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You never asked for this.
Chuck’s first mistake was putting himself in his story, and you are determined to not become your grandfather, but you never asked for this. You only just got your life back, and now you have to walk away, leave it behind you like a snake’s shed skin, and it hurts. It hurts like getting your soul back. It hurts like losing it in the first place. But you walk away anyway.
You will not become your grandfather.
~
You go to Heaven, first, as soon as you’ve put all the people back where they belong. You walk down the endless white hallways - you’re not ready to let go of your body, not yet - and study the names on the doors. So many people, each of them locked in a box with all their best memories.
You never hunted a djinn, when you were a hunter, but you read of them. You spent some time locked in a box yourself.
Chuck was afraid of any real afterlife, you think. He didn’t want people to see the cracks in it. He spent so long papering them over, he never stopped to ask why they were there in the first place. He certainly never waited to see what might grow.
~
The omniscience doesn’t happen all at once. There are weeks at a time where you just feel like Jack, a kid in a body like an ill-fitting suit. Then you’ll remember something you weren’t alive for - the sorrow in Michael’s eyes when Lucifer turned away, the give of fruit beneath Eve’s teeth, the crunch of the Impala’s wheels over the dead grass of Stull Cemetery - and that suit disappears. You’re naked and free and everywhere at once. You’re God.
It’s a pain like a toothache, all the ways that people have hurt one another. They’re written into you now, more a part of you than your skin and bones once were. You have memories instead of muscles, and most of them are ugly.
Was Chuck a benevolent God, once, before all of this? You know everything, but you don’t know that.
~
“He kept coming back to you,” you tell Amara.
She takes a long sip of her pomegranate margarita. It’s not real - she’s still inside you, the both of you too fragile to make her human-shaped again - but it’s the least you can give her. “What do you mean?”
“The Empty. The leviathan. They all looked like you.”
“He didn’t make the Empty.”
You tilt your head to the side. (You still have a head, here with her.) “Didn’t he?”
Her drink is an iced caramel mocha, now. She stirs it with her straw. “Hell if I know, kid.”
“Like I said,” you say, “they all looked like you.”
~
You meet with the Empty on its terms, on its turf. “I’d like to apologize,” you say. “I never meant to wake you up.”
“Too little, too late,” it says. It didn’t bother with a body for this meeting. Neither did you. It talks in pulsing darkness and you answer in light.
“It might not be.”
“You can send me back to sleep?” Longing like a heartbeat pounds inside its words.
“I think so.”
Suspicion oozes through it. “What will it cost me?”
“Everything, or nothing. It depends on your perspective.”
“What do you mean?”
“Let me make you how you were always meant to be: empty.”
~
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” asks the hallucination of Lucifer you still carry with you. You could get rid of him, but you haven’t yet. Every time he talks, you feel closer to Sam.
“No,” you tell him. You were terrible at lying to yourself even before you were all-knowing. “I’m doing it anyway.”
“You said you were going to be hands-off,” he says.
“I never said I wouldn’t fix what he broke.”
He sighs. “Well, you’re certainly a Winchester.”
“There are worse things to be.”
~
Purgatory is a gray and ugly place. Seeing it reminds you of the year Dean and Cas spent here, a year that gapes in your memory like a wound gone black with rot. (You’re still adjusting to the way your mind works, now that it’s not a brain. Five minutes ago, you had no idea they’d ever been in Purgatory.)
Your grandfather made monsters like a kid who didn’t want to play with dolls. He twisted limbs apart and tied tongues together, and when he was done he shoved them in a dusty corner of the basement before he burned down the house. You don’t know how he didn’t see the beauty in them, each and every one, as critical to his worlds as the undersketch of a painting.
You take them by the hand and lead them, blinking and astonished, into your new Heaven.
~
Dean cries, when he sees Castiel again. The other angels and demons you freed from the Empty went to your new Heaven, but that was never the plan for Cas, even if he’d wanted it.
Cas cries, too. They melt into one another, weeping. You know it’s joy they feel - you feel it too - but you still ache to see their tears. They’ve both cried far too many tears.
~
It takes a long time, gathering the courage to talk to Mary. You’re all-knowing, all-present, all-powerful. You’re working very hard on being all-good.
You were none of those things, when you killed her.
The first thing she does is hug you. You’re not even wearing your body and she hugs you.
“I’m so sorry,” you tell her, voice breaking.
“It was an accident,” she says. “We all make mistakes. And it looks like you’re making good use of your second chance.”
“You can’t just - forgive me,” you say.
“I can do whatever the hell I want,” she says. “You’re family.”
“I’m God.”
She shrugs one shoulder. “So I have God as a grandson. Weirder things have happened.”
Well. You can’t argue with that.
~
“Oh, kid,” says Rowena when you visit Hell, “you’re too young for this.”
“I know,” you tell her. For the first time in a long time, you’re wearing the face she knows as yours. You savor the taste of words on your tongue. “It was our best option.”
She laughs. “You really are their son.”
“I like to think so.”
“What’d you come all the way down here for, then?” She smirks at you, eyes glittering, like she already knows the answer.
You smile back. You can’t help it. “I’m getting rid of Hell.”
~
Sam prays to you every day. They’re small, frivolous prayers, for the most part: he talks about how the dog’s training is going, and Eileen’s new apartment, and how much you would love to see this sunset. It hurts the part of you that still wants to be human, but you welcome the pain. (You are still, in many ways, the Winchester’s child.)
You send what answers you can: the wind in the trees and the sun in the sky and the rain on the churned-up ground. Sometimes he knows it’s you, and he thanks you for it. Other times he doesn’t notice at all.
~
“So you got rid of Hell entirely?” asks Amara. She’s moved on from drinks, and spends her time rubbing imaginary lotion into her hypothetical hands. Right now it smells of pomegranate and vanilla.
“Yes,” you tell her. “It did more harm than good.”
She laughs, delighted. “My brother would be beside himself.” She twists the lid onto her lotion. When she uncaps it again, it smells of smoke and brown sugar. “What’re you going to do with the evil souls, then? The ones who actually deserved to be in Hell, I mean.”
“I hoped you might have some ideas.”
~
Cas prays before significant events, as though you might have been too busy to notice them yourself. “Jack,” he says, “I wanted to let you know that Alex is graduating college next week,” or “Sam and Eileen have decided to have a child,” or “I am going to propose tomorrow.” He never gives you updates afterwards; he spent so long praying to a God who only listened for his pain. If you care enough, he figures, you’ll be there.
You always are.
~
“Do you want to go back?” you ask Mary.
“Of course,” she says, “but I shouldn’t.”
“I don’t understand.” You find you kind of like the feeling. Things that you don’t understand have been getting fewer and farther between.
“I had my relationship with them. They loved me and grew past me and grieved me, like we should all get the chance to do. If I go back now... I’m their mother. I’m going to die before them. They’ve already mourned me twice. I won’t ask them to do it a third time.”
“I don’t think they would agree.”
“No.” She laughs. “They probably wouldn’t.” She pauses. “I have an idea, though. If what you want to relieve is their grief, not your guilt.”
She introduces you to this world’s Charlie Bradbury.
~
Dean doesn’t call it praying, what he does. He refers to it, when he acknowledges it at all, as “leaving a message” - as though your divinity is simply a phone you can choose not to pick up. He does it once a week, like clockwork, after he does the grocery shopping but before he starts the laundry. He gives you simple, straightforward updates on his life and the lives of those you left behind: “Claire took that demon down solo,” and “Baby Mary took her first steps today,” and “I said yes.”
~
Sam Winchester grows old and dies. It happens in his sleep, two days after his 93rd birthday, and you come to greet his spirit personally.
“Jack!” he says, and wraps you in a hug. You haven’t worn this body in decades, but like this, you feel as though it’s only been a day.
You hug him back. His soul is warm and solid beneath your hands. “I missed you,” you tell him, and he smiles at you.
“You were always here,” he says, like it’s that simple. Maybe it is.
~
The Winchesters aren’t the only ones to pray. All the time, all over the world, all manner of creatures ask you to favor them, bless them, love them. A human child in Ontario loses her favorite shoes and asks you to find them. A new vampire in Perth wonders if he still has a soul. A young mother in Dubai begs for your wisdom to help raise her son.
Chuck’s first mistake was putting himself in his story, but you are not your grandfather. You are not bound by what he broke.
You do not perform miracles, but you give hope, when it’s needed. You don’t raise the dead, but you remind people of what joy looks like. You cannot stop war, but you can soften the edges of its memory.
You are not a God who works in parted seas or in messiahs. You work in the quiet moments, the unremarkable beauty of the day-to-day. It’s not your story, after all. It’s theirs.
~
Dean, too, grows old and dies. He greets you, when you come for him, with a smile and a, “Took you long enough, buddy.”
“I’ve been busy,” you tell him.
He ruffles your hair, tosses an arm around your shoulder. “Too busy to grab a beer with old friends?” he asks.
“I don’t frequent Heaven,” you tell him.
“Come on, kid.” He sobers, and gazes at you like you’re still a toddler in a grown man’s body, like he still has the weight of the world on his shoulders. “For old times’ sake?”
“Just this once,” you say, and he laughs.
“We’ll see about that.”
~
Try as you might, you cannot bring back the universes that Chuck snuffed out. You can create new ones, identical in every way, but the souls are different, so you decide to leave it be. Chuck annihilated billions upon billions of people, a number so staggeringly huge even your new and improved mind can’t grasp it. He destroyed their Heavens and their Hells and their Purgatories, and there is no afterlife for them, not even an Empty. Your grief for them is immense and absolute, terrible and obscene, and unlike so many of his terrors this is one you cannot fix.
In the place that used to be Purgatory, you plant a garden for them. Every soul he demolished gets a flower or a fern or a tree, something that reminds you of who they were, of who they could have been. When your grief and sorrow overwhelm you, when the burden grows too heavy to bear, you go there and you walk until you remember why you took it on.
Maybe your grandfather was a good God, once, before the weight of all his worlds warped him beyond recognition. Maybe he wasn’t. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is you, and the people you are still able to serve.
~
The man who once was God grows old and dies. You approach his spirit yourself.
“You’re still around,” he says in disgust.
“Yes,” you say. You smile at him. “I am.”
He flinches from your gaze. “I suppose it’s Hell for me, then.”
“No.”
“The Empty?”
“No.”
He squints at you. “You’re a strange one, kid.”
“I get that a lot.” Or you did, when people still talked to you. “Come with me.”
He doesn’t really have a choice. “I suppose there’s a special cell for me in Heaven, then. I imagine the angels weren’t thrilled at how I turned out.”
“There are no cells left in Heaven,” you tell him.
“Where are you taking me, then?”
“To the same place I take everybody else.”
~
It takes so much longer than you both had hoped, but eventually you’re able to return Amara’s body. She stretches, cracks her spine, wiggles her fingers and toes. “Finally,” she sighs. “You did good, kid.”
“I’m not a child anymore,” you say.
“You’re all children to me.”
Fair enough. “You haven’t changed your mind?”
“About Hell? No. I’m destruction, not eternal suffering. That was my brother’s mistake, thinking that any absence of good is evil. You give me those souls that can’t make it in your Heaven, and I’ll get rid of them. Leave Hell empty, Jack.”
“I will.”
She shakes your hand, and she leaves.
You start another garden in the place that once was Hell, this one for the souls too warped to live forever. Your grief for them is different than what you feel for the ones you couldn’t save - that’s why their garden isn’t in Purgatory - but it’s no less present. They’re as much a part of you as anyone. Their loss cuts just as deep.
~
Even Castiel grows old and dies. “I waited so long,” he tells you when you greet him.
“I know,” you say. “You were so patient. You did so much good.”
“Not as much as you.” The smile he gives you twists something in your chest. It’s an old, familiar ache.
“Come with me,” you say. “Your family is waiting.”
“Not all of it.”
“Yes,” you say. “All of it. You’re not the only one I took out of the Empty. They’re all there.”
“I know that, Jack. I was talking about you.”
Oh. “I understand,” you say, “but I still have work to do.”
He hasn’t stopped smiling at you. It hasn’t stopped hurting. “Will you visit, at least?” he asks.
You were not always a god. You were a child, once, his child, and the pain in your chest is a sign that you could be again. “I’ll try.”