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Dean Winchester was dying.
It was the kind of thing, he reflected in the way one can really only reflect with a nail driven through his upper back, too close to the heart for movement to be survivable, he was sure— it was the kind of thing he should be used to. He'd been dead, legally and clinically and spiritually dead, twice now, and close many more times. He'd been hurt in every way a person could be, on every level. Worse, if he really looked at the situation, than he was hurt right now. Frankly, the nail through him didn't even hurt that much. It just felt like more.
Maybe it was because when he'd died, before, he'd died for something. To save Sam. To avenge Mom. To get intel on the workings of Heaven before the arrival of the apocalypse. That last one had been a bit of an accident, to be fair, but at least something good had come out of it, when there had been a story that made sense. This? Dying suddenly, pointlessly, of nothing so much than a bad landing in a fight? That took something out of him.
Maybe it was because when he'd died, before, there had been people to tether him and bring him back. Dad. Sam. More prosaically, there had been people who made it easier to be here than there. So many people, all dwindling away into so much nothingness, until Sam was here and the whole world, everyone Dean had loved, was there, and for the first time in his life Dean could balance those scales and find them tipping a different way.
Because Cas was there, too.
Cas, who had saved him when Dean had been beyond saving. Cas, who had been there, always, through insults and fights and apocalypse after apocalypse after apocalypse, and who had been sitting on that confession for so long and when he'd said the words he needed to had simply vanished like so much fucking smoke. When Dean had stood there, too shocked and scared and confused to say anything. Because he'd had all these thoughts, and he'd figured that none of those thoughts matched Dean Winchester the legendary hunter, Dean Winchester the scourge of demons, Dean Winchester the champion of humanity, Dean Winchester the man. He'd been so very tough, just tough enough to be an utter coward, and Cas had been the brave one and Cas was gone and Dean hadn't said anything because he'd have opened his mouth and his dad's words would have come out.
Sam was standing in front of him, hands on his shoulders, and for the first time in his life there was something that outweighed the need to be there for his brother.
"We can call an ambulance," Sam was saying, as though emergency services weren't going to have questions about the headless corpses that probably wouldn't be answerable by "vampire juggalos". "You're gonna be okay, Dean, promise."
"I'm not," Dean said. "And that's okay. It was always going to end like this." He'd wanted it to end like this. Anything else, anything more than dragging his bruised body and shattered self across the finish line, that would be an admission that he hadn't been enough. Hadn't done enough. "Sam. Do you remember when I came to get you, right out of college?"
Words poured from him like the blood he could feel staining his clothes. He told Sam everything. Every moment of emotion he'd hidden behind a thrown insult, every moment Sam, sensitive whiny bitchy Sam, had been so much braver than Dean could ever imagine himself being. By the end of it, the words didn't matter so much.
And Dean Winchester died.
——
He hadn't known what to expect. Heaven? Hell? Purgatory? A waiting room, like that new show Sam liked?
He hadn't expected a road. It looked like a lot of roads Dean had driven down in his life. Barely paved, speckled with potholes of varying sizes, trees along either side. One of those roads that always felt faintly out of place in the American Midwest, not that Dean was some kind of tree scientist nerd.
Though in the broad scope, that kind of thinking had gotten him here. He'd known the vampires had been in the barn. If he hadn't been quite so averse to the idea of thinking, not been quite so eager to prove he could take down a vamp in a brawl, he'd never have walked in. He'd have gotten a matches and some gasoline, and they'd have come out to him and Sam, and there wouldn't have been any rebar to worry about.
The Impala was with him. Of course it would have been. No angel, no god, especially no Jack, could look down at Dean Winchester and think "this is a man who would enjoy heaven without his car." But there were other things Dean Winchester needed for heaven, and they weren't all pie.
He turned around, and he started walking away.
A reaper stood in his path. Well, an angel, but Dean recognized a reaper when he saw one. It wore the form of a young woman of precise edged features, like a sharpened blade, and for the first time in what Dean could no longer call his life, it annoyed him that they did that. Like they thought it would make him more okay with everything if some hot chick held his hand to the next life.
"You're new, huh?" Dean asked.
"My name is Marael," the reaper said, in a voice like glass in snow.
"And my name's Dean Winchester," said Dean. "Which I figure you probably know, right? I'm kind of a big deal up here."
"You're dead now," said the reaper, in an utterly professional voice that Dean hadn't heard from an angel in some time. "If you are expecting special treatment—"
"Where's Cas?" Dean asked.
The reaper's resolve might have flickered for a moment, or maybe Dean had been imagining things. "Castiel is gone."
"Fuck that."
"Castiel is gone, and you're dead, and neither of these are things that I can change," said the reaper, with no suggestion of any emotion, least of all mercy. "I'm your GPS, and the only direction I have for you is to drive, as fast and far as you can, for as long as you want, in the other direction."
"Good place?" Dean jerked his thumb over his shoulder. Then he pointed past the reaper. "Bad place?"
"Worse place," said the reaper coldly. "Hell is gone. Little more remains."
"Cas is there?"
The shift was subtle. The reaper tensed, fists at her sides. "Need I remind you, Dean Winchester, that you no longer have your repository of angel blades? That your magic is powerless here? That you are powerless?"
"Not hearing a no," Dean teased, and took another step forward.
The reaper rested one hand on a scythe at her belt. "Castiel is beyond our reach. The last decree of an old world."
Dean deflated. "You're right, of course."
"Yes."
Dean turned away from the reaper, and got into the Impala. The key was there, in the ignition, where it belonged, and the engine purred just like it always had, and as Dean shifted the car into reverse and backed over the reaper, swiveling the Impala around and peeling out as fast as he could away from heaven, the car moved just like it should have.
"You'll be alright," Dean muttered as he drove. "Lot of people like you like to say that we're powerless. But God's out of the game, and you gave me my baby back— and now I'm going to go get my angel."
——
Dean wasn't sure how long he drove for. The sky didn't change. He didn't get hungry, or tired, or even really bored, because how could he get bored at the wheel of the Impala— so there wasn't any measure for how long it had been. He wondered if, back on Earth, Sam was still alive. If Sam was living. That had always been the agreement, hadn't it? They'd lived it, broken it, complained about it— hopefully, finally, Sam had accepted it. Found someone decent, someone normal. Sam had always deserved a normal life. There were other people to pick up the slack, even if Dean's little scheme fell through.
Everything broke around him. The road crumbled, the trees wilted, and Dean drove down instead of away, fell through fire and darkness, fell through nightmares and memories and the blurred edges between them.
And fell into Emptiness.
It was quiet. Endless. In the darkness, Dean could see the forms of angels, dead or sleeping or something that wasn't either of those two things that Dean wasn't equipped to comprehend. No sign of Cas. No sign of anything else.
Dean turned on the car radio, and cranked the music up as high as it would go.
Sound blared out through the Empty. Dean could see the angels stirring, see everything stirring.
Someone rapped on the glass. Dean looked, and saw something that might have been a skeleton if it hadn't been cloaked in the shadows of nothingness.
Dean rolled down the window. "Hey."
"You don't belong here," said the Empty.
"Nobody belongs here," Dean said flippantly. "Where's Cas?"
"He's mine," said the Empty. "There was a deal."
"We break deals." Dean turned the music up louder.
"Quiet," said the Empty. Dean ignored this. "I can hurt you, Dean Winchester."
"Doubt it."
The Empty did. Something happened to Dean that he couldn't process, something involving Hell and Alistair and Lillith and Purgatory and the Bad Place and Lucifer and Michael and Dad and Azazel and so much pain it was beyond the human capacity to feel and so much sadness and misery it was beyond the human capacity to mourn.
It was memories, though, and given that Dean had experienced it once already he wasn't too bothered. He was old drinking buddies with pain and sadness and misery. Sort of his brand. He turned the music up a little.
"What is it you want?" the Empty growled.
"Already told you, man," Dean said. "Give me Cas and we're good." There were countless other angels here besides Cas.
Other angels were dicks, and the world was as better off without them as without the demons, without God, without Lucifer, without any of the people dedicated to some conception of what its story was supposed to be. "That's all."
"One angel," said the Empty. "And you leave?"
Cas was so much more than one angel. "Yeah."
The Empty vanished back into the dark, and Cas was standing outside the window.
He looked confused, like he always did. Faintly scruffy, in his battered old trenchcoat that had probably been made sometime in the Renaissance. He looked as he'd looked before he vanished, eyes alive with so much emotion, more emotion than Dean had been willing to let show on his own stupid human face. Sadness and resignation and...and love.
For Dean.
And Dean couldn't understand why, not for the life of him, but that kind of love deserved something like this.
"Hey, Cas," Dean said, doing his best not to let the moments of still-lingering discomfort slip into his voice, to say what he felt and not what he'd always thought he should feel. "Sorry it took so long to return the favor."
"Dean—" Cas said, looking faintly confused. "What are you—"
"Get in, Cas," Dean drawled. "I don't think I'm really meant to stay here, and I know you're not."
Cas, thankfully, got in, and Dean floored it, and they left the Empty to its quiet and shadows.
They drove under the unchanging sky again.
"I'm an angel again, I think," Cas said.
"Yeah?" Dean asked. "Like, same as you were after the apocalypse? All those phenomenal cosmic powers?"
"I think so," Cas said. "I could— I could make you alive again. I did notice that you were dead, don't think I didn't."
"Maybe." Dean still wasn't sure how long it had been since he'd died. He wasn't sure he was interested in heading back down to an Earth with no Sam in it. "Maybe later."
He wasn't looking at Dean. Dean, who was driving, wasn't looking at him.
Good time for a talk, Dean figured. Always had been. "I'm sorry I didn't say anything," he said.
"You don't have to be—"
"Yeah, I do." Dean pressed down harder on the gas pedal, not that it made a difference. "I wanted to tell you the same. I wanted to say you made it possible to keep going, even when you were pulling stunts like trying to become God—"
"I did become God," Cas said.
"Or being human and spending all your time trying to get laid—"
"I don't recall—"
"Or when you were Lucifer—"
"Not my finest hour—"
"Cas, you were the best part of all this. You saved my life, so many times, you've always laid everything on the line for me, and when you did it one last time, I couldn't even— I didn't even—" Dean's voice and vision were blurry, and he was glad the road was straight, which was a layer of metaphor beyond what he was willing to deal with.
"I know," said Cas.
"You don't know anything."
"I'm billions of years old, Dean," Cas said. "I'm not good with people. But I know how to read a face. I know how to read your face. I know when someone is scared of their feelings."
"I'm not scared anymore," Dean said. "I told Sam everything, before I died. And I figured— after everything, I sort of owed it to you to come give you a ride back up. Like you did for me when we met."
The road was straight, and Dean broke from years of tradition and looked at his shotgun. He met Cas's eyes, and those eyes weren't Jimmy Novak's, they were stars and galaxies and infinities and all those infinities were filled with love.
"You made it up to me a long time ago, Dean," Cas tried. He was smiling, lips parted slightly.
"Then I guess you owe me," Dean said, and he leaned over and finally kissed his angel.