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Even after the demons are gone, Dean still wakes up shaking out of his skin, soaked in a cold sweat underneath four layers of blankets and one layer of Cas. His shaking wakes Cas, who always promptly rolls off of him.
"Are you okay?" Cas asks.
"No."
It’s not really a question, and it’s not really an answer, but it’s easy, as much part of their routine as silver and saltwater once were.
"What was it about?" Cas asks, refraining from the urge to drape an arm over Dean. Dean’s visceral reactions to touch post-nightmare were something it took both of them a while to figure out, but now that they know, it’s a boundary Cas will never break.
And Dean says: “Alistair,” or “I killed a six-year-old when I was a demon,” or “fire,” and then he tucks his head below Cas’s chin and cries. Then and only then does Cas hold him in his arms - soft and slow at first, just a hand on the shoulder, to make sure it’s okay. If Dean shrinks, or flinches, or shakes his head, then Cas will back up and let him keep crying. But if Dean doesn’t react, then Cas can hold tighter, and then he can wrap Dean up in both his arms, and then they can cry together.
Later, after their tears are all dried up, Dean rolls away. “Thank you,” he says to the wall, and falls asleep with his arms wound tightly around himself.
He never dreams for the rest of the night, though, and he wakes up in Cas’s arms in the morning.
Even after the angels are gone, Cas starts upright in sheer terror, convinced that they’ve found a way back into his mind. He shakes Dean awake with tears in his eyes.
"Are you here?" he asks, fighting the desire to pry open Dean’s eyes and stare into his soul. He can’t do that anymore. "Did I hurt you?"
Dean shakes his head wearily, pushes Cas’s hands away. “I’m fine, buddy. You can go back to sleep.”
Cas is vibrating with horror, though, and shifts so he’s sitting with his legs folded underneath him. “When I was under Naomi’s control, I had to kill a thousand copies of you,” he tells Dean, and it has the air of a revelation even though they both have heard it recited in the middle of the night several dozen times now.
Or else he says something else, something like “Zachariah used to put my grace in the vacuum of space, or so deep in the ocean I could see all the monsters, or inside the core of a collapsing star, and he didn’t do it for a reason, he just did it for fun.” Or maybe “I still see Lucifer sometimes, in the corner of my eyes. Purgatory didn’t get rid of him entirely.”
And Dean listens with clenched teeth, knowing that when he falls back asleep his dreams won’t be of his own Hell, but of Cas’s. He listens anyway, because Cas needs this as much as Dean needs his silent crying sessions.
When Cas is done talking, Dean pulls him onto his laps and pets his hair. “It’s okay, baby,” he says. “It’s all over. None of it matters anymore. You’re safe, love. You’re safe.”
Even after the monsters are gone, one or the other of them still wakes up screaming, and it’s never pretty. It’s always ugly tears and shattered monologues, eyes meeting through a fog of dread.
But they get along. They cope.
Every once in a while, one of them has a good dream. Dean gets to play baseball with Jess and Sam’s bundle of kids, or Cas sits on top of the Universe again and listens to the galaxies clang together like marbles in a glass jar.
Those are the hardest dreams to wake up from, though, because those are the lost ones. Cas will never see the stars from an angle different than this Earthly one. Jess is dead, and Sam will never have a huge gaggle of children following him around like ducklings. “Things just don’t shake out with a happy ending like that,” Dean says, in one of his worse moments, “no matter how hard you fight.”
But then the both of them cuddle up under a big soft blanket, and their breaths sync, and they’re in love, and that’s enough. That’s always been enough.
Because that’s the way it is for heroes in the aftermath. There’s no idyllic bliss or fairytale ending - not even the ironic bloodletting of a Grimm piece. There’s just the daily grind, made that much harder by nightmares and daydreams and the fact that a lifelong fight is over. That’s how endings are.
So they cry, and kiss, and fall asleep wrapped in each other’s arms. They are both here, and they are in love.
That’s enough.