adam goes and leaves Dean with Cas and his shoes, but he’s back a minute later carrying Eileen’s blanket.

“I don’t think he gets cold,” Dean says.

“I don’t think he gets uncomfortable, either. Or hungry.” He drapes the blanket over Cas, then steps over to the desk to take the candy Cas didn’t eat.

Cas looks more like just a person sleeping now. Which is wrong, he’s not just a person, not human, probably not asleep in the technical sense but something weirder and more worrisome, and thinking Cas is other than what he is just because he seems like a regular dude is something that gets Dean into trouble time and time again. But what he sees in front of him is his friend, falling down, struggling, and all he can do is try to take care of Cas in the ways he knows how. He can’t fix post-resurrection-itis but he can put food and water in front of him, sit with him until all of this makes sense.

“Your phone rang earlier,” Adam says.

“Where is it?”

Adam shrugs.

“My phone, or one of the work phones? When was this?”

“I don’t know, like half an hour ago? Sam said to tell you.”

Adam leaves again, and doesn’t return.

Dean tells himself there’s no harm in leaving Cas alone for a little while, that he’ll be here when Dean gets back or he can come looking for Dean if he needs anything. He tells himself several times.

He finds his phone in the pocket of his coat, which in turn is in a pile on his floor where he left it two days ago. Oops. But everyone who might be trying to get in touch with him is in this bunker. Almost everyone.

There’s a missed call from Emily; he calls her back. While it rings he tries to compose a quick message for Cas on the back of a receipt, discarding a few dozen possibilities before settling on back soon. She picks up right as he gets back to Cas’s room.

“A crude t-shirt and a 30-inch poster print photo of your dog,” she says.

“What?” Dean says, having gotten distracted by the lines in Cas’s sleeping face. There’s nothing unusual about them, it’s just… Cas’s face. Which he thought he’d never get to see again.

“Your questionably thoughtful Christmas gifts.”

His brain catches up to what she just said. “Is there a chance it wasn’t me that sent it it?”

“The photo of your dog?”

“The shirt. How bad are we talking? And can I just emphasize that I have a lot of respect for you. As a person.” He leaves the note beside the bed and gets the hell out of there. Because of Cas really can hear what people say while he’s out… yeah. He heads for the kitchen, figuring he’s got a little time before Sam takes over to prepare his Christmas dinner atrocity.

“It has a picture of a pit bull on it and it says ‘show me your pits.’”

“I’m sorry?”

“Yeah. The dog looks just like Juliet. I’m gonna wear it forever.”

“Oh. Good. I mean, I thought it was funny. I think.”

“You don’t remember buying it.”

“I remember buying you something. It’s been a weird couple of days. Family stuff.”

He can hear the dogs barking on her end, and he wonders where Miracle is right now.

“For you, family stuff can mean anything from your brother taking the last donut to the literal end of the world.”

“The world is not ending, that I know of.”

“Well, that’s too bad.”

“What’s eating you that’s worse than the apocalypse?”

“Oh, I just told my girlfriend what I do for a living, twenty minutes before she left town to spend Hanukkah with her parents. Smart, right?”

“Hanukkah ended a couple days ago, didn’t it?”

“She got back on Sunday.”

He waits, but she doesn’t elaborate. If they’re gonna make a habit of having awkward heart-to-hearts on holidays, okay, but she needs to give him something to work with. “And?”

“She said she needed ‘some time.’ It’s fine. I don’t need you to be my relationship counselor or whatever, I know you’ve got your own shit going on.”

“Does it help if I point out that the world ending is not a good alternative to having a hard conversation with your girlfriend? Speaking from experience here.”

“Shut up. Anyway, I’m quitting. No more monsters, no more demons. I’m doing the dog thing. Drawing up paperwork, looking at properties. I don’t know, maybe I’ll just renovate the house. I just… want her to be part of it, you know?”

Does he know?

There were times in his life where he didn’t go two days without imagining what it would be like to get out, but just as often he has felt in his bones that he would die doing this job, a blaze of glory, the only thing he could do that meant anything.

Surviving Chuck was an ending of sorts, was supposed to set them free. And he’s been watching Sam making plans, talking about the future, taking jobs that are more research, less violence, and he knows that’s what his brother needs. And what does Dean need? He stopped trying to get out because there was nowhere else he wanted to go. Isn’t it enough that he’s hunting on his own terms, not because Dad or destiny or anyone else is making him do it? But the cracks are starting to show. There’s a life beyond all this, and the only part missing showed up under the Christmas tree this morning.

Yeah, he knows.

He doesn’t think he has it in him to turn this into any more of a Moment, though, so he says, “How are the girls?”

“Oh, they’re fine. Ava’s getting big! And I had a client in for a meeting the other day and Juliet didn’t even bite them.”

“Maybe she should have.”

“Probably.” The subject of her dogs carries her for several minutes as usual. Sam comes with Miracle, and puts food in the dog’s dish before getting started on human dinner.

“Okay, have I helped you avoid your problems for long enough?” Emily asks, after describing at length Juliet’s feud with a stray neighborhood cat.

Dean doesn’t bother pretending he wasn’t trying to do just that, at least a little bit. “Screw you.”

“Pass. And when you’ve got it all sorted out, I wanna hear the whole story.”

“You sure? It might involve angels. And the afterlife.”

“Positive. It’ll be like a fairy tale. Happy endings only.”

Wouldn’t that be nice? “Okay.”

“Keep an eye on the mail. Seems I owe you a Christmas present.”

It’s impressive how she makes that sound like a threat.

After he hangs up, Sam asks, “How’s Emily?”

“Fine. What the hell are you making?”

“Chickpeas. How’s Cas?”

“Peachy. I thought we said chicken.”

“Could’ve sworn you said chickpeas. Adam said he passed out again.”

“I’ve never said ‘chickpeas’ in my life.”

“Is Cas alright?”

“Fuck if I know.”

Miracle turns his attention from Sam and his lack of chicken to Dean, coming to rest his chin on Dean’s knee.

“What? You already ate your dinner. And he has the food, go bother him.” To Sam, who is smirking at them, Dean adds, “If you can call that food.”

With all the Castiel stuff, Dean has barely had time to think about his dog. “Was he hiding under the table all day? Has he gone outside?”

“Eileen took him out for a little while this morning. He was a little freaked out by last night, but he’s pretty much okay now. You can trust us to look after him when you’re busy, you know.”

“I’d better take him out now.” Dean pockets his phone and Miracle follows him to the door.

“About last night,” Sam says.

“Brady brought Cas back, and that should be the end of it, but there’s something Cas isn’t telling me. Alright?”

“And?”

“And? I’ll tell you when I know more. Can I go now, before my dog pisses on your nice clean kitchen floor?”

“Dress warm!” Sam calls after him.

He gets his coat and stops off in Cas’s room on the way out.

The room is empty.

There’s the blanket crumpled at the foot of the bed, the cup still on the floor, granola bars eaten, Cas’s shoes on the floor. His socks, too.

It’s not like Dean thought they would just fall into each other’s arms, or something. Yeah, okay, it was definitely one of the fantasies in the back of his mind while he was pacing beside the bed early this morning, but no way on earth he was ready to actually do anything related to the stuff he has recently managed to admit to himself. It was supposed to be enough to just have Cas here. Alive.

He’s not supposed to just leave.

Miracle whines and Dean remembers there are problems in this world other than his own bullshit feelings.

His phone tells him it really did snow last night, so he heeds Sam’s warning and puts on his coat and then he sees the note, the one he left earlier.

The paper is written and drawn all over, the kind of stuff that would scream crazy to anyone less familiar with what it’s like on the inside of an angel’s brain. Abstract shapes and half-faces and stars and mathematical equations and words and phrases that sound familiar, like he heard them in one of his various freaky dreams. In the center of it all is Dean’s own writing, back soon, and next to it, in tiny, cramped letters,

Outside.

So.

Miracle barks to remind him he’s headed that way anyway. It’s kind of difficult to be an angel wrangler and a dog dad at the same time, but occasionally the stars align.

He’s relieved and exasperated to find Cas just outside the garage entrance, barefoot in the snow, wearing the hat Dean gave him.

Miracle, ever impervious to the cold, runs off to do his business and get in some quality frolicking time.

Cas says, “It’s colder than I thought it would be.”

“No shit. If you weren’t you, I’d say you were gonna get frostbite.”

Cas’s face is pretty flushed for someone who’s not supposed to feel cold.

Cas frowns at his toes. “I don’t care for socks.”

“But you don’t mind hats.”

“You gave me this hat.”

“So if I gave you socks, would you wear them?”

“I might.” He gives Dean a look filled with meaning, but based on Dean’s knowledge of Cas’s assortment of meaningful looks, this one really just means you puny mortals are so goddamn weird with your socks and your feelings and your internal organs.

Miracle trots up to them dragging a stick, more like a branch, longer than his whole body. Dean breaks off a piece of it and throws it for him.

Cas watches him chase after it. “Whose dog is that?”

“Mine.”

“You have a dog.”

“Yup.”

“I think I knew that.” Snow is still falling lightly from the golden haze of the late afternoon sky. Flakes land on Cas’s hat and shoulders and melt there. He holds his hands out in front of him and flexes his fingers. “I don’t know what I know. Should I be able to feel these?”

Dean grabs Cas’s hand and finds it ice-cold. “For fuck’s sake. We’re going inside.” He whistles for the dog and pulls Cas back into the garage.

Somewhere in the time he spent muddling through how to exist post-Cas, he started to think of Castiel as something he was missing, like if only he had that missing piece, everything would be okay. Like Cas isn’t just as fucked up as he is.

Looking at it like that, surprisingly, helps.

“So,” Dean says as Miracle shakes melting snow out of his fur, “You wanna tell me what’s going on with you?”

Cas sighs. “It’s difficult to think.” He studies the blue and white lights strung around the garage and sways a little.

“Hey, if you’re about to go all fainting goat again, warn a guy first, okay?”

“I think I will remain conscious.” He shivers a little, though. Dean decides getting him warm takes priority over getting answers, and ushers him on back to his room.

Chapter Text

Cas being Cas, helping him get warm is harder than it ought to be.

There are covered dishes on the desk, and a note from Sam—don’t skip meals!!!—and the trash from earlier has been cleaned up.

Cas dumps his damp hat and coat unceremoniously on the floor. Dean hangs his own jacket from the back of the chair while Cas takes one of the plates and starts eating, standing in the middle of the room, still barefoot.

Dean says, “Socks.” Miracle jumps up on the bed and begins trying to bury his seabird in the blankets.

Cas eats another forkful of beans. “They’re wet. I stepped in the water that spilled earlier.”

“Fine. But you need to get into bed before your toes fall off.”

“They are not that cold. I am eating. And the dog is on the bed.”

“Miracle, off.” Dean is grateful that the dog decides to actually listen to him for once. He takes the plate from Cas’s hands and Cas seems too baffled to fight him. “You can eat in bed.” He gives Cas a look. It’s a pretty good look, Dean thinks, perfected over years of being the only one around to make sure Sam ate and showered and went to bed on time. It’s been a while since it got much use.

The look Cas gives back is truly scandalized. “You are treating me like a child.”

“Only ‘cause you’re acting like one.”

Cas looks away and Dean is sorry as soon as he says it.

“I’m trying to help, Cas.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I know I don’t have to. But it’s what I know how to do, so you can tell me to fuck off, or tell me what I’m doing wrong, because I’m flying blind here. All I know is what Brady told me, which doesn’t explain why you’ve been blacking out, or getting cold, or—”

“What did they tell you?”

“That they basically pestered the Empty into spitting you out.” Cas’s always-intense gaze seems turned up to eleven. “Is that right?”

“It’s… difficult. To talk about.” He lays a hand gently against Dean’s arm. It’s the first time since he’s been back, Dean realizes, that Cas has touched him on purpose, of his own clear volition. The first time since the last time. Were his hands always this warm? “You’re not doing anything wrong. I am not very good at letting others take care of me.”

Dean knows that’s true about Cas like he knows it of himself, that he was hell anytime he got sick as a little kid, that he keeps his shit bottled up tight no matter how much Sam wants him to share, that he’s been pissed at Cas for months for saving him in a way he can never repay. And maybe he’s trying to make up the difference right now, but he’s not about to cop to that. “It’s easy,” he says instead. “Just do as I say.”

Cas frowns, but there’s something in his eyes approaching amusement. As usual, he knows what Dean leaves unsaid.

But he does as Dean asked and climbs into bed. He makes a face and pulls the blue-footed bird doll from under the covers where Miracle buried it.

“Christmas present from Eileen,” Dean says to Cas’s perplexed expression.

He gives the thing back to the dog while Cas straightens the blankets. “Has Eileen been here the whole time?”

“Just the past few weeks. Now she and Sam are…” He loses track of his words, because Cas has moved to the far side of the bed and sits holding the blankets aside. An invitation. “What?”

“You can eat in bed. It will be warmer. Sam and Eileen are what?”

“Engaged,” Dean says, but his brain feels like it’s full of cotton and white noise and the four feet of empty space between his body and Cas’s. “Didn’t I tell you that already?”

Cas replies, “Shoes.”

“Right.” Dean leaves his boots beside Cas’s shoes on the floor. He hands Cas his dinner, grabs his own, and sits beside Cas on the bed and tries to keep himself from counting back to the last time he got into bed with another person. Cas pulls the sheets and blankets over them both.

A few minutes later Cas has already cleaned his plate while Dean is still picking at the food. It’s not, admittedly, terrible. He likes that it’s spicy, at least—Sam can be kind of a wuss about spicy food. Cas reaches around behind him to put his plate on the already-crowded table on Dean’s side of the bed. He places his hand on Dean's shoulder for balance.

Just for balance. Chill the fuck out. What does normal breathing feel like?

“Are you alright?”

The space between them is inches now. It’s weird. Being in bed with Cas is weird, right?

“Shoulder got messed up on a hunt a couple weeks back. Guess it’s still sore.”

Cas reaches out again, this time a gentle touch Dean can hardly even feel through his shirt. “I’m sorry,” Cas says.

The bed is wide enough that they don’t need to sit this close.

Dean gives up on his dinner and sets the plate aside. He turns back and Cas is watching him expectantly, with a tiny smile on his lips and an unmistakable glance down towards Dean’s.

A decade of this shit, Dean coming up with every excuse—he doesn’t mean it, he can’t want it, I don’t, it won’t work, I never—he knows better now, but making sure Cas is okay takes priority. It has to.

He swallows down all he’d rather be saying (or doing). “Are you gonna keep avoiding the subject of what happened to you?”

Cas sits back, his shoulders squaring with tension, hands clasped tightly in his lap. Dean searches his face for any clue of what is going on with him and finds only a part of an answer in Cas’s eyes. Scared, and more than a little pissed.

Fuck it. He puts his hand over Cas’s. “Help me,” he says. “Help me help you.”

After all these years Dean is plenty used to Cas looking into his eyes like he’s staring straight into Dean’s soul, and Dean can give as good as he gets. Cas blinks first.

“The Empty will not take me back a third time.”

“So what, you’re immortal now?”

“The opposite, actually,” Cas says.

Dean’s first terrible thought is that Cas is literally dying, that he just got him back and has to lose him again, then a few more pieces slide into place. How fragile he seems, how tired, confused, frustrated. Used to existing in way Dean can’t begin to comprehend, and once again reduced. He’s only dying as much as Dean is—slowly, unavoidably mortal.

“I forgot,” Cas says. “I forgot how it felt.”

“Cas, I’m sorry.”

“Do not,” Cas says, “apologize. It is not your fault.”

Isn’t it, though? Didn’t Cas die for Dean’s recklessness, only to get dragged back from his final rest by the fact that Dean can’t leave well enough alone?

Cas frees one hand from Dean’s grip and raises it to cup his cheek. Dean leans into the touch, his eyelids heavy all of a sudden and he’s not even sure why.

“When did you last sleep?”

Oh, right. That’s why. “I took a nap earlier. Don’t change the subject.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. This morning.” Don’t change the subject. Is Cas okay? Does he regret coming back? What does he need, what can Dean do for him?

“You should lie down.”

“Hey, who’s taking care of who, here?” But he does lie down, still holding tight to Cas’s other hand. “I don’t want to miss it.”

“Miss what?”

“You. I don’t want to miss you. Goddamn sick of it.”

“I’ll be here when you wake up.”

He wakes up and the room is dark, and he’s alone. He’s pretty sure he fell asleep as fast as if Cas had knocked him out with his angel powers, but seeing as that's no longer an option, apparently he was just that tired.

He doesn’t know what time it is other than “feels late,” doesn’t see anyone in the halls of the bunker. Doesn’t know where he’s going until he stops outside the door of the room he hasn’t set foot in for six months.

The door is open, and Cas stands just inside.

“This place gives me the creeps,” Dean says. Why weren’t you there when I woke up?

“I needed to use the toilet,” Cas replies without turning around.

“Get lost on the way back? What are we doing in here, exactly?”

Now Cas looks back over his shoulder at Dean. “I’m in the room. You’re not.” His tone implies, Chicken.

Dean wants to go stand beside Cas because that’s where he always wants to be. He doesn’t step over the threshold. Wants to. Doesn’t. Wants to.

With a shaky breath he steps into the room. Lit only by the light spilling in from the hallway he can just barely see the far wall, the spot where he stood when—

“It looks just how I remember it.”

“It’s a weird place to reminisce about.”

“If I avoided this room just because it holds unpleasant memories, the unpleasantness would only grow with time.” He casts Dean a knowing glance.

“Yeah, well.” It’s true he’s been avoiding this room, its memories and its cold walls and its darkness. There’s nothing to fear, though, and maybe there never was; the things that haunt him are gone and Cas is here next to him. The dark and the cold and the memories all suck, but he’s lived through worse. “How are you holding up?”

Cas looks out into the room but his gaze falls somewhere beyond it, a world unseen. Dean watches Cas rather than look at the place where he lost him. He’s still barefoot, and at some point he ditched his jacket and tie.

“Everything hurts,” Cas says. “The world is loud. I keep thinking that this is most likely a dream and any moment I will wake up to find myself still alone in the dark, except that if this were a dream, I wouldn’t be so damn uncomfortable. And you would have listened to me. But you never—you never listen to me.” He winces and reaches up to massage his temple, and Dean notices the strip of fabric clenched in his hand—his tie. No, the new tie, the one Dean gave him. “Even in my dreams you never listen.”

“I do listen to you. I did. I mean, I tried, and I’m trying.”

Cas only dignifies this with his signature head-tilt.

Dean tries again. “The past six months, I’ve been trying to figure out how to be happy. But I guess in the process I accidentally got you dragged back here. And I am sorry for that.”

“I said—”

“Not to apologize. Well, I’m going to, because seriously, the last thing I wanted was to make things worse for you.”

Cas rolls his eyes. “Death said I had a choice.”

Castiel is an autonomous entity, and not a thing to be given. The choice was his.

“I could have stayed, and finally slept in the darkness, but I chose to come back, even if you weren’t here waiting for me.”

That’s not much of a choice at all.

Where else would he be? The Shadow had tried to give Dean the choice, too, but he’d never been good at letting things go.

He reminds himself that you have to say things out loud sometimes.

“Where else would I be?” Cas seems like he’s going to say something, but no, you know what, he got his turn. Six months ago he got to say his piece and Dean’s been holding onto this since then.

“I think about you all the time. When I’m falling into old habits and being too hard on myself or whatever, I think of you. What you’d say. You know, have more faith in yourself. Eat healthier. That kind of thing. It’s always your voice in my head.”

“My voice,” Cas repeats, wonderingly.

He thinks it might tear his heart open if he doesn’t say it. “Cas, I—”

“When you’re out driving?” Cas interrupts.

“Uh, yeah. Listen—”

“Or feeding french fries to your dog.”

“That’s… specific.”

“Or talking to your friend Emily, or worrying about Sam and Eileen’s relationship milestones?”

“Okay. Explain now.”

“‘Look at you, planning for the future,’” Cas says, the same words Dean heard in his head the night before.

“That was you.”

“I thought they were dreams.”

Dean recalls what he said earlier in this very conversation. “I told you I listen to you,” he says, but Cas is laughing. Leaning against the shelves, doubled over laughing.

His smile might be the most beautiful thing Dean has ever seen. Dean can feel his own face trying to match it, albeit a little more watery.

“What the fuck, Cas.”

Cas manages to stop laughing long enough to lift his right hand and tap his left shoulder. “You called, I answered.”

“No wonder the Shadow said I was loud.”

“You are. You are very loud.”

“Brady would have had to cut the cord. For you to sleep.”

“That would appear to be the case.”

“But they didn’t. So it’s still there? The… bond? Even though you’re, you know.”

“Yes. I think we’re stuck with each other.”

Dean can remember a time that might have scared the hell out of him. It doesn’t sound like a bad thing when Cas says it.

“You love me.”

Cas nods slowly. “I did say that.”

“I love you.” The car doesn’t crash. The world doesn’t end.

“That’s good.”

Which is kind of an underwhelming response. “Did you want to do something about that, or…?”

“Do what?” Cas asks, and he seems genuinely confused, right up until he smiles.

Cas is an asshole. Dean loves him.

“Come over here.”

As first kisses go, it’s dry, awkward, and brief, and it’s perfect, and when Cas pulls back he rests his forehead against Dean’s.

Cas is warm and breathing and his heart beats under Dean’s hand on his chest and they are both alive.

Chapter Text

There’s a new freedom now—the freedom of knowing he could get in his car and drive all day and into night, Cas in the passenger seat, home and holidays and movie night and the rest of his family waiting when the road brings them back this way. He can send postcards from Houston or Sioux Falls or Wisconsin or wherever in the meantime.

“Don’t get married before we get back,” Dean warns Sam and Eileen.

“Same goes for you,” Eileen replies, and Dean pretends not to know what she means.

Cas is engaged in a staring contest with the dog in front of the open rear door of the Impala.

“Get in the car,” Cas says to the dog. Miracle tilts his head to the side and smiles his empty-headed doggy smile.

“He’s used to riding in the front,” Dean points out.

Miracle jumps into the back, then climbs into the passenger seat.

“Dean, he’s in my seat.”

“I can see that.”

It started as a vague idea in the back of Dean’s mind as he watched Cas in the bunker the first few days, moving through good moments and bad. He’d be friendly with Eileen and then snippy with Sam and then downright hostile towards Adam in the space of five minutes and Dean loves him, always, and would be happy to just sit back with a bowl of popcorn and watch the chaos, but he started to wonder if Cas’s adjustment to his new existence might benefit from a change of scenery. You know, not being in the same underground bunker with the same four people (and one dog) 24/7. Except taking him out on a hunt seemed like an even worse idea. So Dean was stuck.

Dean tries forcibly removing Miracle from Cas’s seat, but the dog hops right back in.

“Maybe he could sit in your lap,” Dean suggests to Cas. Cas seems unenthusiastic about the idea.

While they’re still trying to work out the seating logistics, Adam arrives back from town. He tosses something to Dean, but since Dean has his arms full of Miracle, Cas steps forward and catches it instead.

“Stopped by the post office for you,” Adam says. “You’re welcome. You guys heading out?”

Cas inspects the package, and Dean gestures to him that he can go ahead and open it if he wants. “Thanks.”

“Try not to get killed,” Adam says as he heads inside.

“It’s really not that kind of trip,” Dean calls after him, but he’s already gone.

After dwelling on the issue all week, Dean mentioned the possibility of going away to Sam, who reminded him that he could just… go. Just get in the car and drive. It’s that easy.

Of course it wasn’t that simple in practice; this isn’t some emergency we-need-to-be-in-Oklahoma-by-tonight-or-people-will-die situation so there was actual packing and planning and Sam keeps thinking of places and people he thinks Dean should visit and there has been plenty of second-guessing. Cas was on board right away; it’s Dean who lay awake at night wondering if this—a goddamn vacation—was a good idea, if he could really do this—

Thanks to Sam, Cas got in on the planning part and informed Dean that they absolutely have to visit the covered bridge capital of the world (it’s in Indiana) and he had this light in his eyes so damn sincere about it and yeah, okay, they’re doing this.

Now Cas is opening Dean’s mail. “It’s a shirt,” he reports.

“It’s probably from Emily. Actually, you don’t have to open it.” Dean has no choice but to stand there with his dog in his arms and watch this happen.

“It is a pink sleeveless shirt,” Cas elaborates. He unfolds it and holds it up for Sam and Eileen to see. “The text on the front reads ‘mutt slut.’”

Eileen squints at it. Sam starts laughing.

Miracle is restless in Dean's arms. He loves Dean a lot, but there’s a limit to how much he’ll tolerate having his liberty restricted. “Okay, time to go. Cas, get in the car.” With a final meaningful glance down at the shirt, Cas complies.

Dean then releases the dog into the backseat, where he stands and stares up at Dean, and Dean assures himself he is imagining the betrayal in the dog’s expression. Dean tells Miracle to sit and he does, because he still loves Dean the most.

Sam insists on one more hug, which Dean doesn’t even pretend to grumble about.

When Sam steps back, he says, “I think 2021 is gonna be a good year.”

“Do not fucking jinx it, Sam.”

Dean gets in his car. Dog in the backseat, Cas beside him, snacks and a terrible present from a good friend, a new mixtape. People are waiting for him when he gets back, but not worrying about him too much because it’s when, not if.

The tape appeared on a table in the bunker library one afternoon, no sign of where it came from except that Miracle was on edge for the rest of the day. No label on the box, but Dean couldn’t sleep that night, so he put on headphones and gave it a listen and it wasn’t half-bad.

Now, the label in his own handwriting reads: Dean & Cas’s Road Trip. Dean pops it into the tape deck.

Kansas plays. Dean reaches over and squeezes Cas’s hand, just to see him smile. They drive.