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Dean woke up covered in sweat and with the sound of his own heartbeat pounding in his ears. If he closed his eyes he could still see the angel's blue eyes wide open in fear as he was left alone and unprotected in dimension it wasn’t his. Guilt came as waves flooding his senses and closing up his throat, threatening to make him cry.
Dean sat up in bed, looking around to find he was alone in the motel room. He could let himself feel the loss, but he didn’t dare – Dean knew that opening that door would be dangerous. Instead, he grabbed the first pair of clean clothes he saw in his duffel and headed straight for the shower. Nothing like the cold and unpressurized shower of a cheap motel to wash away his trauma and restaur his sense of self.
It didn’t take long for Dean to hear his brother back in the room, shouting he’d brought coffee and donuts. He turned off the shower and took a deep breath, hiding behind the mask of the righteous guy who didn’t have nightmares about his best friend locked away in frigging purgatory and got dressed to face the day he’d had ahead.
“Morning,” Sam greeted, taking a sip out of his cup and grimacing. “It tastes more like water than coffee.”
“Well, that’s the price to pay for cheap coffee shops,” Dean said, sitting next to his brother and drinking his own coffee. He grabbed a donut and, not caring to talk with his mouth full, asked: “So, what's the word, anyway? What even is the case?”
They were in a small town in the north of Kansas investigating a case Sam had found on the internet, but if Dean were to be honest, he didn’t pay much attention as his brother explained the series of events that let him into thinking it could be supernatural. Dean stopped listening in the “So, get this-” part of Sam’s classical ways of telling he found a case; he just wanted something – anything – to get his mind out of purgatory.
Sam frowned at his brother, but didn’t say anything. At this point, they hadn’t quite made peace yet, and Sam knew Dean well enough to know how his brother’s coping mechanisms worked.
Sam cleared his throat, “Apparently, people around here have been dying of broken hearts.” Dean raised an eyebrow.
“Say what, now?”
Sam finished his coffee and grabbed his notebook on the nearest nightstand, turning it on to search for the data he’d saved from the news, and then turned it’s screed for Dean to see it.
“Peter Johnson and Annabelle, the first victims.” Sam said, pointing to the picture of the two teenagers on the online newsletter. “their parents didn’t approve of their relationship, so they both decided death was better than to live apart.”
“Huh,” Dean nodded, “Romeo and Juliet of the new generation.”
Sam turned the screen to himself and, after some more time typing, turned it back to his brother.
“Anna Kristoff,” Sam pointed to the young ginger girl in the picture. “She was married, but after her husband found out she was cheating on him with his neighbor, she jumped off the bridge.”
Dean finished his breakfast and cleaned his hands clapping in one another.
“I dunno, Sam. She could just be cuckoo bananas.”
“I’d think that too, but there’s another one,” Sam searched for another report. “Katherine Edwards. She lived alone, but her next door neighbor said to the police she’d been seeing a guy for weeks and he vanished without explanation and left the woman in tears. Last time she was seen alive, her neighbor said she looked like a ghost.”
Dean looked through the window of the motel room, to the street. People came and went and, as a bus crossed the street, Dean saw him: dark hair, beige trenchcoat. Walking just across the street. The image made his head spin and his heartbeat increase, but then Dean blinked and realized it wasn’t the angel, just a normal guy checking his watch, probably late for work.
“Well,” he said, diverting his eyes from the street, “it’s worth a look. We’ve investigated for less.”
Ten minutes later, they were ready to go. Sam decided to talk to the victims relatives while Dean investigated in the morgue, which the older brother didn’t mind, especially because he was starting to feel Sam’s presence a little suffocating. Sam could not know him completely, but he knew enough to be able to read between the lines of Dean’s attitude and that felt almost as bad as talking.
“I don’t understand how this could be in the interest of the federals,” the coroner said, leading Dean to examine the latest victim’s body.
“Just following orders,” Dean simply said. He was in no mood to come up with better excuses.
The doctor led him to the chamber where they kept the corpses and opened the drawer closest to the door, revealing a frozen body covered in white sheets.
“There’s not much to tell,” he said, uncovering the body. The woman seemed about twenty-five, twenty-six years old, and Dean thought she would’ve been really pretty before the dehydration and malnutrition. “I couldn’t find a specific cause for her death besides the malfunction of her organs without water or food. Which is weird, ‘cause she had eaten at least four hours before her death. It’s almost as if her body has given up living.”
“Huh,” Dean looked for signs of monster feeding or that could indicate witchcraft, but if there was, it wasn’t visible for him. “No signs of violence?” The coroner shaked his head. “And did you find anything weird? Any unnatural thing next to the body?”
The man frowned, the way most people react to those questions, but then his expression changed. “Well…” He walked towards a drawer in the opposite wall and came back holding a plastic bag. Inside of it, there was a white feather. “I did find this inside her stomach, if that’s what you mean. But I doubt it could cause her death.”
“A bird feather,” Dean half asked, half stated, raising an eyebrow.
“Yes, a white dove’s feather, to be more precise.”
Dean took the plastic bag to examine it closely. He didn't ask how the man knew how it was from a dove and not literally any other white bird, but he has his doubts. Dean returned the bag and thanked the doctor for his services before leaving the morgue.
On his way back to the motel, he stopped in a fast food restaurant to get lunch and called Sam to tell his findings and to hear about his brother's. It looked like they had got to the same conclusion of the whole crazy being the works of a pagan God.
"Did you find any connections between the victims?" Dean asked some time later, when both brothers were eating their hamburgers on the motel room's small table.
"Not yet," Sam replied, cleaning his mess with a napkin. "I still have Katherine's neighbor to interview, but we'll have to keep looking."
"Figured."
The neighbor ended up being a dead end, but she got Sam thinking. He remembered his college times, when he was living with Jess and she had that enormous collection of books. She once told him about her favorites, the big romantic ones: the classics.
The neighbor had said that Katherine was always reading before the mysterious man showed up, and he saw the full shelves on both Annabelle's and Anna's houses. Besides, there was indeed something familiar about their deaths.
It took the younger Winchester an entire day of digging and researching, but he eventually found what linked all the victims.
"A book club? Really?" Dean asked in disbelief as Sam broke into the apartment upstairs the bookstore. He held his gun tight and kept looking around the dark streets looking for possible troubles. "So what? They read some Emily Brontë and decided to live it?"
Sam raised an eyebrow. Dean ignored.
They walked into the empty apartment with his guns ready to fight, but there was no sign of anything or anyone there. They split up and Sam headed to the kitchen while Dean got the bedrooms.
He looked under furniture, inside drawers, hidden cabinets, but couldn't find anything. It looked just like any common suburban apartment, until he got into the master bedroom. It wasn't that the room was full of weird stuff or anything, but there was a painting right above the headboard of the bed that sent a shiver down Dean's spine.
He had seen the Birth of Venus before on the internet and fake replicas around the country, but this one was nothing like it. The water seemed so realistic, like it was moving, like it was not a painting but a video of the ocean. He could almost feel the shell's texture in the painting.
But the bizarre parte was in the face of the naked lady. The more attention Dean paid to her face, the weirder it got: he was certain her hair was blond, but then it turned into a brunette. He didn't see the exact color of her eyes, but suddenly it was the clearest blue. And then. Then Dean felt his stomach drop and the room temperature drop a thousand degrees. Because he knew that face. Hell, that was the face he saw every time he closed his eyes. He froze where he was.
A noise nearby told him Sam had found the room, but the noise of his own heartbeat on his ears was too loud. What was Cas doing there, how was that possible? And, more importantly, he was sure the painting portrayed a woman, so how could he be seeing the body of Jimmy Novak with the eyes only Castil had?
“Oh, dear, those are great questions,” a voice said behind them. Dean turned to see Sam right beside him as a figure walked into the room. When it walked towards the lighter spot, he saw it clear as day: the trench coat, the dark messy hair, the stoning blue eyes. It became hard to breathe.
“Do I know you?” Sam asked, and Dean turned to him with a raised eyebrow. But then the figure who looked like the angel spoke again, and Dean realized that even though the appearances could fool, everything about this creature’s behavior was different from Cas’s.
“Samuel Winchester, a legend in the supernatural world,” the creature said, not showing any fear even though it knew the brother’s could kill it. The figure walked towards the windows and opened the curtains, letting the street lamp light up the room. “You see me as a familiar face, not a stranger. That is rare. A glance of true love is more than what most people get in a lifetime.”
Sam frowned at that, not getting where the creature was going with that.
“All right, enough chit chat,” Dean said, coming to his senses and pointing his gun at fake-Cas. “Why don’t you tell me what you are so I can kill yah, huh?”
The creature completely ignored him.
“You, on the other hand,” Fake-Cas fixed his eyes at Dean, with sudden intense interest. “You can see it clear as day, can’t you? Who I am supposed to be. I know my face.”
“Ok, that’s enough.”
The creature simply dismissed him with a hand gesture, like he was no threat at all.
“Lower your weapons,” it said, in a tone that had nothing to do with Castiel, but somehow got into Dean's mind and made the idea of hurting the creature very wrong. “Your brother only sees me as some random girl that resembles someone, perhaps his dead girlfriend or the one he stopped hunting for, but you see the one you’ve been in love with for the last four years. You see your true love.”
“Stop,” Dean mumbled, feeling weak already.
The creature gave a condescending smile.
“I can’t do that. You came after me, and now you must hear. Because you, Dean Winchester, gave me a love story I haven’t seen since Paris and Helen of Troy, and I can’t just let it go, can I? Not when you’re finally realizing what’s happening.”
Sam was under the creature’s – which he now suspected who was – spell and couldn’t bring his body into attack mode, but he was also curious. He tried not to invade too much of his brother’s privacy because Dean was so secretive about it, but you just couldn’t live with somebody for so long and not notice some things. A small part of him thought it wasn’t all bad that those things were being thrown in Dean's face.
Dean, on the other hand, felt weak and defenseless, a sensation that after a year in the friggin purgatory did not look good to him.
“Why are you even doing this? He's gone.”
“Is he? You see, at this point you must have realized I’m the ancient goddess of love, one of the few to remain powerful these days, powerful enough to know when big things are about to happen, especially when there’s a love story involved.”
“Stop saying that.” Dean chose to ignore what the goddess had said about Cas being alive, he’d rather not have hope.
The goddess stared at him for what seemed like long exhausting minutes, analyzing him in a way that reminded Castiel when they first met.
“Love is the gas in which the flames of the world burn, Dean. It can kill you as well as it is what gives your life meaning, be it of any kind: paternal, fraternal, friendship or romantic. You must not fear it just as you don't fear death or the next apocalypse.”
“I can’t,” he whispered so low he thought no one else heard.
“I’ll learn to,” the goddess replied, and then turned to look at the sun rising in the horizon. “I must go, but know that I’ll be watching you closely, Dean Winchester. I like you, and I plan to help your life get more interesting.”
The smile the goddess gave made it clear she didn’t mean any good, but Dean’s mind was starting to feel too much like a whirlwind for him to care. Sam, on the other hand, seemed to have come to his senses as the goddess started to fade away.
“Hold up, what about the deaths of those people?”
“It is not my concern how the weak minded will react to the presence of my power,” she said, before disappearing completely.
Sam tried to look around to find and kill her, but Dean was no use. He felt like an empty shell, unable to work or speak for hours after the goddess left. He felt like a guy who had his brain surgically opened to reveal all his darkest secrets, leaving only shame left to see it all exposed to his brother.
But Sam gave him space. They went back to the motel without a single word, had their snacks before going to bed still in silence and didn't talk until the other day arrived.
When he fell asleep, Dean dreamt about the angel and his time at purgatory again. This time, however, he couldn’t fool himself about what he was feeling.