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“Hey, kiddo.” Dean shuffles his feet through the rock along the highway, little clouds of dust billowing up to settle across his boots, turning the hard worn creases a pale rusty brown. It’s nearly twilight, but the stars aren’t quite out yet, so he stares into the expanse of blue that fades into purples and pinks, hoping that Jack can hear him. “I know you’re, you know, busy being God and all that, but, uh…”
An over-pimped pickup truck flies by, going at least ten over the speed limit and hardly even crossing the centerline to avoid Baby. A year ago he might’ve had a fit over it, but the metal feels cold and empty against his back. It’s just a car.
“I miss you,” he whispers into the silence, a confession he doesn’t feel he deserves, not after everything he’s done. “I know I wasn’t the best dad—hell, I wasn’t even a good dad. But you were ours. And I know you got bits and pieces of our story, you know, between all the world-ending catastrophes we could never quite save you from, but now that he’s…”
It doesn’t get any easier to say the words, no matter how many times it’s happened. It’s never been this final, never been this devastating a goodbye. What he’d never let himself believe could be his happy ending turned out the same as the rest of his life: a fucking tragedy.
Dean slowly sinks to the ground, his knees protesting the entire way down, and he can’t even bring himself to care about the particularly sharp rock jutting into his thigh. He can see the stars now as less and less blue spans the sky. Even though he knows the reality of what happened, where he went, Dean imagines he’s up in Heaven or flying through the stars, his wings fully restored. Anything is better than an endless eternity of nothing, too far outside Dean’s reach.
“I suppose I have to go back, start at the beginning. March 23rd, 1972, Mary Campbell walked out of a movie theater and directly into one John Winchester, just back from the war. Years down the line we’d find out it was Heaven’s doing, but…” He clears his throat, trying and failing to dispel the roughness in his voice brought on by the flood of memories surrounding that discovery. God, Sammy was a mess, and Dean was… Famine had described him as dead inside. If it weren’t so horrifically sad, it’d be almost funny that what he felt back then was nothing compared to now. “Anyway, as you know, she was a hunter. And, uh, she loved you, by the way. I know I couldn’t—it was too much, at the time, but I know you didn’t mean it. And she’s… she’s at peace. Wasn’t too happy being dropped into the pain and misery of the twenty first century anyhow.”
There was supposed to be a point to this aside, but all Dean can see is that goddamn gun in hands that should’ve been shaking, hands that were far too steady for the sin he was about to commit. The quiet resignation of his child, ready to die again at the ripe old age of two.
He’d been able to take a step back from his grief and anger, sparing them both, but then Jack died anyway.
“Mom didn’t really want to hunt,” he steamrolls on past that particular weight of guilt before it can drag him down to the point where he can no longer function, “but she was made for it, and she had a hard time quitting cold turkey. There’s this… sense of responsibility. Like we know we could do something, but we choose to sit it out; let someone else handle it, even if they’re not as qualified. Can’t stand it, letting anyone else put their life at risk when it could be me instead. And I—I get that from her. My dad, too, but… mostly her.”
Signing away her future for the sake of his father, the start of a seemingly endless cycle of shitty deals made by the Winchesters.
Still, Dean would give anything for just a little more time.
“You know, when she died the first time, my whole world fell apart. Four years old, no mom, no home, and I pretty much lost my dad that day, too. We were broken. Irreparably. And I guess I never got past that, so when she was just gone, everything crumbled. I lashed out, ‘cause it was easier to push everyone away than let them leave me.”
His classic MO, a skill he’d all but perfected over the last forty years. He’d used it on every single member of his family at least once, but no one more than the one chosen family member he could never bear to lose. Even when they were on opposite sides of an issue, even when Dean was trying to kill him, he couldn’t entertain the thought that they were saying goodbye.
And now it was forever.
“Mom and Dad were happy, for a while, living their apple pie life. Mom got away from the family business, Dad was blissfully unaware that monster stories were real. But they were far from perfect. I don’t know if it’s a family curse that somehow skipped Sammy, but none of us are any good at talkin’ about shit. Emotions exist to be kept inside until we explode, and that’s it. It’s no wonder they fought so much.”
It'd taken approximately six months for him to cave and contact Mia Vallens, another three and a half weeks of aborted phone calls and ignored messages before he even said a word to her. Over the last several months, she’d helped him work out why he can’t just say how he feels, but undoing that much damage is a grueling process he’s not sure he’ll ever finish.
Especially with all his regret for not saying anything when he had the chance. While they still had time, a possibility of some kind of future, rather than all this emptiness.
“Well, I’ve probably talked your ear off enough for tonight. Got another seventy miles or so before my next pit stop, I should keep movin’. Anyway. Um… we’ll pick this up another time.”
There’s more he wants to say, but that phrase has never solidly been part of his vocabulary. Not like he deserves to say it anyway. But Jack knows, in a way, and if he didn’t before, that omniscience sure is coming in handy.
Dean should get up, stretch his legs, work the kinks out of his back, but he sits and stares at the sky a while longer. Somewhere out there his kid is doing extraordinary things. He knows he’s not the parent who inspired that.
Eventually he clambers back into his car. He watches his knuckles turn white around the steering wheel. Deep breath in, slow breath out. Alive. Still alive. Despite everything telling him he shouldn’t be, he doesn’t want to be, he has to stay alive. A little longer, and maybe he can find a miracle.
Sam calls to check in every three days like clockwork, walking the line between making his concern evident and being overbearing. Most of the time Dean answers, just to let his brother know he’s still alive, update him on his current city, but sometimes he lets it ring to voicemail and follows it up with a text of his coordinates.
Between the shitty motel beds and Baby’s backseat, Dean’s sorely missing his memory foam mattress, but he can’t be there right now; he can’t be around Sam and Eileen, the ringing phones of other hunters calling for advice, too close to where he lost everything. He took a burner no one but Sammy has the number for to avoid all that noise. He’ll head back eventually.
Dean’s just outside Rexford, Idaho today, watching the needle on his gas gauge tick ever closer to E, waiting for the right Gas-n-Sip. Seven years down the line, none of the faces look familiar, and that particular ember of hope fizzles out.
“We probably never told you why she died, did we?” He leans against the trunk as he fills the tank. It’s too early in the morning for the station to be busy, so he feels okay talking just above a whisper, no one there to look at him like he’s insane. “Azazel killed her parents and my dad, she just wanted them back. Didn’t even know what she was agreeing to, and all she got was my dad, but she thought it was going to be worth it. I went back once, saw it happen, tried and failed to stop it. There are just some things we can’t change, no matter how badly we want to.”
The nozzle shuts off with a clunk and Dean replaces the gas cap before sliding back into his car and parking across the lot to look out over the road. A thought occurs to him, setting off a now unfamiliar fluttering in his chest that stokes what little remains of his hope.
“Or do you control that now?” It’s entirely possible he’s just talking to himself, but on the off chance his son’s actually listening, he has to ask, desperation coloring his voice. Amara had brought Mom back after 33 years like it was nothing, and if Jack has that kind of power… “Jack, could you—can you fix it?”
But there’s no answer, just the silence of his empty car that hasn’t seen another passenger in nearly a year.
“Right. ‘Course.” He sighs and taps his fingers on the bottom of the steering wheel to a partial melody running through his head. So take a look at me now, well there’s just an empty space. And there’s nothing left here to remind me, just the memory of your face. “Dad changed when she died. I never… I never thought I’d understand that, how he could end up so angry and volatile in his devastation. Then when Sammy lost Jess—who we’ve probably never mentioned, but they dated through college, he was going to propose, and then Azazel killed her, too. Sam wasn’t dumb enough to make a deal to save her, although with how self-destructive he was for a while, he might’ve if given the chance. Anyway I didn’t get it yet, how losing one person could change you so drastically.”
He liked to think he stayed mostly the same the first four or five times, but deep down he knows it’s a boldfaced lie. No, even the first atomization at the hands of Raphael had done quite a number on him. Dean’s just progressively died more and more inside with each subsequent loss.
At least until this last one, he’d had hope of getting him back.
“A while after that, Dad made a deal with Azazel to save me, and he was the fifth and final family member we’d lose to that yellow-eyed son of a bitch. You met his dick of a brother, Asmodeus.” The Princes of Hell are a particular sore spot Dean can’t quite explain why he keeps picking at, but he suspects it has something to do with the night they found out Mary was working with the British Men of Letters. When they almost…
He should’ve known, should’ve understood back then. They could’ve had three whole years.
“Anyway, a year after that, Sam died in my arms. My whole life, it was always ‘take care of Sammy.’ That was my one job, and I’d failed. What did Dad give up his life for if I was just going to fail? So I made a deal, and the cycle continued. Got less time than Mom, but a whole year more than Dad, so. Not the worst deal in our family history.”
Hell was this terrifying unknown, the worst place imaginable. Thirty years of endless torture and misery before he broke and became the monster he’d always worried he was, the torturer who found pleasure in causing others pain. They’d told him his soul was twisted and corrupted, halfway to becoming a demon, and after he’d been put back together, torturing Alastair wasn’t actually as bad as he thought it’d be. Then again, he hadn’t been alone.
His phone buzzes on the seat next to him, his regular reminder of the passage of time. “Heya, Sammy.”
“Hey. Where are you today?” The poor kid’s trying to sound casual, but Dean had declined his last few calls, so there’s that familiar strain of anxiety, evident even over the staticky connection.
“Just outside Rexford.”
“Rexford… Huh. That sounds familiar, did we work a case there?”
Dean swallows thickly and glances at the Gas-n-Sip storefront in his review mirror. “You sat that one out. It was, uh, while you were healing from the trials.”
“Dean.” And there goes Sam’s voice getting all soft and concerned. Dean never should’ve told him about that case, but he’d felt guilty about the whole Gadreel thing, and in the time between being possessed and feeling well enough to hunt again, Sam had gotten super into chronicling their hunts to keep in their new library. “Is the road trip helping at all? I mean, going to all these places—”
“I gotta do something,” Dean snaps more brusquely than he means to, not that there’s much strength behind his voice these days.
“Listen, Eileen’s heading out for a week or so, did you want to come home for a bit? I mean, at least sleep in your own bed for a night, I can’t imagine the motel mattresses can compare to your memory foam.”
God, he misses his room. But the bunker isn’t his home anymore. The once comforting security of the thick walls, heavy doors, nearly impenetrable warding—it’d all made him feel claustrophobic since the day Ketch tried to turn it into his tomb. He’d pushed through that for another three years, settled in with his little family he had to fight so hard to keep, but then Billie came for his heart. There was no air for Dean to be able to breathe there, not anymore.
“Thanks, but no. You can, uh, clear my stuff out if someone needs the room.”
“Dean—”
“Gotta go, Sammy.”
He’ll pay for that later. Probably not in three days during their next call, but maybe six. Nine, if he’s lucky.
Next stop is along the coast, nearly nine hundred miles away with all the goddamn national forests he has to drive around. The road swings low around the Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve, which Dean resolutely ignores. Not that he has anything against the moon, he just… It makes him feel small. Lost. The world is so much bigger than he’d believed, and that’s before he even considers how many other worlds Chuck created, rough drafts and failed experiments that slowly but surely were destroyed when He was done with them.
Did it ever work out for them in any other timeline?
Were they ever allowed to be happy?
“It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t all bad growing up with just our dad.” He’s lost the thread of his story, several hours and hundreds of miles later, but no matter how convoluted, Jack had always listened attentively. Just like his dad, the kid had always acted like what Dean said mattered. “There was this one time, when I was six or seven, and uh, he took me shooting for the first time. You know, bottles on a fence, that kind of thing. I bulls-eyed every one of ‘em. He gave me this smile, like… I don’t know.”
The last time he’d talked about it he was 27, hunting down the ghost of H.H. Holmes, and just barely able to protect Jo. She’d told him John must have been proud; clearly she hadn’t known his father well.
And in the end, she was just another kid he couldn’t save.
“I tried not to be him, you know. Wasn’t too successful, but I tried.” He thinks back to how easy it was with Ben in the beginning, when he did his best to fulfill Sammy’s dying wish. Without hunting, with the stability of a home and people who cared about him, it was simple. Losing Sam could’ve been his big loss that wrecked him forever, kinda like losing Mom was for their dad, but he’d had warning, time to prepare. And Sammy died saving the world.
Round two of surrogate parenting started far less dramatically, yet went worse, for a time. The damn Mark of Cain fucked up his dynamic with Claire early, not that it’d been all that great given she couldn’t forgive them yet for taking her dad, destroying her family.
He should call Jody to check in, make sure the girls are coping alright after the last nearly world-ending disaster. See if Claire and Kaia are okay, after everything. They more than deserved their happy reunion.
“You gotta know, when you were born, we didn’t—I didn’t know you’d be on our side. Not only were we preparing for a type of evil we’d never seen before, but we’d, uh—Lucifer had just…”
And there it was, the loss that broke Dean. Like his father before him, he’d watched the love of his life die suddenly, horrifically, leaving him with nothing but a potentially dangerous child he’d never asked for.
Dean exits 84 into Baker City, Oregon. There’s a Super 8 just off the highway on the far side of town—as well as a Motel 6 that feels just a little too rundown for the moment—and he checks in for the night despite having several hours of daylight left. He could make it further through Oregon, maybe even hit the Washington border before he gets too tired to keep going, but the wind’s been taken out of his sails. He forces himself to buy some actual food from the grocery store instead of hitting up the gas station, although he caves and grabs a six pack along with it, his first in about a month.
“You know, I never dreamed of running away. Not even when things got bad, not even when Sammy left.” He pops the cap off his beer and takes a few tentative sips. “Family was all I had. We moved every few months, packing up and vacating dirty motel rooms where Dad’s checks were gonna bounce anyway, following whatever new lead he’d discovered. One of the only friends I ever had was Lee Webb. We hunted together when we were younger, screwed around enough that Dad didn’t like it, but I finally had someone I could talk to about all my shit.”
The beer goes down quicker now that he’s started, and soon enough he finds himself reaching for another.
“Saw him again while you were, uh, in the Empty, I guess. Turns out we’d gone down two different paths, and Lee was out there feeding people to his pet monster. I had to kill him. The first friend I’d ever had, and I had to kill him. Figures, though. Ash, Jo, Benny, Kevin, Charlie… their blood is on my hands, too.”
He lapses into silence and polishes off his second beer. After a month of sobriety to appease Mia, the faint buzz is creeping in already, but it’s not enough to drown out the pain, so he opens a third.
“Anyway, I died for the first time when I was 29. Well, fully died for the first time. I was kinda dead at 27 until Dad made his deal, but. Went to hell at 29, and that’s where the story really begins.”
It’s too much. He’s pretty sure Jack knows how they met, had heard the gripped you tight and raised you from perdition line during one of the various times Dean made fun of his angel for it—because seriously, that’s an insane first sentence to say to someone in any situation. The whole point of this rambling, disjointed monologue was to tell their story, but now that he’s jumped to the beginning of it, he’s not sure he can get the words out. So he backtracks again.
“I never believed in much. Not God, not angels. Hell, I don’t think I even believed in Heaven, as much as I wanted Mom to be there. My dad, Sammy, Bobby, and the things I could see—that was it. Sammy always had faith in a way I couldn’t, and I don’t know if that’s because the only book we had in those shitty motels was the Bible, or maybe it’s just ‘cause he’s more open to all that, but he’s always wanted something bigger to believe in. We worked a case in, uh, Providence, Rhode Island, way back when, and Sam was convinced it was an angel. Turned out to just be the ghost of some priest who was getting parishioners to kill for him, even tried to get Sammy in on it.”
The third bottle ends up on the floor, glass clinking against empty glass. This used to be nothing for him, not even close to impairing him past the point of driving, but his head is feeling fuzzier than it has in a while. Guilt gnaws at him, a nagging he’s only been able to temporarily alleviate with copious amounts of hard liquor, but then he goes and does something stupid like pick a fight with anyone who looks like they could land a hit.
“No, I know why.” Dean shoves the remainder of the six pack away from him with the toe of his boot he hasn’t bothered to take off and flops back against the hideous stained blanket that itches almost as much as his conscience. “Sammy was hoping he could be saved. And that was—that was before we knew all the shit we’d learn, about Azazel’s deal with Mom, about Sammy being Lucifer’s perfect fucking vessel because we were chosen—because Chuck decided we were His favorite little action heroes and our lives, all the pain and fucking misery we experienced, it didn’t fucking matter. As long as He got to tell the story He wanted to tell. Ca—” The beer threatens a reappearance as his mostly empty stomach flips. He still can’t say his name, not without completely fucking losing it, and he’s really not in the mood to cry in this dingy motel room. Besides, it’s outside of Mia’s office hours, so he’s on his own. “—your dad changed all that, I think. I mean, he was never supposed to stick around, but Chuck couldn’t control him, not even with repeated brainwashing. Not for long, anyway. And that stupid idiot chose me—”
He cries anyway, making an awful choking sound he’s glad no one else is around to hear.
Jack had filled him in on one of their last cases they worked before the end of everything. Dean had been off trying to convince Amara she could trust him while Jack insisted on going to Missouri to follow up on the death of a teenager. Father-son bonding case and all that. Jack said the pastor looked an awful lot like Dr. Sexy—minus the white coat and cowboy boots, of course—and had been very kind. Accepting. He’s not quite sure what the pastor said, but it seemed to strike a chord with the angel, who gave a heartfelt speech about finding a family, becoming a father. The one consolation Dean has is he knew he was happy.
Dean could’ve made him a whole lot happier, though, if he’d just been given time to process and respond.
He doesn’t sleep well despite the exhaustion he can feel in his bones. Most of his life has been a practice in accumulating a sleep deficit, but he’d gotten better in the bunker, actually got more than four hours a night. The past year, he’s been lucky to get three unless he’s completely smashed, but that results in far from quality rest.
It takes him longer than it should to hit Washington, and then even longer still to reach his destination. He makes a pitstop in Castle Rock for lunch and catches wind of a possible case, dispatches a trio of vampires that had been terrorizing the area for months. After hastily cleaning up in a truck stop bathroom, the grime on the sink and mirror a less than promising indication of his own cleanliness, he decides to crash in a motel for the night so he can take an actual shower. The muck and blood don’t bother him as much as they once did, but it’s something to do, a delay in his trip, and he knows he should be taking better care of himself. The water feels nice against his sore muscles until it suddenly runs cold, ushering him out of the slippery tub faster than he’d like. He sleeps a little better knowing he’d done at least one good thing on this trip down depressing memory lane.
The closer he gets to the coast, the more agitated he feels, the significance of this next stop hitting him harder. It’s not like most of the others, the more transient places he only saw once or twice. North Cove had both a reunion and his second hardest goodbye, a moment where all he could yell was no.
According to the internet, it’s currently for rent. He considers setting up a tour, but he’s not sure he could walk into that house, see that dining room table where he’d painstakingly prepared the body for the funeral pyre, and act like nothing’s wrong.
He sits along the little rocky embankment, back turned to the place where the shadows of broken wings once decorated the ground.
“I think Chuck had envisioned your aunt Anna as our angelic sidekick. Not that—uh, not that your dad is…” Dean swallows around the lump in his throat. The water ripples below him, distorting his reflection. Something about it looks thin. “Was our sidekick. Bona fide part of the team, crucial to each and every one of our successes. But I don’t think Chuck wanted that. It didn’t fit with His vision, the parallels of Sam and Ruby, me and Anna. Little did He know…”
The rocks along the edge of the embankment are small, more pebbles than anything, too round for skipping. He takes a handful and tosses them out, watches them plunk down into the water in an uneven arc.
“He was my best friend.” The past tense feels wrong, even all this time later, so he tacks on, “Still is.” It’s the truth, has always been the truth, even while one of them is dead. After decades of only being able to rely on Sam—and even that was tenuous at times—his angel was the first person he connected with who could fill that role, not out of obligation, but because he wanted to. So few people ever stuck around, and then there was a millennia-old being, defying Heaven’s orders, choosing to stay by his side.
“You know, Sammy did most of the hard work for stopping the apocalypse, but we wouldn’t have been able to do it without your dad. He wasn’t nearly so human back then. He called Michael—the Michael from our world—an assbutt, if you can believe that. He threw a fucking Molotov cocktail of holy oil at him, too.”
A flock of birds swoop overhead, circling above the water, relishing the breeze. One lands in the tree above him with a soft fluttering of wings.
“The two of us had this crazy plan to trap Raphael, way back when. Your dad was convinced he’d die in the process, but he wanted to do it anyway. He knew I’d be fine ‘cause I was Michael’s perfect vessel, Heaven wasn’t allowed to kill me. I took him—” he laughs at the memory, completely absurd in retrospect, but at the time, it’s what Dean thought the angel would want, “—I took him to a brothel. You should’ve seen the panic on his face, he called the place a ‘den of iniquity’ and looked like he was gonna pass out when some girl led him to the back. Fucked the whole thing up and got kicked out. Not the funniest guy I’ve ever met, but no one could make me laugh like him.”
Dean’s had a lot of friends over the years—lost most of them at least once—but none were quite like his best friend. His angel, who willingly died for him four separate times.
“I wish you could’ve seen how far he came, but I’m glad you weren’t around until he’d softened into who he was meant to be. Don’t get me wrong, the righteous fury of heaven was fun, but he… It wasn’t who he was. Not really. People like us, we’re forced to be weapons, to be tough and violent and mean when all we want is to care about others. I’m sorry if I ever made you think that’s how you needed to be, too. My dad wasn’t exactly a good role model, but he was all I had before Bobby, who also had a shit father. None of us actually knew what we were doing.”
He lays back and takes a deep breath of the coastal air. It’s not hard to see why Kelly had liked this house, why they’d run off here to bring Jack into the world. He wonders how long it took the owners to paint over the mural in the nursery.
Sam calls. Eileen must be gone by now, and all Dean’s done the past three days is drive further away from the bunker. Not quite ready to talk about it, he sends the call to voicemail. If you have this number, you know who this is. Sammy, Cas, Jack, Mom—I’m off kicking ass, I’ll get back to you soon. Two dead, one off-world, but he can’t quite bring himself to change the message.
“Hello, Dean.” He’d know that voice anywhere, the soothing, deep rumble that permeates his best dreams and worst nightmares. Two words that are packed full of meaning he’d never understood until it was too late. It’s a cruel twist of fate that he’s hearing them still, wide awake. “Dean?”
Dean takes a deep breath and opens his eyes to find nothing but the tree beside him. Another wave of grief washes over him. He wants to call out, hope without concrete proof that it was real, but he doesn’t dare open himself up to that kind of heartbreak. Not again. Instead, he ignores it and continues rambling to his son. “I miss him. I wish… I wish you had power there, kid. At the very least he deserves a proper heaven, don’t you think? Somewhere I could visit eventually. Maybe.”
“I’m sorry, Dean.” There’s that voice again, but that phrase never came often, and never with such a sad, resigned tone. A crocotta, maybe, or a shifter, the sound stolen from those scant voicemails he plays on repeat, even the bitchy one that’s predominantly just ‘where are you?!’ from when they’d been fighting. God, they’d wasted so much time.
“You left me,” he responds against his better judgment. But he’s fairly certain he’s alone, no one but Jack to hear him talking to himself.
“I know, and I’m so sorry, Dean.”
He whips around and just about slips off the embankment, because standing halfway between him and the house—not far from where he died the sixth or so time—is the one person he was looking for, the one he thought he’d never see again.
He’s imagined this moment countless times, but everything he’d dreamt he’d say withers on his tongue.
“I didn’t mean to—” the creature wearing his best friend’s face shifts his weight from one foot to the other, avoiding looking directly at Dean. “I can go again, if that’s what—”
“No,” Dean interrupts hastily. Even if it is just a cruel joke, maybe it’ll give him a little closure. Something within him crumbles, and for the first time, he allows himself to ask for something he’s always wanted. “Stay.”
The creature smiles, soft and sad, and calmly replies, “Of course, Dean.”
He knows that look, has seen it countless times over the years. His heart aches, yearning to reach out and hold onto the man in front of him, but it can’t be his angel, not with the deal he’d made. He has to admit the imitation is good, although the trench coat is different—less bulky, lighter, closer to the one he’d been wearing when they met. Nevertheless, Dean staggers to his feet and stumbles forward, helplessly drawn into the creature’s orbit.
“You left me,” he repeats, a little angrier. If he can’t berate the real angel for the grief he’s caused, maybe he can alleviate some of that pain by directing it at whatever this is.
“Believe me, I never wanted to,” comes the quiet reply, those too-blue eyes resigned to accept Dean’s ire. “It was the only way to save you.”
“No.” Dean shakes his head and takes another unsteady step forward, the anger gaining strength as it courses through him. “You took everything from me in one fell swoop. I may be alive, but I haven’t been living. Do you have any idea how close I’ve come to just fucking ending it once and for all? To letting some monster shove me around until I can’t get back up? Because not a fucking day has gone by where I haven’t replayed that moment in the dungeon, searching for some way I could’ve prevented it, could’ve stopped you from—from—”
“I’m sorry if my truth offended you,” the creature frowns, a familiar bitchiness that lessens some of the acidity eating away at Dean’s chest where his heart used to reside, “but I never needed your acceptance or response. Jack was wrong, coming here has been a mistake.”
“Wait, no, that’s not—” Dean closes the last few feet between them to grip the trench coat lapels with both hands. He’s close enough to breathe in the distinct scent of his best friend, all clean and warm, with the faint odor of ozone that hasn’t been present since his wings were damaged in the fall. It’s 2012 all over again, fresh out of Purgatory and pissed as hell. Hopelessly, stupidly in love. “I’m not offended, Cas—”
Hot, bitter tears burn at the back of his eyes. He forcefully blinks them away, afraid if he lets go to wipe at them, the creature will disappear.
“Oh, Dean…” The creature places a gentle hand on his cheek, his thumb brushing over the damp skin beneath his eye. “I’m so sorry, I thought you’d be okay without me.”
“Never, Cas. Never.” Dean leans into the touch, everything so overwhelmingly Cas that he can’t help himself. It’s not real, it can’t be real, but he whispers, “How are you even here?”
“We were lied to. God controls everything, even the Shadow. When Jack absorbed Chuck’s power, he gained the ability to do almost anything. He,” the creature laughs softly, the smile growing fonder, less sad, “he found me, broke my deal, gave me my wings back. We’ve been fixing Heaven together, making new angels—properly, this time. And I’ve been keeping an eye on Sam and Eileen, Jody and the girls, but mostly… Mostly I’ve been quietly checking in on you.”
“You…” Dean can’t believe what he’s hearing. It all sounds fucking plausible, which means either this thing has carefully considered its lies, or it’s all true and Cas has really let him spend the last year alone. Miserable. “You’ve been watching me crisscross the country, drinking myself into a stupor, and just, what? Decided I was fine and didn’t need you anymore?”
“Dean, you have to understand, none of this is out of the ordinary for you. And why would you need me after everything I—”
“Don’t. Don’t you dare,” Dean interrupts, torn between wanting to punch or kiss him. Even if it’s not his Cas, part of him wants to know the feeling. The rest is afraid knowing will only make it worse. “You absolute fucking moron, of course I need you. I’ve always needed you. Haven’t you been listening to me ramble to our kid during all this? Trying and failing to tell our story?”
“You’ve told him about John and Mary, Sam and Jess, mentioned the Princes of Hell and the archangels, but…” The creature frowns slightly and tilts his head in confusion, the birdlike movement so achingly familiar.
“Hey, Jack?” Dean raises his voice slightly despite knowing he doesn’t even have to say it aloud. “Can you come down here real quick? It’s important.”
“Hello!” And there’s the kid, still dressed the way he was when he left them to become God, hand raised in an awkward wave.
“Hey, kiddo, is—is this…?” The lump in his throat gets impossibly larger.
“I missed him,” Jack shrugs, the gap-toothed smile never faltering, “and you asked for him back. The Shadow didn’t like it, but they’re not allowed to leave the Empty anymore, so.”
Cas—actual Cas, not a crocotta or a shapeshifter or Lucifer, but his Cas—is right there in front of him, safe and sound against all odds. Dean’s knees buckle slightly as he embraces the angel, nestling his face in the crook of his neck, breathing in the smell of home. It takes a moment, but Cas hugs him back and rubs soothing circles between his shoulder blades.
“You never let me answer,” Dean sniffles into the trench coat. “I was gonna—in Purgatory, I tried to tell you, but you…” Realization dawns on him; Cas may not have known exactly what he was going to say, but he would’ve lost him then and there if he’d gotten the words out. “Fuck, Cas, of course I…”
He’s tried and failed to say those three words so many times over the years. Cas has always loved so openly and freely, he more than deserves to hear them back.
“Thank you for the stories, Dean.” Jack says carefully, clearly uncomfortable witnessing this emotional breakdown. “I’ll let you two talk. Love you!”
With a faint flutter of wings, their son disappears again, and although Dean already misses him, he’s grateful for the privacy to choke out what he needs to say.
“Me too, Cas,” he mumbles into the angel’s neck. It’s too much, not enough. He’s spent far too long piggybacking off other’s sentiments, he’s gotta man the fuck up and just say it. No more wasting whatever time he has left. “I… I love you, too.”
There’s no apocalypse looming over them, no vengeful god or petty archangel threatening to destroy their world. It’s not even an earth-shattering moment, Dean’s quiet confession, meant just for the two of them. Cas holds onto him tighter, his skin flushed warm to the touch, and waits for the tears to gradually subside.
Dean kisses him, soft and full of promise, of all the things he’s been unable to tell his angel until now.
“You can’t leave me again,” Dean says solemnly. He’s never been good at wanting things or expressing his needs, but this has to be said—he won’t survive losing Cas again. “’Til death do us part and all that, but my death, okay?”
Cas hums, halfway to a laugh. “That sounds an awful lot like marriage, Dean Winchester.”
“Okay,” he answers like it’s the simplest thing in the world. Not a legal marriage—the government would never recognize the union of a body-snatching angel who doesn’t technically exist and a wanted serial killer who’s legally dead at least twice over—but if Cas wants a ring and a party, Dean’s happy to do it. “Anything you want, just promise you won’t leave.”
They decide to stretch the drive back out to nearly a week, stopping in all the parks and preserves so Cas can wander through and explain the history of the area, the names of the native plants. Sam calls while they’re strolling through the Boise National Forest, his voice more panicked than usual, but Dean lets Cas answer and everything’s okay again. Through obvious tears of relief, his brother tells them to take their time, he’ll be waiting for them at home.