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Dean downed half his beer in one go, and slammed the bottle back down on the sticky bartop with a satisfied sigh. “Damn, that’s good. For British beer.” He turned the bottle in his hand and peered at the stylish but unreadable label. “No clue what this is, but it’s good.” He brought the bottle to his lips again and half the remainder disappeared too. “The beer in Heaven sucked. Why does the beer in Heaven suck, Cas? It’s freakin’ Heaven.”
“I don’t think Heaven understands beer. Despite all the monks.” Cas watched as Dean made the expression he used when he knew Cas was trying to make a joke, but he either didn’t get it or didn’t think it was funny. He thought he’d never get to see it again. “The beer should taste the way you remember it. It’s how Heaven works.”
Dean shook his head. “Not any more, not since we beat Chuck. It’s not all greatest hits any more. It’s like being alive, but only the good stuff.” Dean shrugged. “I was sharing a beer with Bobby – the real Bobby, not a memory. I thought Bobby had better taste in beer.”
Cas nodded, taking that in. So Chuck had been beaten, and Heaven was different now – very different, by the sound of things. Dean looked happy to have been reunited with Bobby. Cas wondered how Bobby felt about seeing Dean so soon. “How is Bobby?”
“He’s good,” Dean replied, flashing a smile. “Bored, I think. You know Bobby, if nothing’s on fire he doesn't know what to do with himself.” He lifted the bottle and drank again.
“And how is Sam?”
The bottle froze in mid-air for a moment on its way back down to the bartop, while Dean’s face arranged itself into carefully composed neutrality. It was a mask Cas had seen many times. Dean finished lowering the bottle, very carefully. “He’s fine,” he stated, as if saying it confidently enough would make it true. “Having a nice life.”
“That’s good to hear,” Cas said, pretending to be convinced. Sam had lost his brother. He was very unlikely to be fine. Dean needed to believe it though, being stuck here in this other world, so Cas wasn’t about to suggest otherwise. He watched Dean study the bottle again, as though it were a fascinating artefact and not merely a glass vessel with a paper label he’d already read several times.
The bar was quite busy, but the other patrons were avoiding the space around them, as if something was subliminally warning them to keep their distance. Cas wasn’t doing it. At least, he didn’t think he was doing it. The effect was pleasant though, a bubble of calmness in a sea of boisterous human contentment. He kept watching Dean, who was nursing his bottle and his thoughts, alone in a crowded room as he so often was.
“So what’s this world like?” Dean said at last, looking up from the bottle with his mask firmly in place and an obvious desire to change the subject. “Is there really nothing to hunt?”
“Nothing I’m aware of,” Cas replied. “Crowley and Aziraphale insist that there isn’t anything to find.”
“You’ve been looking anyway though?”
“Of course.”
Dean nodded and swigged the beer again, finishing it. “Good, I don’t trust those guys.” He tried to catch the bartender’s attention. “What about the angels and demons? Are they a threat?”
“That's complicated.”
Dean shrugged. “We got time.”
As the bartender came over to swap Dean’s empty bottle for a full one, Cas thought about where to start – the differences between this world and their own were extensive. One thing did stand out. It was something that he still found troubling, months after he'd learned it. “The demons here were never human,” he said. “They are the angels who were cast out of Heaven with Lucifer.”
Dean paused with his new beer halfway to his mouth. “The demons here are angels? When angels Fall they become demons?”
“Yes.” Cas wondered what it would be like to be a demon. The idea wasn’t appealing. That said, he hadn’t sided with Lucifer, and perhaps only Lucifer’s followers Fell here. Aziraphale hadn’t, so far, after all, and he was just as disobedient as Castiel.
Dean held his beer in mid-air, swaying it from side to side slightly, while considering the information. “So Crowley’s a fallen angel?”
“Yes. It’s a sensitive subject.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” Dean’s slight smile suggested he intended to poke Crowley in that sensitive subject at the earliest opportunity. “What did he do, to piss off both sides?”
“He sided with Lucifer against Heaven, and then with humanity against Lucifer.”
“Guy likes trouble,” Dean said, not a little admiringly. He seemed to have taken to the demon, even if he didn’t trust him. Cas wondered what they had talked about on their drive around London. “So the whole angel-demon cold war Smiley was talking about, it’s really angel-on-angel action?”
“Effectively, yes, although the demons have infernal power instead of Grace. The two sides have a great deal in common.” Cas looked down at his barely-touched beer. He angled the bottle, watched the bubbles as they gathered in the neck, pushing each other aside, merging and vanishing. “They have been working towards the Apocalypse since Earth was created. Now it has been averted, neither side knows what to do.” Cas jostled the bottle slightly, watched the resulting surge of bubbles collect on the surface of the liquid – a burst of activity that was soon over, leaving the beer looking the same as it had before. It wasn’t, not quite. Nothing ever is. “So far all they’ve done is exile Crowley and Aziraphale for treason.”
“They’re clearly devastated,” Dean deadpanned. Uninterested in the bubbles, he downed half his second beer. “So is either side a threat? Do we need to do anything about it?”
Cas gripped his beer bottle almost hard enough to shatter it; he caught himself just in time. He turned to look at Dean, making eye contact and hoping he was adequately conveying the fear Dean had just put into him. “Dean, you can’t fight the angels or demons here. You would die. And you would not come back. No-one who dies here comes back.” He turned away again, closing off.
Dean let out the breath he’d been holding and gripped his own beer bottle like an anchor. “Right,” he said. “No do-overs with Death here. Got it.”
Cas drank from his beer, deeply but with rather less enthusiasm than Dean. He put the bottle back down and, very deliberately, let go of it. It stayed in one piece, which was a relief. He could fix it if necessary – returning small inanimate objects to a recent previous state had turned out to be relatively simple, once he got the hang of it – but doing obvious miracles in a crowded bar was probably a bad idea. “The sides are interested in each other, not in humanity,” he continued. “We can and should stay away from them.”
“All right. If you insist.”
“I do insist.”
“Okay.”
They lapsed into silence. Dean swigged his beer again and watched the bartender serve other customers, showing no interest in their conversation whatsoever1.
The subject of Dean’s untimely end was still playing on Cas’s mind, not helped by the man’s ongoing attempts to throw himself at the biggest available threat. That tendency had been bearable in their own world, where for themselves at least death had been verging on mere inconvenience, but this newer happier world was not nearly so forgiving when it came to the great leveller. “So you did defeat Chuck?” he asked.
“We did,” Dean said with a grim but satisfied smile. He took a swig from his beer. “It was touch and go for a while, but in the end… we got that sonofabitch.”
Cas nodded. Good news, at least. “And it wasn’t Chuck who…” he trailed off and looked down at his hands.
“Killed me?” Dean finished for him. “No.” Cas looked up in time to see Dean look away. He seemed a little embarrassed.
“So what was it?”
Dean sighed. “You’re really bringing the mood down here, Cas.”
Cas narrowed his eyes and glared.
“It was a hunt, okay?” Dean threw his hands up defensively. “Just an everyday, milk run hunt. It happens. Every hunter strikes out eventually.”
“Not you.”
“I didn’t have an asshole deity keeping me in the game any more,” Dean said irritably, grabbing his beer again. “Or a cranky angel patching me up.”
“Were you relying on me to do that, Dean?”
Dean paused with his bottle halfway to his lips, and studied Cas for a second. “You know how many times you saved my ass?”
So that was a yes. Cas should have anticipated this problem. His own death had saved Dean’s life, but Dean had made a habit of mortal peril, and was never likely to give it up lightly. Few hunters did, especially not Winchesters. “I was dead.” He watched Dean flinch at the words. “You should have been more careful.”
Dean gulped the last of his beer and slammed the bottle back down on the bartop with unexpected force. A customer standing at the bar behind him jumped and edged a little further away. “You were dead,” Dean echoed bitterly. “You didn’t get a vote.” He turned away and gestured to the bartender for another drink.
Slightly bewildered, Cas stared at his back. He hadn't expected his loss to make Dean so angry. Dean reserved that rage for family, and Cas had never been sure he counted. “Defeating Chuck was supposed to free you,” he said quietly. “Why were you even still hunting?”
Dean spun back round to face him again. “Because someone has to! The monsters didn’t just go away when the show ended, Cas. People still need help.”
“There are other hunters, Dean. Haven’t you done enough?”
“No. I’ve never done enough. That’s not how it works.”
They fell silent again. Dean stared down at his empty beer bottle as if he would find more beer in it if he looked hard enough. The customer behind him collected his drinks and went back to his table, glancing back at Dean curiously.
Cas took a swig from his own beer, mostly for something to do with his hands – despite Aziraphale’s best efforts at instruction, taste still left a lot to be desired. He took a deep, unnecessary breath, more of a punctuation mark than anything else. They needed to continue this conversation, but not now. “So, what did I miss?”
Dean gripped his beer bottle, keeping his voice casual. “Okay, so, I don’t know if you actually know, what with, uh, everything, but your plan worked. Took Billie off the table. I got out of there fine.”
“That’s good.” Cas smiled, saw Dean's expression, and let the smile fade. “What happened with Chuck?”
“We took his power away. Left him human.” Dean rolled the base of the empty bottle against the bartop. It was a casual enough action, to anyone who didn't notice that the bottle was being pressed hard enough to leave a mark on the wood. “He wanted us – wanted me – to kill him, but no. He can live out a normal, boring, nobody human life and be forgotten like he deserves.”
Cas nodded, satisfied. That seemed like a fitting end for a god who treated people like playthings. He paused for a moment, then asked the other question he’d been afraid to ask. “How is Jack?”
Dean toyed with the beer bottle some more. “He got the power. Jack’s God now.”
There was a pause. Cas went very still. The buzz of the bar’s clientele seemed to sharpen in contrast to the silence in their bubble, making it feel smaller and more fragile. Jack? God?
“He’s good, Cas,” Dean said hesitantly. Cas glanced up and realised Dean was looking at him again. “He’s real good. Kid’s good at being God.” Dean waved at the bartender, looking away only as long as it took to be acknowledged, before turning back to Cas. “He brought everyone back, all the people that Chuck dusted. He’s the reason Heaven’s not the Hallmark Matrix any more. Shame about the beer though. I shoulda taught the kid about good beer.”
The crack broke the tension; Cas took a breath, then glared at Dean with mildly accusatory fondness. “He’s three years old.”
“I think God’s allowed a beer.”
Cas rolled his eyes. He swigged his drink and tried to settle his nerves. Jack wasn’t Cas, there was no reason to believe he couldn't handle such power. He shouldn’t have to, though – he deserved his own life. What would the weight of that responsibility do to him? Who was guiding him, in Cas’s absence? Was anyone helping him stay grounded? Cas had to get back. They both did.
Cas thought about how sure Crowley and Aziraphale were that only the God of this world could send them home, and the fact that She had been out of contact for some time, much as Heaven liked to imply otherwise. His brief but colourful conversation with this world’s Gabriel had adequately confirmed that. He wondered how to go about finding Her. Finding a God who didn’t want to be found had been hard enough in his own world.
“Is there really no way for us to get back?” Dean asked, as if he could tell what Cas was thinking.
Cas snapped back out of his thoughts. A bottle of bourbon and two glasses had appeared on the bartop in front of them – apparently Dean had decided to switch to something stronger.
“Crowley and Aziraphale are sure of it,” Cas reiterated. “They are still looking, though. As am I.”
“There’s gotta be a way.” Dean said firmly. “We got here, we’ll get back. We always get back.” He poured a generous measure into each glass and slid one over to Cas with a hint of a soft smile. Cas smiled back and the tension that had crept between them eased a little more. Then they both drank deeply.
“What happened next?” Cas asked.
Dean shrugged, evasive. “Jack went off to do God stuff. Sam and Eileen had a chick flick reunion. We got pizza. We got back to the family business.”
Cas nodded, then waited patiently for Dean to continue. Dean drank from his bourbon again and stared at it in silence.
“We tried to get you back, you know,” he said quietly. “We didn’t just leave you there.”
“You didn’t need to do that,” Cas said earnestly, even while Dean’s words lit up his heart. He really had been wanted. It often hadn’t felt that way. “I made a deal, Jack’s life for mine. I was content with my fate.”
“Well we weren’t,” Dean shot back at him. He emptied his glass and reached for the bourbon again. “We asked Jack, but he didn’t answer. Busy rebuilding Heaven or whatever. We tried that spell Nick used to get Lucifer back. We asked Rowena. We tried asking the Reapers, but they won’t talk to us any more.” Dean made a face. “Apparently there was a memo.” He half-emptied his glass again and put it back down heavily. “Sam went through a whole bunch of obscure lore and got bupkis. We only stopped when Jack finally called in and said he couldn’t get you back. Figured if God couldn’t do it, there wasn’t a way.” Dean finished the glass again, staring into the distance. “He was real cut up about it, Cas. Felt he'd failed you.”
Cas absorbed the information, while tracking Dean's progress through the liquor bottle with some concern. He had never really considered the effect his death would have on Jack. Not that it would have changed anything, even if he had – his deal had been necessary and his death inevitable, and both had been fair prices for what he’d got in return. It was his revival in this other world that made no sense. “He couldn’t have done anything, none of you could. I wasn’t there.”
“Well yeah, I know that now.” Dean filled the glass again, but sipped it this time. He turned to face Cas. “Why weren’t you there, anyway? How’d you end up here?”
“I don’t know. The Empty took me, and then I woke up here. I have no memory of anything in between. It was very confusing.” Cas reached for the bottle of bourbon and topped up his own glass. Bourbon tasted better than beer. He’d never understood why. “How did you get here?”
Dean shrugged. “I don’t know either. One minute I’m in Heaven, demanding to see Jack because there’s freakin’ angels walking around that I know for a fact were iced, and you’re not one of ‘em, next minute I’m lying on a couch in a room I’ve never seen before, being stared at by Sonny and Cher. Not my weirdest wake-up call, but up there.” Dean sipped the bourbon again. “It doesn’t make any sense. Chuck junked all the other worlds. Even if Jack brought them all back, this place doesn’t seem like Chuck’s style.”
“This isn’t one of Chuck’s worlds. It’s somewhere else entirely.”
Dean put the glass back down gently and stared at Cas. “There are worlds that aren’t Chuck’s?”
“It was a surprise to me too.”
Dean’s shoulders slumped. “Goddammit.” Cas looked at him curiously. “We just beat God and now there’s another one? What is this, freakin’ Whac-A-Mole?”
“Dean…”
“What? You want me to believe that this one is nice? They’re never nice, Cas.”
“I’ve just told you the angels and demons here are best left alone, and you want to go after God?” Cas said sharply. “Who has yet to threaten us in any way, and who might be the only entity here with the power to send us home?”
“Fine, fine,” Dean sulked. “But if this God becomes a threat, we are dealing with it.”
“Of course we are,” Cas deadpanned.
Dean glared up at the ceiling and waved a slightly shaky finger at it. “Got that, pal? You’re on notice. Do not be a dick. We will come for you.”
Cas nearly choked on his bourbon. He put the glass down, blinked, felt a moment of terror, followed by protectiveness, then affection, then terror again, then a growing sense of absurdity. Dean Winchester, whom he loved, for whom he had happily died and would happily do so again, was here. They were both stuck in the wrong world. They knew almost nothing about it. They might never see their friends or family again. They had no idea what to do with themselves. And Dean was already threatening God. It was no use. He threw back his head and laughed.
By closing time the bourbon was long gone and they were loudly reminiscing about Winchester greatest hits, to the delight of the small gaggle of eavesdropping patrons they had accumulated over the course of the evening, and the complete disinterest of the bartender. Cas was slightly light-headed and grateful for his angelic constitution; Dean was thoroughly drunk.
They left the pub together and watched the last of their audience stagger off towards Old Compton Street to continue their evening, babbling enthusiastically about ghosts. Cas guided Dean’s meandering steps along the street in the opposite direction, towards a bed and breakfast which would turn out, miraculously, to have a room free.
One smooth check-in later, Cas half-carried Dean up the stairs and into the room, and dropped him bonelessly onto the room’s double bed. He could have it to himself: Cas would not be sleeping. Despite Crowley’s best efforts at instruction, sleep still left a lot to be desired. And Cas did not have good dreams.
Ignoring his feeble protests, Cas pulled off Dean’s shoes and jacket and tucked him in beneath the cheap hotel bedding. He went to the bathroom and retrieved a glass of water, which he managed to get down Dean’s throat; he refilled the glass and left it on the bedside table. Then he reviewed the rest of the contents of the room. They were on the first floor, facing the street, and the sounds of London nightlife were making their way into the room, but they seemed unlikely to disturb Dean’s slumber. Cas was about to head for the threadbare chair sitting by the tiny desk under the window, when Dean’s hand shot out and grabbed his wrist.
“No more dumb shit, Cas,” Dean slurred. “Don’t leave again.”
Cas put a hand to Dean’s shoulder, a gesture that should be reassuring while not excessively intimate. Suitably ambiguous for whatever their current status was, and for Dean’s current state of inebriation.
“Never, if I can help it.”
Dean nodded sleepily and loosened his grip. He was asleep immediately, and would likely remember none of this in the morning, which was probably for the best, in Cas’s opinion.
Finally, Cas sat down in the chair, still in his coat, listening to Dean’s gentle snores and the sounds of alcohol-enhanced joy from outside. The yellow glow from the streetlights passed through the thin curtains with little resistance, painting itself across the walls. The shadows it cast moved and shifted as the night breeze from the draughty window caught the fabric. Cas watched the subtle patterns form and fade, expecting at any moment to see them pushed aside by inky malevolent blackness.
He was in no doubt that his life was still forfeit and it was only a matter of time before the Empty worked out how to collect. Especially now that he had Dean back. He didn’t know whether it could come here, but it would certainly try. Perhaps Jack could prevent it, should they make it home. But perhaps he could not, and then Jack would be alone again.
That was a risk he’d have to take. Jack was alone now.
Cas took a deep breath.
“I don’t know if you're listening,” he said to nowhere in particular. Dean kept snoring and showed no sign he’d heard anything. “I don’t know if you listen to any of us at all. I don’t expect a reply.”
He sat quietly in the yellow-tinted darkness. Somewhere outside, a car horn sounded. Someone shouted something incomprehensible, and someone else shouted back.
“You must know I’m here, though. My Grace is yours now.” Cas looked down at his hands. “I don’t imagine you acquire new angels often.”
The voices outside got louder and more urgent, as the participants in the disagreement dug out their best expletives. The topic of discussion was still unclear.
“I need to get back. We both do. Any help you could offer would be appreciated.”
The voices outside faded, the dispute seemingly abandoned. A car drove off. The room fell silent again.
Cas watched the walls until dawn. Nothing came.
1. It takes a lot to faze a good bartender. Especially one who can count Anthony J. Crowley as one of their regulars.[back]