Chapter Text
“You need to calm down, Dean.”
“Don’t fucking start with me right now,” Dean mutters flatly, pacing crop circles into the floor; he’d usually muster more vitriol, but he’s exhausted and still half-terrified.
Jack insisted on everyone staying out of the dungeon as he rescued and healed Cas, and so, of course, Dean is directly outside the dungeon door, anxiously waiting to be let in.
For a long time there was just stressful silence, but then, after roughly three hours, he, Sam, and Eileen had heard the bizarre, pulsating sound inter-dimensional rifts make when they materialize, they’d felt the barometric pressure throughout the bunker shift, and Dean very nearly barged in, breaking his contract with Jack.
Sam’s hand on his shoulder was the only thing that reminded him of the terms of this agreement.
A peculiar torture, knowing Cas is right behind that door, and Dean still doesn’t understand why he’s not allowed in yet.
He wanted to be there to receive Cas from the Empty, he wanted to be the first to touch Cas, to speak to him, but beggars can’t be choosers, and he can’t question Jack — not with the stakes so high, and not after it took so long to get Jack to bend.
Dean paces in angry circles for another hour, and then Jack summons Eileen — and only Eileen.
Sam and Dean are flummoxed, but can do nothing about it; the door opens a sliver, Dean sees absolutely nothing, Eileen slips through, the door is shut again and Dean goes back to pacing.
When Eileen reemerges, she looks nervously between Sam and Dean, and tells them, while half-signing, “you need to be prepared. This… isn’t going to be easy.”
“What does that mean?” Dean asks.
“The Empty took from him,” Eileen replies, face regretful, “it’s… hard to explain.”
“Am I allowed in there?”
“… be careful, Dean,” she says — and Dean wants to tell her that he’s insulted she thinks he’d be anything other than that with Cas, but it quickly occurs to him that she means with himself.
Knowing he’s allowed in now, he doesn’t bother hemming and hawing in the hall any longer — he lets himself in, Sam right on his heels, and they both stop before they’ve made it ten feet inside.
Cas’ body — vessel — is young again.
He looks malnourished, windswept, weak, but not grotesquely harmed, as Eileen’s ‘prepare yourself,’ tone in the hall might have implied.
Swallowing the guilt that comes with seeing the evidence of Cas’ long imprisonment and torture, Dean ventures forward again, opening his mouth to greet him, but Jack intercepts him, looking at Cas and saying, “Castiel, do you know who that is?”
“This is the Righteous Man and Michael Sword,” Cas answers in monotone, “I recognize him as all Angels can. The color and sound frequencies of his soul indicate that he has divine purpose, and the engravings on the spires of his soul specify what purpose that is.”
Dean’s brought up short again.
No one says anything; Jack looks at Dean, repentant, and trying to communicate nonverbally that this is not a joke.
Dean’s not sure he believes that yet; it’s an awful joke, a bleak, horrendously un-funny joke, but no alternatives are coming to mind.
“Do you understand where I’ve brought you from?”
“You’ve told me I’ve come from the Empty, but I have no memory of this.”
“Oh… oh, no,” Sam utters just audibly.
Dean’s stomach churns, sharp and hard.
“Regret is a corrosive,” Jack explains to Cas, but also to the room at large, “the Empty uses regret, shame, and guilt, and sort of… injects all of one’s memories with it, amplifies it in the ones that already contain it, which reduces the memories to only regrets. Regret strips the memories of all other qualities, until all that’s left is the interject; the regret. Memory becomes feeling only, a reductive feeling, which makes everything smaller and smaller until…”
Jack glances up at Dean and finishes, “… well, until there is nothing left.”
There’s loud static in Dean’s head.
Jack adds, “this is how the Empty feeds. This is what it takes. It is the full power of regret.”
“I’m missing memories?” Cas asks Jack.
“Many years of them, yes,” Jack replies.
“Heal him,” Dean rasps, barely a whisper, white hot terror sparking at the soles of his feet, flickering up into all of his body as it tenses from the hairs on the back of his neck to the nerve endings under his nails.
“I cannot heal what isn’t there,” Jack responds sorrowfully, “there is nothing broken. There is — there’s nothing.”
“Why does he — look like that?” Sam asks, throat sounding thick.
“Castiel used to age his vessel’s appearance purposefully, to feel closer to the two of you,” Jack tells them, “I think, at first, it was so that an unchanging human person who does not visibly age wouldn’t alarm the two of you by how unnatural it seems — the same reason he gave his vessel vital signs and engaged in sensory processing in the third dimension. He didn’t want to upset either of you by being too… alien. Then he came to appreciate looking as though he belonged among you.”
Cas raises his hand to his jugular, and must be setting a pulse into motion, then he studies Sam and Dean for a few moments and his vessel ages rapidly before their eyes, until he looks about their age, until he’s just as he looked nearly a year ago — the way he looked in this very dungeon when the culmination of he and Dean’s shared memories were so fortified with happiness, fealty, and unwavering, unconditional love that it was enough to save the world.
He glances between Sam and Dean blankly, and asks, “is this more acceptable?”
“He —” said he loved me - but he said he loved me. He loved me. It was the most important thing he ever said, the way he said it, what he told me… he said he loved me, he can’t have lost that, I can’t have lost that — Dean can’t say it.
No one else knows.
He and Cas were the keepers of that beautiful, terrible moment in time, but Dean’s just flashing morse code into emptiness now.
Emptiness.
“… Dean?” Sam starts worriedly from somewhere over Dean’s shoulder.
Emptiness in his eyes, empty hands, an empty mouth with no words left for Dean; an umbra.
Shaky legs move backward, Dean’s unsteady where he stands, and while it’s hard to look away from Cas, it’s also too painful to keep staring. All he can do is retreat.
“Dean?” Sam asks again.
Dean can’t get out of the dungeon fast enough; he shoves past Eileen and Sam, even as they shout after him; he can hear Jack’s voice in his head, apologizing so gently, full of a child’s fear that they’ve done wrong by their parent.
He can’t breathe in the bunker, he thinks he might vomit, so he rushes outside for air, and the summer storm raging there mutes his voice as he pants, out of breath from running, and then roars into the night; no particular words, just grief made audible, just another monster languishing, just the sound of suffering.
He’s bombarded — what if I’d convinced Jack sooner? What if I’d been able to figure it out myself? What if I’d grabbed Cas when the Empty first came for him and just gone with him? What if I had gotten to him sooner? Would he have any memories left? Would he have lost even more of himself had he stayed any longer? Is this why he’s so skinny? Did the Empty run out of incorporeal food and so cannibalize him? What more could I have done? I should have gotten to him sooner, I should have saved him faster, then there’d be something left, there’d be anything left —
How many times? Dean wonders as his voice crackles like dying embers, splintering and winding down in a clap of thunder, tears bubbling to his eyes, and in how many ways can he be taken from me? How many more times will I have him ripped from me? How many more times can I survive it?
When Dean lands in a sprawl in the mud, head in his hands, fingers clawing at his scalp, he feels Sam approach, he lets Sam wrap him in a hug, and he thinks to himself — I can’t. I can’t survive it. Not even once more. Not even now, I think.