Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The whole drive up to the cabin, Dean thought of every possible horrible thing that could happen. He prided himself on being able to catastrophize more thoroughly than most folks, considering he was privy to more types of threats than even other hunters were aware of. He thought about what might happen if Lucifer beat them there, or the other angels. He thought about what might happen if the baby had already been born, had already begun its reign of terror. He thought about Cas brainwashed and rabid like a dog, he thought about Cas fighting them off to protect this monster, he thought of Cas allowing himself to be possessed by it.

Only now, kneeling beside Castiel’s lifeless body, does he understand that even his most pessimistic projections come with a built-in blind spot. He doesn’t allow his obsessive preparation to touch the possibility that Castiel could die. Sure, he’s considered it, but only the way he has in the past. It’s always been an unpleasant bump in the road, something to break the suspension, something to make your stomach flip as you catch a little too much air. But in the past, there’s always been that moment where the wheels come back down to meet the road, maybe skidding, maybe bending the axle a bit, but the car keeps rolling. Cas has died, more than once, and it has always been a temporary condition, a dramatic inconvenience, a sabbatical, a lonely interlude.

This feels like forever. Maybe it’s just the cold wet earth pressing against his shins through his jeans, maybe it’s the charred mangled impression of Castiel’s wings splayed out beside him, maybe it’s the hollow ache behind Dean’s ribs that cannot reconcile the visual input of Castiel’s vessel with the visceral certainty that his self, his spirit, is gone. He can’t feel the hum of potential energy in the air around them, the thrumming tension of his consciousness lingering under the surface of his skin.

It is this realization, more than anything else, that spurs him into movement, because he cannot spend another second living in the reality of Castiel’s death. If he turns away, if he deals with the problem he came here to solve, then he won’t have to deal with this one. For awhile, anyway. So he gets to his feet, knees trembling and jerking underneath him with every step. He follows the muffled sound of Sam’s footsteps up to the second floor of the cabin, which he hadn’t even seen yet, in all the commotion that brought him careening to this moment.

He finds Sam in a room with dingy old wallpaper, hunched over a big bed. He’s performing CPR on Kelly, and Dean knows it isn’t going to do jack shit for her, but he also knows that Sam needs to do it, to soothe some core piece of him, the bit that can’t let people die on his watch. All Dean can think about, with sudden and unexpected intensity, is the baby. The baby is the root of all of this bloodshed. The baby is the reason that Cas is –

The baby needs to be dealt with, before anyone else gets hurt.

It doesn’t take long to find him. He’s still tangled in the afterbirth, quiet and cold and covered in a host of fluids, between Kelly’s motionless knees. Dean scoops him up, like he might pick up a normal baby, because old habits die hard – for Dean, they never really die at all. And he’s so small, in Dean’s arms. He held Sam every day for years, but when Sam was a newborn, Mom was still alive, Dad was still a father.

The day they brought Sam home from the hospital, he held him for the very first time, and all he could think about then was how it seemed impossible that something so tiny and pink and strange could be the same kind of animal as him. Dean had become Sam’s mother and father, when their mom died. But when he held Sam for the first time, that had been the real moment that he became Sam’s protector, because for the first time in his life he was aware of something precious, something new to the world. He wanted to show Sam all the things that made the world wonderful, like matchbox cars and sandwiches with the crusts cut off, like afternoon sunlight coming through the kitchen windows and dandelions in the grass on their lawn. He wanted to keep Sam from knowing about the things that made the world a difficult place to live, like nightmares and parents shouting and doors slamming.

Holding this baby, getting placenta and blood and amniotic fluid all over his chest and arms, feels a lot like that. What had he been thinking, exactly, while he burned up the highway getting here? He knew he’d come up with plenty of plans, but all of them seemed to end with this creature dead or metaphysically cauterized, cut off from his power in some way. Had he thought he’d just ram an angel blade through the damn thing? Shoot it? Every possible method of execution seemed beyond monstrous, and that was probably because there wasn’t really a non-monstrous way to murder an infant.

His feet seem to move of their own volition. He is dimly aware that Sam is still performing CPR on Kelly, nearly oblivious to Dean’s entry, fully oblivious to his exit. Dean finds himself in the bathroom, running the water in the sink until it’s warm. A washcloth reveals itself to him – he wasn’t looking for it, but when his eyes fall on it, he picks it up without a second thought. He starts cupping water in his hand and drizzling it over the baby’s skin, using the cloth to wipe off the more stubborn bits of goo.

The baby is more or less clean, after a few minutes of this, and Dean realizes that the umbilical cord is still in place, mostly tucked beneath him in the sink, tethered to a fragment of the placenta. Swallowing down a feeling he cannot identify in words, but which feels a lot like being unworthy of something, he draws his pocketknife out of his jacket and flicks it open. He keeps it sharp, and he’s glad he does. He slices the cord about two inches from the base, leaving a bit of excess so that it will heal properly, remembering vaguely when Sam was a tiny baby, how gross he thought the stump was, especially after it fell off, even though his mom assured him it was normal, that he’d had one too, when he was a baby like Sam. It hadn’t made it any less gross.

Drying the baby with a towel he doesn’t remember picking up, he shucks his own soiled shirts, finds himself standing in front of a mirror, cradling a baby to his naked chest, and when he looks at his reflection, he cannot recognize himself. Not the normal way that he can’t recognize himself in the mirror, because he always looks too normal, too human, to be the person Dean understands himself to be inside. This time, he doesn’t recognize himself because he’s pretty sure he’s still outside, beside Cas’s corpse, pretty sure he’s dead on the ground next to him, pretty sure whoever he’s looking at is some kind of ghost.

The baby, who’s been silent and pliable so far, stirs against him, seeking his warmth, curled fists pressing against him in search of his first meal. He needs to find a first aid kit, to seal his stump with some gauze. He needs to find some formula, to feed him. He needs to find a blanket or something to wrap him in – maybe one of his old shirts will work? The list of tasks that need doing is comforting, because it distracts him from Castiel’s dead body, and all of the things it means.

He wanders into the other room upstairs, looking for formula, and he stops in the threshold like an invisible barrier is keeping him out. The wall is painted with a mural, a rainbow that proudly professes the alphabet, arcing over an apple tree whose fruit spells ‘Jack’ in big white letters. There’s a crib. There’s other nursery furniture, waiting to be assembled. There’s a few cases of diapers stacked in one corner. There’s a chair, a laptop. A half-unpacked box of baby clothes.

Dean’s throat catches when his eyes slide back over to the crib. For weeks, the only people in this house were Castiel and Kelly. A heavily pregnant woman cannot build a crib. His face is wet, and for a second, the sound he hears makes him think the baby in his arms is crying, so he rocks back and forth to soothe him, but it isn’t working, and he realizes that he’s the one making that high-pitched little moan, not the baby.

He doesn’t go in the room, not yet. Tells himself it’s because he needs to find the first aid stuff before he can dress the baby anyway, so grabbing clothes at this juncture doesn't make sense. Descending the stairs, he holds the baby with one arm, tiny head tucked under his chin, holding the railing with one hand, like Dean’s ever been the kind of guy to hold onto a railing on the damn stairs. The baby is still asleep when he makes it out to the car, and he’s irrationally glad that he parked on this side of the house, because it means he doesn’t have to look at Castiel’s body yet.

The first aid kit is right where it always is, in the top layer of the trunk, tucked behind the wheel well. He pulls it out and lays out a shirt from his duffle, places the baby down gently on top of it. He dresses the umbilical wound without fanfare, secures the gauze. Thinks about just lifting the baby back into his arms as he is, decides instead to loosely wrap him in the shirt he’s laying on. Once he’s holding him again, the baby snuffles against his neck, breath hot and feeble against his skin, which is still cool from the night air.

Dean finds himself back in the house, in the kitchen, opening every cabinet in search of formula, and some frantic desperate part of him keeps thinking ‘If he bought diapers, then he bought formula’, over and over and over again. He finally finds it in the cabinets to the left of the stove, three big flats of cannisters. It’s the powder kind, the same type they used for Sam after Mom was gone. He tears the place apart looking for a bottle, and finds some in a skinny cabinet by the fridge. He set about preparing a bottle, like this was just another day in his normal life, like he mixed formula every single day for the last thirty years.

When the bottle is ready, he isn’t sure how to offer it to the baby, because despite everything, he’s still sound asleep. He rubs his sternum with his index finger, and the baby curls his limbs more tightly to his torso, but he doesn’t rouse. He runs his thumb over the baby’s puckered lips a few times, and that seems to do the trick, that suction instinct taking over, so he replaces his thumb with the bottle nipple and tilts the baby slightly so his head is resting in the crook of Dean’s arm, elevated enough that he won’t choke. It’s been years, lifetimes, since he did this for Sam, but something about seeing baby Sam in that weird dreamscape with his mom, not even forty eight hours ago, makes it all feel so fresh.

Dean hears himself murmuring things to the baby as he eats, mindless comforts, perhaps as much to calm and reassure himself as they are to soothe the infant. When the bottle is empty, he switches easily to a one-armed carry, resting the baby’s head over his shoulder, rubbing his back to encourage him to burp.

What the fuck am I doing? Dean’s brain seems to finally catch up to the present moment, to fully process that he just bathed and swaddled and fed the fucking anti-Christ, that he’s bouncing him and burping him and thinking about what kind of baby clothes would be best suited to the temperature in here. Just as the thought stops him cold, one shoe on the bottom stair as his feet are about to carry him up to the nursery, the baby wakes up. Their cheeks are pressed together, the baby facing over his shoulder, but he feels that restless aimless waking shudder roll through him, hears the puffing crowing test cry come crackling through the child’s vocal chords.

A thought, which is not Dean’s thought, comes sliding into his mind, like a note passed beneath a desk in grade school. Are you Castiel?

“No,” Dean sputters, voice feeling too loud for the hush of the cabin, which has become a sort of crypt in his own mind.

Another thought, unfurling in his mind, a letter drawn from a crinkled up envelope. I need to find Castiel. Dean swallows, leans against the wall at the base of the stairs with his free arm.

“Why?” He whispers, his mouth almost too dry to speak.

The delay is longer this time, and the baby is more still against him, and he wonders if he fell back asleep before he could muster an answer. After a moment, it comes to him, bolder and warmer than the last two messages, and it’s like stumbling across an old engraving in the bark of a tree, initials carved inside a heart, worn smooth by time. Castiel is my father, he’s going to protect me.

There isn’t a single thing that Dean can think to say in response to that, because it feels like someone has sliced him in half at the hips, like he doesn’t have legs anymore. He finds himself sitting on the bottom stair, baby still tucked safely against his chest. It might be seconds later, it might be hours. Dean eventually returns to himself, because there isn’t another option.

“Castiel is your father?” His words feel like rough hunks of sandstone, heavy in his belly, and each one hurts on its way out, scraping him raw.

No message, no foreign words, pop into his mind. His thoughts are his own, cold and sharp. He goes back to cradling the child, holding him with both arms, so he can look down at him, really look at him. He looks like every single newborn baby, membranous and pink like a hatchling bird.

The baby’s eyes drift open, and they are not like the eyes of any other baby he’s ever seen. They’re sunshine yellow, golden and glowing, and the instant their eyes meet, Dean’s mind is flooded with images, jumbled out of order, rushing by too fast to inspect with any degree of detail. Some are of Castiel speaking to Kelly, some are of Cas on his own, some are of Cas with some teenage boy, and many of these feature Dean himself – if not visually, then by his presence, like an aura hovering around the edges of a scene. The cavalcade of information tapers off, and Dean can hear himself gasping and coughing as his vision clears and the cabin reappears in front of him.

“I’m so sorry, Jack. Castiel can’t…he won’t…none of that can…he’s dead. I’m sorry.” Dean uses the baby’s name for the first time, because he isn’t the baby, not anymore. He’s Castiel’s baby. He’s Castiel’s son. And Cas had given his son a name.

Jack cries. Not the way babies cry, really, because he’s quiet, his tears slicking the skin of Dean’s chest where his face is pressed against it. Dean cries, too, the way babies do, sobs shredding out of him, like hellhound claws dragging against the inside of his ribcage. He cries because there were thousands of ways this could have gone differently – he should know, he spent the better part of the drive over trying to enumerate the bad ones, the ways it could go awry. He never even thought to consider the ways it could go well, the possibilities where something beautiful happens, where a baby is born, and by his very existence, turns a friendship into a family.

It took Cas dying for Dean to realize he hadn’t bothered to picture a future for himself where Cas wasn’t right beside him the whole way. Holding Cas’s son in his arms, while Cas lays dead in the dirt outside, that failure of imagination takes on a new dimension, his grief centuplicates into innumerable shards of lives he will not live, cannot live, prismatic iridescent kaleidoscopes of dreams he never even got the chance to push away, never got to enjoy in secret, before they were ripped away. Dean is a widow, skipping right over the wedding, careening past the vows, the kiss, landing square in the middle of mourning.

Dean gets back to his feet, switches Jack to a one-armed carry so he can hold on to the stair rail. He carries him to the nursery, and he lays him in the crib that Castiel built for his son. The box of baby clothes is disorganized, like someone was interrupted while they were sorting through it, and he wonders if it was Kelly or Castiel who last touched these soft pieces of cloth. He wonders if he would be able to tell, if he held on to them long enough, just by the lingering energy, wonders if Jack would be able to tell. He finds a newborn sleepsack, one of the ones with sleeves and buttons on top and a closed sort of skirt at the bottom. Sam liked those, maybe Jack will, too.

He pulls a newborn diaper up his tiny legs, securing it snugly, but not too tight, around his tiny hips, then guides his tiny arms into the sleeves of the sleepsack and pulls the bottom of it up to where it fastens across his tiny chest. There is not a single atom in Dean’s body that does not ache as he does this.

Jack is asleep before Dean is even done dressing him. He can’t stop staring at him, watching his chest rise and fall and rise and fall and rise and fall. Sometimes, right after Mom died, Dean would work himself into a panic about Sam, especially if he was left alone with him for hours on end, as he often was. So he would lay next to him on the bed in whatever apartment or motel they found themselves in, all the pillows and sheets stripped off except the tight fitted sheet so that Sam wouldn’t suffocate. He would lay curled around him, a crescent moon body, not touching him, afraid to wake him, just making himself a barrier between Sam and the door. And he would stare, and watch him breathe, and remember that breathing was all Sam needed to be doing.

Dean isn’t sure when he ended up in the chair beside the crib, but that’s where Sam finds him when he finally shuffles out of Kelly’s room, hang dog expression evidence enough that Kelly is well and truly dead.

“Did you…” Sam winces as he imagines the myriad ways that Dean may have committed infanticide.

“No.” Dean doesn’t need to hear the end of whatever sentence Sam was building.

“Good, I guess.” Sam isn’t really sure what Dean’s plan is, if he’s still planning to kill the child, just waiting for some reason, some condition to be met, some circumstance to present itself.

“I think I gotta…” Dean trails off, scraps of what Jack had shown him fluttering around in his mind like tickertape cascading down on a parade from skyscraper windows. “Sam, I think I gotta see this through.”

“See it…through?” Sam swallows the lump in his throat, because it sounds an awful lot like Dean still plans to kill this kid. And he isn’t sure Dean is wrong, but he isn’t sure he’s right, either.

“Jack is…Cas was…” Dean looks down at his hands like he’s seeing them for the very first time. “He was Cas’s son. So, he’s mine now, I think.”

His words wash over Sam in unaccountable eddies, sediment dragging lazily along, until the tide yawns back out again, and he can see the picture Dean has drawn, half-faded in the sand, one strong wave away from disappearing altogether.

“He’s Cas’s son?” Sam can’t think of any other questions, besides the ones he isn’t allowed to ask.

“S’what he told me. He asked if I was Cas…asked where he was…and I…” Dean looks back up at Sam, and his eyes are desolate. Sam has seen Dean at his lowest, over and over, can play the instances like a slideshow in his brain. He’s never seen him like this. “I asked why he wanted to know. He said Cas was his dad, that Cas would protect him. And I had to tell him he was dead.” Dean almost eats the last word, so it comes out like a cough, or some strangled inhale.

“He can talk?” Sam won’t touch the rest of that stuff with a ten foot pole, but this he can push against.

“Nah,” Dean’s mouth quirks up on one side, like he just thought of a tasteless joke, but the smile looks mangled, and it doesn’t reach his eyes. He taps his temple with his pointer finger a few times. “He calls direct.”

“How long’s it been since you slept, Dean?”

“Since…shit, since before I busted the wall with that grenade launcher, I guess.”

“Why don’t you sleep, I’ll uh…I’ll keep watch.” He hands Dean an angel blade that he fetched from the trunk, patting the one in his own jacket pocket to show he was armed as well. Dean takes the blade and balances it on his thighs.

“Okay, yeah.” He makes no move to get up. Sam shifts from foot to foot, waiting for him to go off and try to nap.

“You gonna…?” Sam gestures at the door behind him, but Dean just shakes his head.

“I’ll sleep here, thanks.” His eyes slide over to the crib, where Jack is sleeping. Sam nods.

“Then I’m gonna, um. I’m gonna bring Cas inside, alright? I’ll keep watch downstairs.” At the mention of Cas’s body, Dean shudders. The world loses it’s sharpness, and it takes Dean an embarrassingly long time to realize that it isn’t some strange supernatural phenomenon or physiological deficit that’s clogging up his perception all of a sudden, it’s just tears, blurring things into desaturated blobs and smears.

“Yeah, alright.” Sam waits for him to say something else, but he doesn’t. So Sam stalks downstairs, Dean listens to him go. He shivers – his chest is still bare, he hadn’t thought to grab a shirt when he was down by the car, but the shirt he’d used to swaddle Jack is still draped over one of the unopened IKEA boxes. Wearing it is better than nothing, but it smells like Jack, his warm salty baby smell. It also smells like something else, someone else, and it takes him almost fifteen minutes to place the scent. It finally hits him, when he hears the backdoor open downstairs, hears Sam shuffle in, encumbered by a weight he doesn’t want to envision.

Jack smells kind of like Cas, that rainy electric clean smell. And it makes sense, really. Jack is Cas’s son, after all.

Chapter Text

When Dean wakes up, it’s still dark outside. He wants to go downstairs, because now that Castiel’s death has stopped being a location and started being an event, he is acutely aware that he is approaching the tail end of that event. He wants to go touch his body, to honor it in some way, before there isn’t anything left of it. He wants to prove to himself that Cas is dead, and he is somehow still alive, and to find some kind of forgiveness for that. If anyone could forgive him for it, it would be Cas. Dean knows, better than anyone, that once the event of death is over, the memory of death takes its place. And memories of death, those can keep forever, fresh and sweet and haunted, like ancient Egyptian honey uncovered by archaeologists.

Dean wants to go downstairs, but the thought of leaving Jack, even for a moment, is unbearable. He’s still sleeping in his crib, and Dean understands that he would be completely fine on his own for a few minutes. He’s in a safe sleeping environment, in a secure house. Perhaps, then, it’s Dean who won’t be fine on his own for even a few minutes.

He stands up from the chair, and his joints complain, like they always seem to these days. Beside Jack’s crib, looking down at him, time stops for Dean. All the phases of his life have been orbiting this moment, a moon cycling through false face after false face, hiding his deepest desire from everyone, even himself. He’s said all kinds of things – that he derides the ‘apple pie life’, that he wants it but knows he can’t have it, that he had it with Lisa and he blew it, that he never wanted it with Lisa in the first place, that he can’t be a father, that he was already a father and he fucked it up, that he sees a normal life for Sam and that’s enough, that he sees a normal life for Sam and he resents the hell out of him for it. All of them were true, and all of them weren’t enough combined to paint the full picture.

Earth’s moon rotates on its axis, but at such a slow rate that it appears fixed, from Earth’s vantage point. Humans only ever see one side of the moon. Dean knows what it’s like to circle something, careful to never show your weak spot, to turn your back on your enemy, to give them the opening they need to bring you down. The phases of the moon, how much of its face is visible at any given moment, is dictated by the position of the sun. It doesn’t generate its own light, just reflects whatever it can of the sun. Without the sun, it’s just a black lifeless rock. Dean’s lived long enough to know that the analogy isn’t perfect – he existed before he ever met Castiel, and he’ll keep existing even now that he’s gone. But he will exist in darkness.

Maybe that’s what finally liberated the part of him that’s looking down at Jack now. In the dark, no one knows which side of the moon is on display. Now that there’s no one to hide from, now that no one’s looking, now that there’s no one left alive to see it, he can want this.

Dean reaches down, intending to pick him up, but his hand gets sidetracked and ends up beside his head. His thumb quests out idly, strokes the fine whorl of hair on the back of his head, traces it to his hairline, then down the swell of his pink cheek. The texture of Jack’s skin is so different from Dean’s, so soft and delicate, that it feels like there should be a different word for whatever covers Dean’s muscles and bones. Jack has skin, Dean has chitin.

He does pick him up, after he’s looked long enough.

It doesn’t seem odd to him, to bring Jack with him to Castiel’s body. It must seem weird to Sam, because he’s pretty shocked to find them there together.

“Dean?” Sam asks, voice rough from disuse. He lowers the gun he had pointed at him, tucks his angel blade back into his jacket. “Dude, I thought you were sleeping.”

“I was,” he answers, tone intentionally lower than Sam’s. He doesn’t want their voices to disturb Jack, who’s still asleep in his arms.

“Okay?” Sam asks what he’s doing downstairs without really asking.

“I woke up,” Dean answers without really answering. He would shrug, but he’s holding Jack, so he settles for cocking his eyebrow.

Sam seems to finally put together where he’s found Dean, and he rolls his lips together until they’re just a thin pale line, pressed into nothing.

“You want me to, uh, take him? While you…?” Sam doesn’t look at Jack, though he gestures to him. His eyes don’t leave Dean’s face.

“Nah.” Dean looks away from Sam, over toward the windows. “You should get some sleep, too. Been awake about as long as me, besides your nap in the car on the drive up.”

“But – “

“Go on, man.” Dean points by tipping his head toward the living room, since his hands are busy. “I’ll keep watch. I’m up now, not gonna make it back to sleep.”

Sam goes, and Dean breathes a little easier, now that it’s just him and Jack. And Cas.

He could say anything right now, anything at all. Any of the things he’s always wanted to say, any of the accusations and admonitions, and of the admissions and affections. And Cas wouldn’t hear any of them, because he isn’t here. Cas is dead.

Dean almost feels stupid for coming down here in the first place. Cas is just as dead shrouded on the table as he was splayed in the dirt. But he didn’t come down here to see if Cas would come back to life. He came down here to be a part of his death.

He lays Jack down on a dish towel, spread out on the floor. He will need both hands, for this.

The body is dirty, bloody. He would wash every inch of him, if they weren’t just going to burn him anyway. He thinks he remembers something about that from the bible, but it’s been too long, and he never believed much of that stuff anyway. He settles for an abbreviated version, getting a dishcloth wet and wiping the dirt from his forehead, his cheeks, his neck, his hair, his hands. He makes sure the water is warm, even though Cas can’t feel it, because he’s dead.

Something shifts inside of Dean, when his fingertip slips past the edge of the cloth and runs across the skin on Castiel’s face. He’s touched that skin before, but only when Cas was dying, or dead. Always as a parting indulgence, shorthand for all the things he’s not supposed to want to say. The warm water gives an illusion of life to the otherwise cold skin of his face. If he touches his skin even one more time, he thinks he might come completely apart, not collapse, not melt, not break. Come apart, like a gun, disassembled, laid out in menacing hunks of metal, to be oiled and brushed and snapped back together when it’s ready to kill again.

There aren’t any clean linens left in the kitchen now, with Jack on the only towel and Dean holding the only dishcloth, now wet and stained with dirt and blood. He considers fetching some from the bathroom, but doesn’t want to leave the room. He considers letting Castiel’s body air dry, then irrationally worries that he’ll get cold, and rejects the idea. He ends up, once again, using his shirt. He almost makes himself laugh, when he thinks about how this night has brought new meaning to the idea of giving someone ‘the shirt off your back’, but he doesn’t laugh. Isn’t sure he remembers how.

Clean and dry, there isn’t anything left to do but bind the shroud. He’s done this enough times now that he knows how, knows you can tuck a standard sheet around and behind such that you don’t need rope or anything else to seal the body up. It’s kind of like swaddling an infant, in its methodical way. He knows how to wrap Castiel’s body, like every other body he’s wrapped and burned. Cas’s body isn’t like every other body he’s burned.

Dean pulls down the tension rods from the windows, strips them of their yellow organza curtains, tears them into thick strips. Halfway through, he thinks about how Cas may have picked out these curtains, maybe during one of the trips out to buy diapers or formula. That feeling is back, the one where he doesn’t have legs anymore, but he manages to stay upright, just doubled over, struggling to breathe. Jack makes some sound in his sleep, a gurgling murmur, before going silent again, and it almost feels like it was intentional, a way to bring Dean back into his own body.

The body looks better, bound in sunshine yellow like this, and Dean stands back to admire his work. He has the overwhelming urge to tear the shroud away, to look at his face again, but he reminds himself that half of the point of doing all of this was to manufacture an ending, a final look.

He scoops Jack up off the towel on the floor, and he wakes slow, blinking and yawning up at Dean. The house is too still, too quiet, and Dean can see the first streaks of morning light outside, now that there are no curtains to obscure the view. Jack has never been outside of this house, Dean thinks. He slings his slightly damp shirt, which he pretends not to associate with Cas, pretends isn’t the last thing that touched Castiel’s face, over his shoulder, and carries the baby outside.

Jack hasn’t tried to talk to him again yet, though he just woke up, so it might happen. Dean doesn’t think it will. He remembered reading somewhere about how babies, right when they’re born, have the ability to crawl up their mother’s body to seek milk, even though they won’t be able to actually crawl until a later stage in development. Dean wonders if it’s like that, with his communication powers, a desperate burst of connection, some way to establish initial contact, no matter the cost, before being at the mercy of whoever is holding you.

His eyes aren’t golden anymore, and Dean figures that’s probably for the best, considering how hard that would be to explain to other people. They’re blue now, not blue like Castiel’s eyes (nothing is blue like Castiel’s eyes, nothing) but it’s a near thing. He looks more vulnerable like this, more human. When Jack starts sending up little squawking cries, Dean knows he needs a diaper change, and probably another bottle, but he doesn't want to go back inside just yet, so he bounces him to distract from those desires. It works better than it should, and his sounds taper off into inquisitive huffs and gurgles. Dean reaches out his pointer finger, and Jack wraps his fingers around it. His whole closed fist barely covers his finger past the first knuckle.

Jack’s grip eases as he settles, and Dean decides this would be a good time to change him, since he’s calmed down immensely. He carries him back inside and up to the nursery, where the diapers sit sentry in their corner. Whoever went overboard on diapers didn’t seem to get the memo on other diaper change essentials, so there are no wipes, or powder, or any other helpful accoutrement.

Moving their operation to the bathroom, he gently divests Jack of his sleepsack, inspecting it briefly for any stains and finding it miraculously clean. He sets it down to the side, then lays Jack out on a towel by the sink, peeling off his diaper. It’s full of a liquidy green-brown fluid, and some dusty part of his brain pings to life, remembering there’s a name for this stuff, michorium or meconium or macronium, some science word that assures you this is normal, this is what newborn baby poops are supposed to be like. Dean’s changed plenty of diapers, and ganked plenty of monsters, so this doesn’t really even rank in terms of disgusting things he’s dealt with.

Jack seems less than thrilled to be in the middle of his first true diaper change, so Dean runs a soothing hand down his side, hears himself shushing and cooing, doesn’t really feel his lips moving. It had all seemed so surreal the night before, and he had assumed it would start feeling real in the light of day, but everything muffles and slides and blurs like a dream still, even with the sun clawing its way up to the horizon. He wipes his bottom with a wet cloth, and dries it with the edge of the towel he’s laying on, before securing a new diaper in place.

Dean doesn’t bother dressing Jack again yet as they head down to the kitchen for a bottle. He knows he’ll probably spit or burp or some combination of the two after he eats, and that the added volume in his stomach will probably trigger another bowel movement. No sense in dirtying either of their clothes just yet.

The water’s heating on the stove when Sam comes in, hair sticking up on one side.

“Sleep okay?” Dean asks, only glancing up at him for a moment before turning his attention back to Jack.

“Not really,” Sam manages to say between two massive yawns. Dean nods, turns off the stove. “I’m gonna build the uh…you know. For Kelly, and C – “

“Yeah, sounds good,” Dean cuts him off, keeping his voice cool, low. Pretends he’s staying serene for Sam’s benefit, knowing that he’s doing it for Jack.

Sam seems to get the message, and Dean hears the door click shut behind him when he goes outside to gather wood.

After mixing the formula with the water, Dean tests it on his arm to make sure it isn’t too hot. If anything, he thinks it could stand to be a little warmer, but he doesn’t have a thermometer handy, so this will have to do. He nestles Jack in the crook of his arm again, propping him up against his bicep, as he offers him the bottle. It feels good, to have their skin touching like this, and he’s pretty sure he’s read something about that, too, how babies need that kind of contact to develop properly. He feels bad, that Sam didn’t get much of that after Mom died. He can’t put too much blame on his own shoulders for that one – he wasn’t even six yet, he couldn’t be expected to know that much about infant development. As Jack drinks, and drowses, Dean thinks it wouldn’t be the worst idea, to pick up a book or two about that sort of thing. Maybe there’s even some lying around in the nursery.

He rinses the dregs of the bottle that Jack didn’t manage to finish before nodding off and soaks this bottle and the ones from the night before in the sink. He’ll sterilize them in hot water later. He could help Sam, he supposes, but he can’t think of anything he’d like to do less at this moment than that. Not to mention, he’d have to leave Jack alone in his crib, and he’s not ready to do that. Not yet.

Regardless, he does go upstairs and lay him down for a nap. The loss of contact with Dean’s warm chest doesn’t wake him, and he breathes a sigh of relief when he’s back in his crib, sleeping like he’s just pulled a twelve hour shift at a sawmill. Dean takes the opportunity to poke around the room. He finds another box, which has some more clothes inside as well as a few toys safe for newborns. The unopened furniture, waiting to be assembled (by Cas, his brain can’t help but remind him), includes a gliding rocker, a changing table, and a small dresser.

There’s a laptop, and a few USB drives, along with three books on pregnancy and early childhood development. One of them – The Montessori Baby – has been heavily marked up and annotated. At first glance, it seems like maybe they got the book used, and these markings are from a previous owner, but when he really looks at it, he recognizes Castiel’s no-nonsense scrawl in the margins. It feels like he’s falling into the book, and he can’t say for sure how long he sits there on the floor by the IKEA boxes, thumbing through it, running his fingers across Castiel’s annotations and comments like he's discovered a sacred text. However long it is, it must be about as long as it takes to build a funeral pyre, because that’s where Sam finds him when he’s finished outside.

“Dean?” Sam asks from the doorway, and he gets the impression that it isn’t the first time he’s called his name trying to pull him away from the book.

“Yeah.” Dean looks up at him. He knows why he’s here, and what comes next. He doesn’t want to have to say it. Sam can say it for him.

“Everything is ready. Are you?”

“Yeah. I’m ready.” It comes out too fast, and Sam gives him a look, purses his lips, grinds his teeth.

“If you’re not, we can – “

“I’m ready, Sam.” Dean closes the book in his lap, and doesn’t notice how he presses it to his chest, holds it tight with both hands. Sam notices, and he says nothing.

“Kinda chilly out. Probably wanna put on a shirt.” Sam shrugs as he heads back down the stairs.

Dean sets the book down with the other things he found in his snooping, getting to his feet. As much as he’d like to put on a shirt, all of his clothes are outside in the Impala, so he’ll have to stop there first. He digs around in the clothes box before he finds a generic gray onesie for Jack. He gives him a quick sniff, and is surprised to find that his diaper is still clean. Jack wakes up as Dean carefully maneuvers him into the onesie, but he doesn’t seem upset.

The walk down the stairs and out to the car isn’t something Dean remembers, but he’s standing by the trunk of the Impala, so he figures he managed to do it somehow. Jack is tucked up against one shoulder, and he’s squirming to try to turn his torso towards Dean’s neck. His wriggling is no match for Dean’s grip, so it barely registers as he pokes around in his duffle for a shirt. He keeps asking himself what he would want to wear to Castiel’s funeral, and the thought cuts itself off every time before he can even begin to answer the question itself. He finally just settles on a gray long sleeved t-shirt, which he pulls on over his head and left arm, then switches Jack over to that side so he can finish pulling it on over his right arm, too.

Though he hasn’t checked the time since sometime yesterday, sometime before Cas died, he figures it's about ten in the morning, based on the position of the sun. He toys with the idea of never looking at a clock again, some drastic romantic notion, that the entire construct has ceased to hold meaning, that there ought to be some material evidence of that. It’s the kind of idea he could mention to Cas, and would end up sitting through some lecture about how in some cultures they stop the clocks in the house when people die. It’s the kind of idea Dean lets himself play around with as a consolation prize for not wasting away to nothing instead.

Standing there, in front of the mass of branches and tinder, the bodies that lay at its apex, Dean is aware that Sam wants him to say something. Sam always wants Dean to say something, especially when someone dies, which is precisely when Dean finds himself the least able to say anything.

“You wanna…say something?” Sam asks, like he can hear Dean’s thoughts. It might have made him laugh, under different circumstances.

Dean shakes his head, tucks Jack against his shirt so he doesn’t have to breathe in the smoke. He notices Sam, fumbling in his pockets for a lighter, so he beats him to it. It’s heavy in his hand, and he hangs on to it, watches the flame dance by his thumb for a few seconds, knowing it’s the same flame that’s about to touch Cas, that’s about to be the last thing to ever touch Cas, and some sick part of him wants to be touched by that flame, too. Just so they’ll both have touched it. Dean hardly ever gives in to the things he wants, so he catches himself by surprise when he lets the tip of his thumb dip into the flame, just for a few seconds, just enough to know it’ll get red and sore and need to be bandaged for a day or two, before tossing the whole thing onto the pyre.

He watches it catch, and he’s glad he chased that impulse, gave that modicum of relief to himself, because otherwise, that urge would have blossomed into something hungry and ferocious. Otherwise, he might have shoved Jack into Sam’s arms and dove headfirst into that smoking pile, ready to burn right alongside Cas.

Both of them stand there and watch it burn until there’s just ashes, and Sam gathers those up, when they’re cool enough. Dean takes Jack inside, along with an old unused duffle from the trunk. He crams loose items from the kitchen and nursery into the bag – the laptop, the books, odds and ends that don’t have boxes of their own. He carries it back down to the Impala and shoves it in the trunk, then makes several more one armed trips with the lighter boxes, hauling flats of formula and cases of diapers and the box of clothes down and cramming those into the trunk, too. When he runs out of trunk space, he starts shoving things in the backseat. Finally, all that’s left is the furniture, which he’ll need Sam’s help to carry down.

“You packed all this yourself?” Sam asks when he comes back from clearing the debris from the pyre.

“Yeah.” Dean figures this is just his way to start a conversation, considering it’s obvious that Dean couldn’t have had help. “Was thinking maybe you’d drive Baby, I’d take Ca – that, uh. I’d take the truck? Still gotta load up the rest of the furniture in the bed, if you think you’re up for it?”

“Sure, yeah.” Sam sounds about as out of it as Dean feels, and he doesn’t press. Only once they’re in the nursery do they both realize that Dean won’t be able to help carry anything with Jack in his arms. He lays him down in his crib, and for the first time since he’s met the kid, he cries, the way a baby does, loud and insistent. Dean places his broad hand over his little tummy and makes a rumbly sound as he wiggles him back and forth a few inches, and Jack quiets down to a few shallow whimpers. Sam looks at him like he has five heads.

“What’re you lookin’ at?” Dean asks, a genuine smile quirking the corner of his mouth, so fast that it probably looks like a trick of the light.

“How did you…?” Sam is at a loss to describe Dean’s inelegantly successful method of infant soothing.

“Worked often enough when you were little.” Dean shrugs. They make quick work of the items that are still boxed up, waiting to be built. Soon the only thing left to bring out to the truck is the crib itself, so Dean brings Jack out to the truck and gets him secure in his car seat, which he just knows Cas set up, and which he cannot afford to think about at this point. If he thinks about that, he’ll crumble.

Sam and Dean carry the crib down the stairs and out to the truck. Dean puts the mattress in the backseat so that it doesn’t fly out of the truck bed once they’re on the highway. He secures the whole load with a tarp and the bungee cords that are already in the truck bed, things Cas probably bought when he and Kelly got set up here.

They’re ready to go. Dean, stupidly, cannot stop thinking about the mural upstairs, trying and failing to come up with some way to bring it with them. He also has the urge to start unloading the cars, to tell Sam they actually can’t leave, because Cas picked this place to raise his son, because Cas died here, because this is the view Cas wanted his family to wake up to every morning, and they should honor that. The practical side of Dean understands that this is impossible and dangerous and childish, and he tamps the feeling down. Cas would want Jack to be safe, and there’s nowhere safer from angels than the bunker. Still, that mural won’t stop bugging him.

“Wait here a sec,” Dean tells Sam as he stalks up to the house. Sam starts a sentence, but Dean’s too far away by the time he does to hear anything but the confused tone in his voice. He takes the stairs two at a time back up to the nursery, which is completely empty now, besides a chair they decided not to bring. He pulls out his phone and takes a picture of the mural, then takes another from a slightly different angle, just in case the first one sucks.

Dean is about to head downstairs when he glances over at the window and feels a tightness in his chest as he looks out over the water, the light reflecting off. He takes a picture of the view. Takes another. And another. Wishes that Cas were here to say something insightful and out of pocket about what the place looked like when dinosaurs were alive or whatever. Wishes Cas were here so he could take a picture of Cas, standing in front of the water. Maybe they could take a picture together. He was pretty sure they didn’t have any pictures of themselves together. It hurt, to have so little evidence of such a major part of his life.

Sam’s down at the car, standing by the backdoor of the truck, where Jack is all strapped in where he left him.

“You ready?” Dean asks, like he wasn’t the one to hold them up in the first place. Sam pulls a face, and for a second it’s just like normal, with them always ribbing each other.

“Been ready.” They both stand there, neither one moving toward their respective vehicles. “Dean, you, uh. You sure about all this?”

“All what?”

“I mean, Jack, and everything?”

“What about Jack?”

“You were gonna….I mean before we got here and everything went…the way it went…you were gonna…you know?” Sam built a sentence only Dean could understand. “And now you’re doing this, and I’m not um. I’m good with it, but, are you sure you’re good?”

“I’m good, Sam. I know I said a lot of things. I thought a lot of things. I didn’t know what I was talking about. I’m good.” Dean doesn’t mean he’s doing well. He’s never been doing worse, he’s fairly certain, and that’s saying something, because Dean’s been dead more than once, been to Hell. Been to Purgatory. Been a demon. Dean just means that he’s sure. And Sam gets that.

“Good.” Sam turns, then turns back. Hands Dean a cannister. “If you see a good spot, on the drive. Otherwise you can just bring him all the way back, to the bunker. Your call.”

“Thanks,” Dean’s voice scrapes out. Sam doesn’t hold his gaze, turns and jogs lightly over to the Impala. He doesn’t wait to see if Dean gets in the truck, he just hops in and drives off.

Dean makes himself get in the truck, makes himself turn the key in the ignition. He looks in the rearview mirror, at where Jack is sleeping snug in his car seat. Dean packed a bag with diapers and a few other necessities for the drive, since most of that stuff is in the Impala, and he touches the bag in the seat beside him for reassurance. It is full of things that Cas bought, in preparation for the arrival of his son. He tells himself that having it in the front seat like this, it’s kind of like having Cas beside him. He places the cannister of ashes on top of the bag, makes sure it won’t shift during the drive.

It isn’t anything like having Cas beside him.

Chapter Text

After a few sleep deprived days with the crib set up in Dean’s room, various baby supplies stacked up in any available corner of the room, it’s actually Sam who suggests that they turn the room across the hall from Dean’s into an actual nursery. For some reason, it hadn’t occurred to Dean to do anything that permanent. Maybe on some level, he isn’t convinced this is real yet, that he isn’t going to wake up from whatever is happening and find himself on the floor of that cabin with a head wound. Isn’t convinced that he didn’t die when Cas died, that he’s not in some torturous Heaven or sickly sweet Hell.

Sam helps him move the Men of Letters furniture out of the room that’s going to be Jack’s, helps him build the IKEA furniture they dragged here from the cabin. Before they move all the other baby stuff in, Dean makes Sam drive to the hardware store in town to buy paint.

“What color?”

“Bunch of ‘em. All of ‘em,” Dean dismisses the question gruffly, focused on the baby in his arms, focused on keeping him engaged while he feeds so he won’t doze off before he gets enough to eat.

“Dean, really, ‘all of ‘em’ ? Gimme something here, man.”

“My phone’s on the changing table, go to my camera roll,” Dean mutters, shifting Jack’s weight in his arms to muscle him into a more upright position, making it easier to angle the bottle.

Sam retrieves the phone, swipes past a few pictures looking out over the water from the top floor of the cabin. Stops on a picture of the mural in the cabin nursery.

“You wanna…?”

“Yeah. I think so, yeah.” Dean’s blushing up to the tips of his ears, and he turns away from Sam, under the pretense of setting the empty bottle down and grabbing a burp cloth, but mostly to hide his expression, to keep some kind of barrier between them.

“Okay, then, I’ll, uh, yeah. I’ll be back in like, an hour.”

And Sam thinks about it, the whole drive to the hardware store, and the whole time he’s in the aisle full of paint, and the whole time he’s checking out at the paint counter, feeling insane with his fifteen tiny paint cans and bundle of brushes, and he thinks about it the whole drive back. He thinks about Dean darting back into that cabin, just to take a picture of the wall. Just to take a picture of the water.

He gets back to the bunker, and he lugs everything inside, all the way to Jack’s room, where Dean is standing on a chair, finishing the outline of what he intends to paint on the far wall. It’s like the mural at the cabin, but it has crisper lines, sharper edges. It’s more methodical, more exact, more Dean. Jack is in his crib, still asleep from his earlier feeding. He tends to sleep better at this time of day, only really kicking up a fuss at night. Dean’s been reading the books they found in the cabin, says that this kind of behavior is pretty normal.

“Got your paint,” Sam announces the obvious, because it feels like the only safe thing to do, these days.

“Good.” Dean hops down from the chair, comes over and inspects Sam’s haul. “Yeah, that’ll work.”

“You want me to, uh…?” He’s pretty sure Dean doesn’t want his help, like he hasn’t seemed to want his help with anything else to do with Jack except the things he can’t physically do all by himself. But it feels rude not to ask.

“Nah, I’m good.” He waves him off.

Somewhere along the way, maybe right from the moment Dean first picked up the baby, maybe sometime between then and the drive down from the cabin, Jack became Dean’s kid. Sam isn’t sure Dean knows that, but Sam does. He thinks it has a lot to do with how Dean insists that Jack is Cas’s kid, like there’s some transitive property at play, where if something is Cas’s and he’s not around to take care of it, that something becomes Dean’s responsibility. Sam knows that sounds an awful lot like a marriage, and he dedicates a lot of brain space to keeping that thought out of regular rotation.

Sam also thinks a lot about how easy it is to tell that Jack is Dean’s kid, and about how he could even know what that looks like, considering Dean’s never had a kid before. Ben wasn’t Dean’s, and no matter how much Dean cared about him, it was obvious that their relationship wasn’t like that. Claire isn’t Dean’s either, kind of how she isn’t really Cas’s.

It clicks for Sam around Jack’s bedtime, the following evening, when Dean’s reading to Jack from some board book they brought with them from the cabin. At first, he can’t place the source of the ache in his chest, the tension weaving itself between his ribs like yarn through a darning loom. He thinks it might just be a final drop in adrenaline, a denouement that’s plummeting through his nervous system like a cormorant crashing into the sea. About halfway through the book, the ache starts to feel familiar, not necessarily in that he's felt this specific thing before, but like the ache itself is the word ‘familiar’, the idea of familiarity. His mind latches onto that, puzzles it apart, unravels the feeling until he lands square on the sensation, something he almost never has occasion to feel – nostalgia.

Hearing Dean read to Jack isn’t just bittersweet, or relaxing, or uncanny. It’s nostalgic. Because Dean used some version of that same tone to read to Sam, when he was Dean’s kid.

Sam’s hands are numb, by the time Dean finishes reading the book, and when Dean glances over at him, raising an eyebrow in silent question, Sam flashes him a manic smile in an attempt to deflect, to reassure. Dean has enough shit going on without Sam cracking apart. Sam’s consciousness is a pebble, sinking down into the mucky pond of himself, getting lost in the green nothing of his body. He’s pretty sure he’s sweating, but he’s so cold, all of a sudden, and now Dean’s sitting in the chair next to him, and he can’t remember seeing him cross the room, but it must have happened right in front of him. He must have been too deep in the pond, to see out clearly.

“Sam, hey, breathe, man.” Dean still hasn’t dropped that tone, the one he had when he was reading to Jack, and Sam isn’t sure Dean realizes he’s still talking like that.

“Thanks,” Sam manages after a few centering breaths. Dean would usually clap him on the shoulder, right about now, but instead he ruffles Sam’s hair, like he did when they were kids, like he did when Sam was his kid, and Sam swallows the lump in his throat.

“Gonna put him down, see if I can’t get some sleep before he gets hungry again. You should probably go to bed, too.” Dean sounds more like he usually does, and Sam’s glad. He’s not sure how much more nostalgia he can take tonight.

“If he wakes up, you can come get me, have me handle him for once. I know you aren’t sleeping much,” Sam offers, but Dean’s already shaking his head.

“Nah, we’re good,” he says, and Sam tries to focus on his lopsided smile, and not the bags under his semi-vacant eyes.

+++

Dean is different. Sam noticed it right away, but he originally chalked it up to grief, or exhaustion. He can’t exactly say for certain that it isn’t just grief and exhaustion, still, but he’s had long enough to ruminate on it that he believes it’s something more than that.

For one thing, Dean doesn’t do research anymore. Doesn’t even want to hear about the research Sam’s been doing on his own. Even when it’s about Nephilim, even when it’s about accessing alternate universes, even when it’s about what happens to angels when they die. Dean doesn’t get upset, or yell at him, or make a scene about not wanting to be in the loop – he just exits whatever room they’re in, just removes himself from the situation. If Sam follows him, he just goes somewhere he can’t follow him – the bathroom, his own bedroom, wherever. So Sam keeps doing research, but he stops trying to share his findings with Dean. He figures this stark new division of labor is ultimately fair, considering that Dean does one hundred percent of the childcare, no matter how much he offers to help.

In that same vein, Dean doesn’t really get upset anymore, period. He doesn’t yell, he doesn’t even ever seem to struggle with anger. That should be a good thing, Sam thinks, and does not believe. For years, Sam wanted Dean to be a less angry person, was afraid of waking up someday and finding that his brother had turned into some version of their father. He isn’t sure now how he ever could have thought that, ever could have believed it was even possible. What Dean does get is quiet. He sometimes goes whole days without saying more than a word or two to Sam, and it doesn’t feel hostile, or loaded with some petty resentment. When Dean’s quiet, he’s not brimming with unspoken thoughts, there is no whirlpool churning just under the skin. No, when Dean is quiet, he’s empty. Trying to talk to him when he’s in that place is like trying to draw water from a dry well. It isn’t that he’s holding back the flood, it’s that he doesn’t have a drop to spare.

Dean hasn’t admitted it in so many words, but he’s scared. Sam hasn’t asked him what he’s scared of, but he’s got some good guesses. He won’t leave the bunker, and won’t let Jack out of his sight. Sam is the one who goes and gets groceries and other supplies, and he can tell it makes Dean anxious every single time, even if he doesn’t say as much. When Sam gets back from running errands, Dean is always waiting somewhere near the entryway, like a nervous dog, listening for the crunch of tires in the driveway, tail between his legs.

Neither of them seems ready to go back to hunting, and they don’t talk about it. When Sam gets calls about cases from other hunters, he gives them as much advice as he can, connects them with each other, refuses to elaborate about why he can’t be of more material assistance. Isn’t really sure why, even if he wanted to tell them, besides that he can’t leave Dean, and by extension, Jack.

At first, Sam is kind of hurt by Dean’s insistence that Sam not take care of Jack. He wonders if Dean just doesn’t trust him, or doesn’t really believe him when he says he wants to help out. A few weeks into it, Sam finally realizes it has nothing at all to do with him. Like everything else, it’s about Dean’s fear.

Jack’s been crying on and off for hours, and Sam only knows this because he got up at three in the morning to get some water from the kitchen. He finds Dean sitting on the floor, back propped up against the fridge, Jack in his arms, as always, like someone accidentally glued his spine to Dean’s inner forearm or something. He wonders how often this happens, how often Jack starts fussing and Dean just takes him as far out of Sam’s earshot as possible, so as not to disturb him, instead of coming to Sam for help.

“Dean, what are you doing down there?” Sam huffs a laugh, because he’s tired, and he can’t stop seeing the bleak humor in all of this, even if Dean can’t. Dean looks up, and Sam sobers a little when it seems like Dean’s just staring through him, not at him.

“Waiting.” He doesn’t elaborate, but he doesn’t look back down at Jack, either.

“Waiting for what?”

“Waiting for him to get tired, or hungry, or something.” Dean says it like it’s obvious. “I’ve tried everything. He doesn’t want anything yet, he just wants to cry.”

“How long’s he been like this?” Sam asks, joining his brother on the floor, sitting so their shoulders almost touch.

“When’d you go to bed?”

“Like, ten?”

“So…I dunno, four hours?”

“Four hours? Shit, dude.” Sam doesn’t raise his voice, because he’s gotten out of the habit, but he’s pretty frustrated. “You could have come and woke me up, you know? You’ve gotta be wiped, Dean.”

Dean just nods, looks away. Hums in noncommittal agreement.

“Why don’t you let me take him for awhile, try to get some sleep?”

“Nah,” Dean grunts. He pauses, and Sam waits for him to continue. He has to wait a long time, and the only sounds in the interim are Jack’s sort of honking shouts, a constant drone that both men have adjusted to now, if not entirely tuned out. “I can’t really sleep, when he’s like this.”

“I would keep him out of earshot,” Sam offers, but Dean shakes his head.

“No, I mean…I can’t sleep without him. If he’s not, um. If I’m not in the same room.”

“But he sleeps in his crib, Dean.” Sam feels like he’s missing something, and the way Dean goes sheet white tells him he’s right to feel that way.

“Yeah.” Dean looks away.

“Do you sleep…in Jack’s room?” Sam whispers it like it’s a secret, like there’s anyone around besides the three of them who might hear it and be shocked right along with Sam. Dean keeps on looking away, and all Sam can see in the dark kitchen is the very edge of his face, the line of his jaw, which is tense and still. His silence is its own answer. “Jesus, Dean. On the floor?”

“Not the floor, just. The chair, mostly.” He turns back to look at Sam, and to his credit, he does look pretty embarrassed.

“We can just…move his crib into your room, you know?”

“I don’t want him to be…I don’t…Look, he’s got a room, it’s his room. I want him to sleep in his room.”

“Okay…” Sam breathes. “We could move your mattress into his room? If we scoot the changing table back and put the rocker in the other corner, we could put your mattress over to the left of the door?”

“Yeah?” And Sam wants to shake him. If he wasn’t holding Jack, he’d reach over and grab him by the shoulders and shake him hard enough to make him dizzy. Because he sounds so fucking broken, so hopeful, so wrung out, that the idea of moving his mattress onto the floor of the nursery seems like some cosmic revelation.

“Yeah, Dean. Come on, we’ll do it right now.” He stands up, but Dean stays put on the floor, still looking at him like he just handed him a million dollars. “Seriously, get up.” Sam can’t spend another second looking at that dopey grateful expression or he’s going to lose his grip, he’s going to throw a huge fucking tantrum, he’s going to start breaking shit. How did he ever get it in his head, that Dean was the angry one?

So they shift the furniture around in the nursery, and they drag Dean’s dense memory foam mattress across the hall and wedge it in the corner by the door. Jack’s in his crib, and he’s still griping and complaining with discontented little sounds, but he’s clearly getting sleepy. Dean looks like a corpse, and Sam tells him he won’t leave the room until Dean lays down on his own mattress. When he does, even with Jack’s racket, Dean is asleep in minutes.

Sam goes over to Jack’s crib and stares down at him, and he can’t find that anger anymore. He starts to understand, why Dean seems unable to get angry these days. There’s something about this baby, or maybe just any baby – Sam wouldn’t know – that makes that kind of thing feel especially futile.

“You really don’t have any idea how lucky you are, do you?” He asks Jack. Jack stares up at him, and Sam could be imagining it, or it could be a coincidence, but he’s pretty sure that Jack quiets down at that. Like he can tell they’re having a conversation now, and he wants to give Sam his full attention.

Sam looks over at Dean, who’s sleeping on his stomach, face smooshed on his pillow. He still has a burp cloth over his shoulder. He’s still wearing his jeans, never changed into his sleep clothes. Must have been too caught up in Jack’s crying. He looks back down at Jack.

“Go easy on him, alright?” Sam sighs fondly, reaches down to touch him, but before he can, Jack clasps a hand around two of his fingers, and they stay there, looking at each other, connected. “He doesn’t really know how to do anything halfway. If you’re trying to test him, to see how far you can push him before he won’t put up with it…I wouldn’t. There’s really nothing you could do to make him want to stop taking care of you. Believe me, I’ve pushed him pretty damn far before. There’s not really an upper limit, with that guy.”

Sam’s not sure why he’s telling all of this to a one month old, but it feels good to say it. He feels like something’s settling, in this strangely peaceful moment, like the air is easier to breathe, like his body is lighter on his joints. He thinks, if Dean can’t let him take care of Jack directly, maybe he can find other ways to lighten the load. He goes back out to the kitchen and gets a glass of water, but he doesn’t go back to bed. He brews himself some coffee, and he starts making a list.

+++

Things I Can Do For Dean:

• Plan Meals
• Cook Meals (If Dean Will Let Me)
• Buy Groceries
• Make Sure He EATS
• Make Sure He SHOWERS
• Do Laundry
• Clean
• Get Him To Watch Movies Again
• Get Him To Go OUTSIDE
• Tell Him He’s Doing A Good Job

Things I Can Do For Jack:

• Monitor Stock Levels of Baby Supplies
• Restock Baby Supplies
• Make Sure We Have Development Appropriate Toys, Books, and Supplies
• Read Some Of Dean’s Baby Books
• Keep Doing Research On How To Protect Him
• Keep Doing Research On His Powers
• Make Sure Bunker Is Warded Correctly Against Angels, Demons, Witches
• Prep Bottles, Puree Food When He’s Older

Sam is pretty happy with his lists, when he’s finished with them. He wastes no time getting down to business. He has the laundry done by the time Dean wakes up, has cleaned the kitchen, has read a few chapters of ‘Caring for Your Baby and Young Child, Birth to Age 5’ by the American Academy of Pediatrics, and is in the middle of making breakfast.

“You’ve been busy,” Dean says through a yawn as he rounds the corner, bouncing Jack in one arm.

“Just trying to pick up some slack.” Sam hands him a cup of coffee, and Dean raises his eyebrows in surprise. Sam knows Dean well enough to know that this is also his way of asking Sam to elaborate. “You know. You’ve been kind of doing everything around here lately, and I wanted to even things out a little.”

“Look, Sam, if this is about last – “

“It isn’t. I get it, Dean, or, well. I don’t get it, but I get that you need to be in control of things with Jack, and that’s all cool with me. But there’s other stuff that needs done, and you shouldn’t have to do all of it yourself.”

Dean looks like he’s about to push back on that, but Sam plates the eggs and sausage he’s been frying, and sets it at Dean’s spot at the table. Whatever he was about to say evaporates like steam from his coffee cup as he sits down and starts eating with his left hand, Jack still pressed against his chest on his right. Sam wonders how long it’s been since Dean had a hot breakfast, and heads off his guilt at the pass. Because things are going to be different now.

They eat breakfast together, and Dean is quiet, but it isn’t the bottomless pit kind of quiet he has been lately. It isn’t the simmering twitchy quiet he used to lapse into, when they were younger. It’s a hesitant quiet, but a pleasant one. Like he doesn’t feel pressure to say something, when there isn’t anything pressing on his mind.

After breakfast, Sam heats up water for Jack’s bottle and mixes the formula. He tells Dean he ordered a bottle warmer and a few other odds and ends online, and Dean gets that goofy grateful look on his face again, and Sam has to pretend the bottle is taking up more of his attention than it needs so that he won’t have to keep looking at him. When the bottle is ready, Dean even asks Sam if he wants to try feeding him while Dean grabs a quick shower.

It still takes Dean a few minutes to psych himself up to leave Sam there with Jack by himself, but once he’s certain Jack’s not going to choke or swallow a bunch of air or anything, he darts off and takes the world’s fastest shower. Jack isn’t even done feeding when he comes back out to the kitchen, wearing sweatpants and a t-shirt, hair still a bit wet. And Sam feels some weight lifted, even though Dean still looks split open, hollowed out, because this is something. This is a start.

Chapter Text

Dean doesn’t talk about Cas.

He didn’t mean to let it become so concrete, this avoidance, but now that it’s become an unspoken rule between himself and Sam, he can’t find it in himself to be the first to break it. So Sam doesn’t talk about Cas, either.

They’ve talked about Mary, however briefly, and Lucifer, inasmuch as Sam assured Dean that he shouldn’t be an issue, as long as he’s in this other universe. They haven’t talked about Crowley, though Dean is fairly certain that’s only because Sam doesn’t feel his loss – his sacrifice – as acutely as Dean does. If Dean hadn’t gotten rid of all the alcohol in the bunker a few nights after they got back, he would have raised a glass in his memory by now. Sam’s brought up Rowena a few times, mostly to speculate about whether or not she’s really dead. Dean is pretty sure she is, but he doesn’t want to say that, because it feels kind of like kicking Sam while he’s down.

Dean doesn’t talk about Cas, but he thinks about him constantly.

He wakes up in the middle of the night to feed Jack, and he thinks about what it would be like to roll over and shove Cas’s shoulder, to tell him it’s his turn to give him his bottle.

He changes Jack’s diaper first thing in the morning, and he thinks about how he used to change Sam’s diapers. He can’t remember having ever told Cas about that, and he wishes he could.

He sits in the gliding rocker and gives Jack his morning bottle (easier than ever, thanks to Sam’s purchase of a bottle warmer), and he sings him the kinds of songs that people sing to babies, and he thinks about what Cas’s singing voice might be like. Thinks about teaching him the songs people sing to babies, since Cas was never a baby, and probably doesn’t know the songs yet.

He eats breakfast with Sam, like he does every day now, and burps Jack with one arm while he wolfs down some eggs. He imagines Cas burping him instead, so that Dean can eat with both hands, so he doesn’t have to put his fork down just so he can pick up his coffee mug.

He sets up his laptop on the library table and sits down at one of the chairs, holds Jack upright against his bare chest in just a diaper and socks, then drapes a blanket around his little shoulders. One of their books called it ‘kangaroo time’, but he’s pretty sure it’s just another way of getting more skin to skin contact. He watches some movie he’s seen dozens of times, with the volume way down low, while he describes the action to Jack in the most moderated monotone he can muster until he falls asleep against him. He imagines watching something with Cas during this phase of the day, letting Cas pick what they watch. Thinks about all the movies he hadn’t introduced him to yet, that he’s never going to get the chance to now.

He gets up and moves to the kitchen when Jack finally starts to stir, just as the credits on whatever movie he’s been barely paying attention to get rolling. He puts Jack back into his onesie before starting his lunchtime routine. Sam keeps them stocked with basic stuff now, like sandwich components, so Dean fixes himself a quick lunch while he waits for Jack’s bottle to be ready. He wonders what Cas would look like, holding Jack in his arms, bottle-feeding him in their kitchen. Every time he imagines it, it’s like he’s sinking, like a slower version of that feeling he had when Jack told him Cas was his dad, like his legs are broken, or are melting off. He imagines it every single day.

He goes back to the nursery after lunch, because Jack always sleeps so well at this time of day, and he puts him down in his crib. Before Sam decided to make it his mission to help Dean out, this would be the time of day that Dean would do laundry and prep dinner and try to get shit done. Now, he usually takes a nap of his own. If he can’t sleep, he reads one of the baby books until he gets tired enough to nod off. Usually, he finds himself reaching for The Montessori Baby, because it feels kind of like talking to Cas, through his scribbled marginalia.

He doesn’t need to set an alarm, because Jack wakes him up when he’s hungry, or when he needs his diaper changed – whichever comes first. Today, it’s a wet diaper that wakes him up, and he carries him to the changing table. Now they’ve got wipes and cream and all the various things that make diaper changes easier for everyone, but he still can’t help but think of those first few diaper changes with Jack, when he only had the very basics, because Cas hadn’t had as much time to prepare as he thought he was going to.

He sets Jack up on a blanket on the floor for tummy time. Jack’s still pretty little, so he only does it for a few minutes every day before his neck gets tired, but it’s important for infant development, so they never skip it. He can picture the section that Cas underlined about it, as if it’s burned into the meat of his brain.

He maneuvers Jack into a sling carrier that Sam ordered online (which he thought was kind of dumb at first, but now cannot imagine his life without) and heads out to the kitchen to see if Sam’s cooking, or if he’ll be the one to cook. Either way, Sam will have gotten everything out and ready. Before he’s even all the way down the hall to the kitchen, he can smell something browning in the oven, and he knows that Sam’s the one cooking, so he takes his time getting there. Sam used to use this time to pressure Dean to talk about stuff, but now he just lets the silence rest between them, until Dean decides he wants to chat about something. Today, he talks about that time when they were staying with Bobby as kids, when Sam wanted to go out and look for different kinds of bugs, so they spent all day getting sunburns, crawling around and looking at ants and beetles and pillbugs. Sam listens, he can tell by his posture while he fiddles around with the things he’s making for dinner, but he doesn’t say anything until Dean’s done reminiscing.

“You should take Jack outside, sometime,” Sam ventures, and Dean pretends not to hear him. “The weather’s been good lately.” Dean busies himself with the few dishes that are in the sink. They aren’t even dirty, really, just need a good rinse. “Even if you don’t want to take him outside. You should go out, even if it’s just for a little while.” Dean runs the faucet a little too hard, so that he can pretend the spray is too loud to hear Sam over. “If you don’t leave the bunker at some point this week, I’m gonna make you start taking Vitamin D supplements, dude,” Sam deadpans as Dean shuts the water off, like he was waiting for him to do it, so he wouldn’t have any plausible deniability left.

“Sam…it’s not safe.” Dean doesn’t know how to explain what he’s afraid of, because he isn’t sure he knows.

“I’m telling you, it is.” Sam pulls a pan out of the oven – looks like they’re having baked potatoes. Dean figures he can’t have messed those up too bad. He wonders if Cas ever had one, when he was human. He bets he would have had something to say about the preponderance of potato formats in the American diet. Dean would have liked to hear that diatribe. Would have liked to make some stupid low-hanging-fruit pun about it being a ‘diet-tribe’, which he’d have to explain to Cas, and then Cas would assure him it was witty, even though he didn’t get it and didn’t laugh, and Dean would believe him, because Cas would never tell him something was funny if he didn’t really think that it was.

“For you, sure. But Jack…I just don’t want to risk it.”

“Then I can stay in here, with Jack. And you can take a walk or something. Hell, take a drive, Dean. You haven’t driven since we got back here. I know you, I know you’ve gotta miss it.” He puts their potatoes on plates, while he’s talking. He made bacon, clearly only enough for Dean to crumble on his potato. He must not be planning to partake. Sam’s probably not even going to put butter on his, like some kind of masochist.

“I’m good, Sam.” He gets himself a glass of water, like the teetotaler he’s become.

“You’re not good!” Sam hisses, a new habit since shouting has become a cardinal sin in the bunker. “You’re very far from good!” Dean can feel himself shutting down, and he can feel Sam feeling it, trying to adjust course, to pull up on the wheel, get himself out of the nosedive he’s in. Sam takes a big breath in and lets it out so slowly and loudly that Dean almost laughs at the charicaturish grandiosity. “Look, I’m glad things are going a bit better here. You’re sleeping more, you aren’t bending over backwards trying to do everything alone. I see that. But I’m worried about you, man.”

“I know you are.” Dean is pretty sure that’s as close as he can get to this subject without bursting into flames.

“You spend all day thinking about one thing.” Cas, Dean’s brain screams, Cas, Cas, Cas. “Jack. And I know, he needs a lot. He’s a baby, of course he needs a lot – but you need things, too. You need rest – not just sleep, but rest. You need to see the sun. You need to take a shower that’s longer than five minutes. I never thought I’d say this, but you need to have a beer! Watch a movie at full volume, and have a beer, you know?”

“Jesus, I’ll take a walk or something. You can put away the ‘intervention’ banner, alright?”

“Sorry, I just.” Sam runs a hand through his hair, like that’s going to make it look any less dorky. “A walk, yeah. Good. You ready to eat?”

“Yeah.” They sit at the table, and Dean can eat with both hands, because Jack’s secure in the sling carrier and snoozing away. Dean thinks that even if Cas did have a baked potato as a human, he should try one again with bacon and green onions and cheddar cheese and butter and all that good shit on it, because knowing him he probably didn’t go all out the first time around. While he’s eating, just while he’s eating, he lets himself pretend that might be possible, that Cas hasn’t already done everything he’s ever going to get to do. They finish dinner in silence, but it’s a neutral silence, easily excused by Jack’s faint snores, a universal appeal for quiet tones and careful movements.

He lets Sam clear the plates, something that’s taken a while to get used to, and walks a few laps around the bunker while he’s still wearing Jack in his carrier. It feels good to stretch his legs. He remembers nights, back when Cas lived in the bunker with them, when he was having trouble sleeping and he’d occasionally hear Cas’s footsteps in the hall, like maybe he was doing laps. Maybe he was standing guard, in his way. Watching over them, while they slept, in any way they would allow. He thinks maybe he’d have an easier time being apart from Jack, if Cas were alive, because Cas doesn’t need to sleep. And he already knows that Cas will take any excuse to watch over the people he loves.

He can feel Jack stirring in his carrier, can tell just by the shape of his movements that he’s hungry, so he brings him back to the kitchen, gets a bottle ready for him. Sam finished cleaning up, and everything is clean and sterile looking again. He can hear himself talking to Jack while he feeds him, can hear Jack sucking on the bottle, but he can’t connect the sounds to the rest of his brain. It’s all just noise, but it isn’t unpleasant. It’s kind of like his brain is being smoothed out with one of those soft vibrating buffers he used to use to even out the Impala’s paint job after she’d taken some nasty hits. His brain used to feel like this a lot, after Hell especially. It was something he sought out, a kind of detached warm place, where things couldn’t quite reach him. Cas had a way of making things crisp again, without making them sharp. Even before he really knew Cas, before he really trusted him, he had this brutal beautiful way of snapping Dean back into focus.

He knows at some point while he was feeding, Jack had a bowel movement, because he can smell it clear as day. So he figures he’ll give him a bath and knock out two birds with one stone. The infant tub and bath supplies are things that Cas and Kelly hadn’t bought yet by the time everything went down, so he’d had Sam go pick those up after the first week they were back in the bunker. Up until then, he’d been getting by on sponge baths, which was what the books recommended he do while waiting for the umbilical stump to fall off. Once it was off, though, he was eager to get Jack clean. Sam had always hated baths, and that was probably in part because he always just got bathed in the sink of wherever they were staying, and no matter how warm you got the water, the sink was always kind of cold. Jack seemed to like baths, and Dean made sure to do everything he could to keep it that way. He knew that baths would only get harder the older Jack got, because he’d have more muscle control, which would mean more wiggling and thrashing and potential for damage. If he could strongly associate baths with positive things early on, it would be that much easier to keep bath time simple later on.

He heats up the water to a pleasant temperature before filling the little tub, which is yellow with the shapes of ducks molded into the outside of the plastic all around the base. He only draws a few inches of water, just enough to get the job done, before undressing Jack and removing his dirty diaper. He’s already stripped off his own shirt, knowing that if he leaves it on, it’ll be soaked soon enough. He gives Jack’s bottom a quick wipe so that he doesn’t get any poop in the water, then lowers him in. Dean knows to keep his hand on Jack the whole time, because as much as he likes the bath, he gets disoriented in the tub when he isn’t being touched. For a few minutes, they just enjoy each other’s company, Jack acclimating to the warm water, Dean lightly rubbing circles on his chest, his tummy, his knees. The baby soap lathers easily, and while Dean washes him, he names each body part, then names them all again as he rinses them. When he names each one, he gives it a silly little wiggle, which makes Jack burble in contentment. He thinks Cas would like bathing Jack, though he probably wouldn’t be too wild about stripping down to do it. It’s kind of funny to imagine what Cas would look like trying to give Jack a bath while fully decked out in his trench coat and dress shirt, if he ignores the twinge behind his sternum when he pictures it.

He lays Jack down on a dry towel and dumps the dirty water in the sink. Dean uses another softer towel to pat Jack dry while he lays on the other towel, and he finds himself talking to the baby, as he often does, though this time, he’s more tuned in to his own words.

“Didn’t even splash me this time! You must be feeling extra polite today.” He never uses a babytalk voice with Jack, because it isn’t really in his nature. He never did that shit with Sam either.

Jack stares up at him with his wide blue eyes, and Dean feels convinced that Jack understands every word he’s saying. He wonders if that’s something other parents feel, or if it has to do with Jack’s powers.

“You’re a smart baby, huh? I bet you’re smarter than me, too. You’ll be like Sam, always explaining stuff to me about birds and bugs and rocks and planets and stuff.” Like Cas, he thinks. His heart hurts, looking at Jack, thinking about all the things Castiel would have wanted to show him, to share with him, that he never will. Things Dean doesn’t know, can’t know, wouldn’t even know how to convey. Jack’s going to miss out on so many things, because he was supposed to have Cas, but he’s stuck with Dean.

“You know, I’m kind of used to being the pinch hitter for lonely babies now. I’m self taught, so I’m sure I’ve got a lot of this stuff wrong. Probably gonna keep getting it wrong. But I’ll try my best, Jack.”

Jack gives what seems to Dean to be a pointed grunt of understanding, but it’s probably a coincidence of timing.

“I appreciate your candor. You wanna get comfy, hit the bricks?”

He takes Jack’s distracted silence as terse agreement, and carries him back to the nursery, enjoying his fresh scent and clean warmth against his chest as they go. Jack’s favorite sleepwear continues to be a sleepsack, so he slides him into a light green one that Sam picked up somewhere while he was out. Bedtime tends to work best if Dean can get Jack to fall asleep before he lays him down in his crib, so he reads him a few books. Dean’s not a big fan of repetition in kid’s books, because they tend to make him sleepy, too. He avoids the classic ‘Goodnight Moon’ for this reason (also because his mom used to read it to him, though he likes to pretend that doesn’t factor in), as well as most Dr. Seuss books, and a few Eric Carle books (looking at you, Brown Bear, Brown Bear). Dean’s favorite is The Runaway Bunny, by Margaret Wise Brown, who also wrote Goodnight Moon. He considers this the clearly superior book, mostly because he craves a plotline, even in a baby book. Dean is pretty sure that Cas would like the art, the way the bunnies look like they’d be soft to touch, just like the grass around them. The sky on the cover is close to the blue of Castiel’s eyes.

He also reads him Rainbow Fish, because he personally likes the iridescent effect of the art. The plot is kind of intense, for a kid’s book, but he likes it. Jack is young enough that he could read him passages from paperback thrillers and he’d be none the wiser, so a children’s book about sharing and community obligation is probably fine. When Jack falls asleep all tucked against him, he can physically feel it happen, like he gets heavier, softer. He rises slowly, so he doesn’t jostle him awake, and lays him down in his crib. The loss of contact makes Dean’s heart go to his throat, and he chides himself for being needier than a literal actual baby. If Cas were here, he wouldn’t feel so lonely, after Jack was all safe and sound in his crib. He could go pester Sam, maybe watch a movie together, but he'd just feel the shape of Castiel’s absence that much more distinctly, in all the spaces he slots into so easily, that are empty now. When Jack is awake, he has to imagine new spaces to carve Cas into. When Jack is asleep, all he has to do is remember the spaces Cas already knew how to inhabit, the ones he’ll never inhabit again.

So, Dean goes to his mattress, and he lays down. The lamp on Jack’s dresser is on, because he always uses that to read by before bed. Now he picks up what he’s come to refer to in his own mind as “Cas’s Book”, his annotated copy of The Montessori Baby, and he reads Cas’s margin notes until his eyelids start sagging. He makes note of the page number, even though he’s read it through multiple times now, and closes it. Before he turns off the light, he takes another long look at Jack, the serene slack expression on his tiny face. Something warms inside of Dean, just at the sight of him, and he lets himself relish that for a few seconds before turning off the lamp. Back on his mattress, Dean falls asleep embarrassingly quickly.

For all that he doesn’t talk about Cas, he dreams about him plenty.  

Chapter Text

Dean didn’t pick up the phone.

Cas doesn’t have enough quarters to ring him again, because if he doesn’t pick up this time, he’ll have to find more quarters.

He presses the last coins into the slot and calls Sam, and the phone rings, and rings, and rings.

And then, Sam’s voice, staticky and tired and exactly like Cas remembers it.

“Hey, you’ve got Sam. Who’s this?”

“Sam?” Cas breathes, and he hears a sort of choking sound on the other end.

“Cas? What the – Where are you?” Sam hisses, like he’s trying to keep his voice down.

He can barely give him the rough street address before Sam says ‘Don’t go anywhere, I’ll be there as soon as I can,’ and hangs up without another word.

Cas waits, and he worries. He understands the value of brevity, especially when the call isn’t free, but he can think of about a thousand questions he needs to ask.

How long has he been gone? Is Lucifer trapped in the alternate universe, or is he still at large? Did Mary survive the confrontation? Did Kelly really die in labor, or did they find a way to save her? Why didn’t Dean answer his phone – is he okay? Is Sam okay?

Of course, what he wants to know most of all, what he’s terrified to find out, is what has become of Jack. He isn’t stupid. He knows why Sam and Dean showed up to the cabin, seething and armed. Castiel wants to believe that they wouldn’t be able to go through with killing an innocent child, but that remains to be seen.

It takes Sam almost a full day to arrive, but Castiel is patient. Anything is better than the Empty. The air is cool and wet and he enjoys the sound of tires on the adjoining street as they roll by. The sun rises, and sets again. He can hear the Impala coming, and he associates the sound so strongly with Dean that he can’t think of anything else until the car is parked in the middle of the street, until he looks up and sees just Sam, launching himself out of the driver’s side door, tripping over himself to cross the last few yards between them.

“Cas!” Sam smacks a hand over his own forehead, reaches out and clasps Castiel’s shoulder with his other hand, blinks rapidly.

“Hello, Sam.”

“How did you? I thought you were?” Sam doesn’t seem to know how to complete his sentences, but Cas understands his questions well enough.

“I was in the Empty, but I’ve been…released. I suppose I was a bit more trouble than I was worth.”

Sam is apparently too confused by the sentiment to even compose a follow-up question. He shakes his head and leads Cas to the car. Cas tries not to dwell too much on Dean’s unexplained absence. The car doesn’t even smell like Dean, when he sits down in the passenger seat.

“You, uh, you’ve missed a lot,” Sam delivers a massive understatement once they’ve been on the road for about twenty minutes, breaking the numb silence they’ve been marinating in.

“I suppose I’ve missed a great deal, yes.” Castiel isn’t sure how to start asking Sam the things that are on his mind, considering that each question in and of itself bears the potential to be singularly devastating to recount. Better to let Sam go at his own pace. “Would you mind giving me a summary of what’s transpired in my absence?”

“Of course, I, uh. Wow. Where to start?” Sam laughs nervously, his hand goes to turn on the radio, but aborts the gesture halfway through and returns to the wheel.

“Wherever you think best.” Tell me what happened to Jack, or Dean, Cas wants to beg. But he can’t make himself ask. Can’t bear to think about the possibilities.

“Right. Okay. Well, Rowena’s dead, and uh, and Crowley. I don’t know if you caught that, in all the confusion before you, uh. But yeah, so they’re gone.”

Cas nods. Sam proceeds to tell him, in excruciating detail, about how Mary and Lucifer ended up trapped in the alternate universe, and about his research efforts thus far. It eats up a solid hour and a half of the journey. He figures that Sam will bring up something about Jack, next, even if only to explain that they’ve killed him, but he doesn’t, and Castiel’s heart sinks into his stomach. If he were well, why not mention it?

He’s familiar with Sam’s brand of avoidance. He walks tight circles around the things he isn’t saying, leaves them no room to breathe. He outlines them in well worn tracks, takes you on a scenic view of the things he isn’t saying, lets you press your nose up to the glass and stare at them until your breath fogs up the view. If he’s not mentioning it, it’s because he knows Castiel understands the implications of not mentioning it.

Dean is a different kind of avoidant. He gives everything a wide berth. Excludes whole words, whole concepts, from his vocabulary on principle, to ensure he never strays too close to any of the myriad things he is unwilling to explore. He lives his life slinking on the margins of the things he wants, the things he fears, the things he cannot bear to say. If Dean doesn’t mention something, all that indicates is that he himself isn’t ready to discuss it, and there could be any number of reasons why.

Sam hasn’t mentioned Dean. Sam hasn’t mentioned Jack. Cas isn’t going to push.

His lengthy explanation of the Lucifer situation is followed up by a somewhat meandering description of what’s been going on in the hunting community, which Castiel could care less about, and which Sam admits to only know about tertiarily, as he and Dean have been ‘taking a break from all that, besides taking calls from hunters to help with research’. Cas figures this must be a sign that things in the Winchester household are in particularly dire straits, considering that he cannot remember a time when either man ever actually committed to taking time off from hunting.

Silence creeps back over them as Sam’s ramblings about recent spikes in vampire activity taper off into yawns.

“I can drive, if you need to rest? I understand that you must have driven straight through, to reach me so quickly.”

“That’d be great.” Sam stifles a yawn against his sleeve, pulling over into the empty lot of a gas station. They trade seats, and within minutes, Sam is asleep. He sleeps for the next fifteen hours, and Cas can’t find it in himself to wake him. He sounded exhausted on the phone, and he looked even more run down in person. His skin is pale, he’s skinnier than Cas remembers, and he has dark circles under his eyes. If Cas didn’t know any better, he’d say he looks just a shade better than he did when he was suffering from hallucinations of Lucifer after his time in the cage.

Sam wakes up a little while after they cross the border into Kansas, and they switch positions again.

The silence between them is back, but it feels charged, and Sam won’t stop drumming his fingers against the steering wheel.

“You know, um. Dean’s gonna tell you, probably, that he’s been fine.”

“He is?” Cas will take whatever information Sam will give him at this point. He’s thought about almost nothing other than Dean, since Sam fell asleep. He’s forced himself to stop thinking about Jack, since, based on his absence from the conversation, he’s not likely to be a going concern.

“Yeah, he’ll say that. But um. He’s been really fucked up, since you died. And he’s probably not going to be honest with you about it, but I just have to make sure you understand that before we get in there. He’s in a really…a really delicate place, and he’s doing a lot better than he was, but with everything he’s had to do…it’s just been a lot for him to process.”

Cas swallows and looks out the window at the tall grass in the fallow field that’s whizzing by. He can’t say he agrees with their decision to kill Jack, but it’s his own fault for charging into that alternate universe to subdue Lucifer. If he’d just been there for Jack, none of this would have happened. Of course Dean is barely functional. He had to murder a child. He felt he had no choice. He didn’t know any better.

“Right. Of course.” Cas tries to keep his voice even. Distant.

“He hasn’t been drinking, which, honestly that was my biggest worry,” Sam huffs, as if reliving his relief in real time. Castiel tries to hide his own surprise. If there’s one thing that’s been historically true of Dean, it’s been his reliance on alcohol to see him through the lows in his life. “But getting him to sleep, to eat? It’s kind of a constant battle. He doesn’t really even seem to notice, how resistant he is to it. It’s like he can’t even remember he’s supposed to be doing it, half the time. He’s too preoccupied.”

“Preoccupied?”

“I mean, he stays busy, in his own way, but he just doesn’t do anything for himself anymore. He doesn’t ever just do something because he enjoys it. It’s like living with a ghost, sometimes.”

“Thank you, for…preparing me.” Sam casts him a sidelong glance. Clears his throat.

“And look. I think he’s going to be over the moon, that you’re back – I told him you called, and he practically shoved me out the door, told me if I stopped to sleep at a motel or something on the way he’d kick my ass,” Sam chuckles, but it’s a fraction of his usual warmth. “I just didn’t want you to walk into this blind.”

“He didn’t…didn’t want to come, with you?” Cas thought he understood, but the more he hears, the less it all makes sense. If Dean was so eager to have Castiel back, why wasn’t he in the car right now?

“He uh…Cas, he hasn’t left the bunker in months. I finally got him to start taking walks outside, but he doesn’t go out for more than ten minutes at a time, and just a few times a week. Never goes more than twenty yards from the door. He’s scared, and I get it, to an extent, but I’ve been going out, I’ve been getting groceries and jogging in the morning and everything, and I’ve been totally fine. He’s paranoid. It makes sense, with everything that’s happened, but I’m not sure it’s ever going to let up. I don’t want to blow this out of proportion, but yeah. He’s…he’s real different, Cas.”

“I’m just glad he’s okay, all things considered.” Somehow, it’s the truth. No matter what, knowing that Dean is alive and unharmed is always going to soothe something inside of Castiel.

The last bit of the drive seems to pass much more quickly as the scenery becomes more familiar. The closer they get to the bunker, the more anxious Castiel feels. He’s going to see Dean again, is going to see whatever he’s become in Castiel’s absence, whatever strange new shape his grief has twisted him into, and he isn’t sure how to be ready for that. Supposes he can’t ever be ready for it.

They pull into the garage, and Sam unlocks the bunker and ushers Cas inside.

“Huh, he’s almost always waiting around by the stairs when I get back from being out. Must be busy,” Sam comments, dropping his keys on the map table.

“Dean?” Castiel calls out, a few decibels louder than his normal speaking voice, so that it will carry through the labyrinthine bunker. Sam whips around and shushes him.

“I’d keep it down, Dean’ll tear you a new one if you disturb the peace.” Castiel nods, dumbfounded. He’s never known Dean to particularly care about preserving a sense of calm. Sam’s right. Dean must be quite different indeed.

“Understood,” Castiel replies, dipping his head in a nod of agreement. This seems to placate Sam’s momentary panic, and he presses his lips into a hesitant smile.

“You can probably find him in the library at this time of day, or the kitchen.” Sam heads to the bathroom, which makes sense, considering he probably hasn’t relieved himself since before he retrieved Castiel.

Being in the bunker again shouldn’t feel so natural. It should be hazy, surreal. He hasn’t been here in a long time, even before he was killed. The last time he was here was before he absconded to deal with Kelly on his own. Before he even knew what she and her child would come to mean in his life. What Jack would become. Would have become, if he’d lived long enough to protect him.

The library is empty, save for Dean’s laptop on one of the tables.

The kitchen is also empty, though clean. The lingering scent of bacon and eggs and toast and coffee is the only evidence that anyone has been in the room today. At least he’s eaten, even without Sam here to remind him he should, Cas thinks as he drifts back out into the hall.

He figures the next place he should check is Dean’s room, given that Sam’s suggestions yielded nothing. When he gets there, the door isn’t latched, and the lights are off. He walks in and flicks the light on. He’s surprised to see the bed frame, completely bare. The mattress has been removed entirely, and the air in the room isn’t stagnant, per se, but it carries an uninhabited dustiness, a settled emptiness, that makes him think Dean may not have even been in this room for several days.

Castiel is about to give up his search for Dean, to just go find Sam again and see if he can locate the man, when he hears Dean’s voice coming from behind him. He turns around, but Dean isn’t in the hallway. He hears it again, low and calm, muffled somewhat. It’s coming from behind the door across the hall. Maybe Dean is talking on the phone?

Unable to put off looking at Dean for even a second longer, now that he knows where he is, Cas opens the door without bothering to knock, and if he needed to breathe, the air would have been knocked right out of his lungs at the sight of the room before him.

It is a typical Men of Letters guest room, in its dimensions, its clean lighting, its white walls and sensible floors. In no other way is it remotely similar to the cold austere quarters of the other bedrooms. To his left, crammed in the corner, is a mattress. To his right, the dresser he and Kelly picked out at IKEA, and behind that, the changing table they bought, pressed into the far corner. In the center of the room is the crib he built, and behind that is the gliding rocker he bought. In the back corner there is a bookshelf, some of the units filled in with bins brimming with toys and stuffed animals, other units with neat stacks of books. On top of the bookshelf, there’s a small yellow plastic tub. The far wall is painted in a near exact replica of the mural Kelly made in the cabin’s nursery, but the letters are all more square, like Dean’s style of lettering.

At the changing table, with his back to the room, his back to the door, is Dean. His bare back is exposed, as he’s only wearing a dark gray pair of sweatpants, the kind that cinch a little around the ankles. He’s got socks on. Castiel can’t really remember a time when he’s seen Dean dressed in so little, unless he’s recently showered or something.

Dean must be too engrossed in what he’s doing to have noticed the door open.

“Oh, I know,” Dean says quietly, commiserating. At first, Cas wonders if he’s speaking to him, but he goes on. “If you didn’t want me to have to give you the full wipe down, you shoulda thought of that before you blasted crap halfway up your back, man.”

A baby lets out an indignant wail, and Dean shushes him before continuing.

“Yeah, I know, I know. But hey! Hard part’s over. You’re fresh as a daisy, kid.” He pulls a diaper from one of the lower shelves on the changing table, though Cas can only see the movement as obstructed by Dean’s own form. His legs lead him further into the room, over to the end of the changing table, to the left of Dean’s elbow.

Here’s the surreality he was expecting, all of it, all at once. Cas briefly entertains the idea that he never got out of the Empty at all, that this is some sort of hallucination, some kind of trick. Except, when Dean registers his presence beside him, he knows he’s wrong. No entity in all of creation, no matter how powerful, could simulate the wash of emotion that cascades across Dean’s features in this moment.

Dean flickers from shock, to fear, to agony, to gratitude, into some unnamable thing, something that crackles like happiness and stings like pain, something that is gone nearly as soon as it crosses his face. As if none of it ever happened, his face is neutral again, if a bit pinched. He redirects his attention back to the baby, but his eyes keep sliding back over to Castiel.

And Castiel wonders what Sam was on about in the car. Sure, Dean seems different, but not in a bad way. He might be wary to leave to the bunker, but that’s to be expected, given the circumstances. He isn’t eating or sleeping regularly because he’s taking care of an infant. If Dean were as despondent as Sam had made him out to be, his reaction to Castiel would have lasted longer than ten fraught silent seconds of staring.

“Hey, Jack,” Dean murmurs to the infant as he finishes securing the diaper in place. “I’m going to get you set up in your crib for a few minutes, okay? I need to, um. I need to go do something out in the hallway for a few minutes, but I’ll be back before you know it. Alright? Alright.” He lifts Jack up elegantly and eases him down into the crib, now pointedly not looking at Castiel. Dean’s hand lingers on Jack for a few seconds, but he stands up and silently motions for Cas to follow him into the hallway, with a calculated tilt of his head toward the door. Still reeling from everything he’s learned, but trying to follow Dean’s calm and composed lead, he trails after him into the hall. Dean shuts the door softly behind him, and as if a switch has been flipped, Dean comes completely apart.

He grabs Castiel’s coat by the lapels with both hands and collapses against him, drops his full weight down through the tension in his wrists, hangs off of him, face pressed into the place where Castiel’s neck meets his shoulder. It’s all Cas can do to support his body, and he finds himself clutching Dean’s back, cradling the base of his skull, pressing Dean’s torso into his own to keep him from sliding down onto the floor.

After a few minutes like this, Dean’s labored gasps for breath hot against Cas’s neck, he seems to regain some of his composure, enough to stand under his own power again. He’s still clinging to Castiel’s coat, fists bunching the fabric, but he pulls away enough so they can look at one another.

“You stupid son of a bitch,” Dean whispers, but his chin is trembling, and his green eyes are wet with unshed tears. “You stupid son of a bitch,” Dean huffs, shoving his collarbone with his still clenched fists on each emphasized word, though he’s kind of smiling, kind of laughing. His tears escape, when his smile changes the shape of his face, breaking the surface tension that was holding them back.

“Dean – “ Castiel can’t keep up with whatever this is, whatever Dean’s feeling. It doesn’t make sense.

“Shut up, Cas.” Dean unclenches his fists, but keeps his flat palms pressed hard against Castiel’s chest. “You have any idea how bad you fucked up? Any idea at all?” He doesn’t wait for Cas to answer, just buries his face in Castiel’s chest, over his sternum, between where his hands are anchored to him. Castiel lays a tentative hand on Dean’s shoulder blade, and he sags into the touch, melts against him, forearms collapsing against Cas’s abdomen as he seals their bodies together. Seeming to realize his own distractedness, Dean pulls back again, holds Castiel’s gaze, his face blotchy and wet, his eyes hard. “You left us, Cas.”

“I didn’t have a choice, Lucifer was – “

“Crowley had it handled. What the hell were you thinking, man? You storm in there, and what, think you’re gonna show the Devil who’s boss?”

“He was going to kill you, I – “

“We had it covered, Cas! You had other priorities, and you knew that, and you got yourself killed anyway.” Dean’s face droops as he relives it all, Cas can watch him reliving it, in the way his eyes are tracking movement that isn’t there, chasing memories. “You left Jack. You left us.” You left me, Dean’s eyes seem to add when they drift up to meet Castiel’s again.

“You’re right,” Cas can’t help but agree, when he’s looking at him like that. Jack needed him, and he let himself get sucked into trying to neutralize Lucifer instead of being there for him.

“Yeah, I know.” Dean pulls away, and Cas misses the warmth of his hands. “Man, I sat there by your body and I…I didn’t know how I was ever gonna get up, ever again. I went inside that house, and Sam was trying to get Kelly back, doing chest compressions, the whole nine yards. And Jack was just laying there. Hadn’t been touched, covered in all sorts of shit, wasn’t even crying.” Dean swallows hard, looks over at the closed nursery door. “You know what I went there to do, Cas. You know. And I couldn’t fucking do it. I got him clean, got him warm, got him fed. And I was thinking, the whole time thinking, I can’t do this.”

Dean’s crying, and Cas is surprised to feel himself crying, too. He wasn’t aware he was capable of that, physiologically, but if there were ever a time, this would be it.

“He fucking Vulcan mind-melded with me, man. He talked into my brain. You wanna know what he said?” All Cas can do is nod, and the motion shakes more tears loose. “He asked me if I was you, Cas. And I told him no, asked him why he wanted to know. And he said you were his dad, Cas. His dad. And I had to tell him you were dead.”

Castiel wants to reach out and touch Dean, because he’s shaking so hard that it’s clipping his words off in strange places, like a scuffed CD skipping, but he isn’t sure he’s allowed to touch him, isn’t sure Dean wants that right now. But his hands burn with the want of it.

“I’m sorry, Dean.” Cas isn’t sure there’s adequate language at his disposal to convey how sorry he is. From the sour look on Dean’s face, it seems like he might agree with Castiel’s assessment of this inadequacy.

“Should be apologizing to him, Cas.” He jerks his head toward the closed door, looks down at his feet.

“I should,” Cas concedes, wiping his face, something he’s never really had to do before. It’s more intuitive than he thought it would be. “But I’m also apologizing to you. You needed me, and I wasn’t there. I fear that’s becoming a bit of a habit of mine.”

“So? Break the habit.” Dean sets his jaw, eyes blazing. “Stop leaving.”

“I want to,” Cas admits, and it doesn’t sound like enough. It isn’t enough.

“That’s not good enough.” Cas wonders if Dean can read his mind. Maybe Jack gave him some kind of residual ability. Maybe spending so much time together, all cooped up like this, the power just seeped into him at some point, and he didn’t even notice. Or maybe Dean just knows him that well, always has, and Cas hasn’t been paying as much attention as he thought.

At the thought of Jack, his attention is pulled toward him, towards the door that stands between him and this beautiful creature, his son. His son who he never thought he’d see, his son who he believed was dead. And it’s like Dean can read his mind again.

“Cas, I’m not opening that door,” Dean grits out, and Cas’s attention snaps back to Dean. “I’m not opening that door until you promise me you aren’t leaving. I will not let him get to know you, to trust you, to love you, just to have you ripped away again.” Dean exhales sharply. “Do it to me all you want, Cas. But I won’t let you do that to him.”

“I promise.” Cas holds his gaze, pushes as much sincerity into his expression as he can. “I won’t leave. I won’t leave either of you.”

“I mean it,” Dean warns, his body rigid, like he’s gearing up for a fight. “My dad, he…there’s so much awful shit he did to us, but the worst thing? He’d leave us, and he’d say it was for us, to protect us, to keep us safe. And it never was. Never. Even if he’d been right, it was wrong, leaving us like that. I won’t be that, for Jack.”

“Dean, I promise, I won’t leave.”

“Even if you think it’s for our own good?” His voice is like ice.

“Even then.” Cas does touch him, then. Can’t resist any longer. He only means to reach out and wipe a tear from Dean’s cheek. It’s been glistening on his cheekbone for some time now, perched, heavy. He can’t stand it, what it represents. Can’t stand that he’s the one who made Dean cry like this. He remembers, after Alastair broke loose and nearly killed Dean, how he cried in front of Castiel in that hospital room. How he’d hated seeing his tears then, too, and hadn’t yet understood the simple reason why. Hadn’t understood that it hurts, to see someone you love in so much anguish.

Castiel’s hand connects with Dean’s cheek, and his thumb brushes the tear away, and that’s where reality stops lining up with Castiel’s intentions, because that’s when Dean grabs his lapels again and drags him down into a desperate kiss.

It doesn’t feel anything like Castiel imagined it would. It feels like Dean forgot how to breathe, like he needs to suck the oxygen out of Castiel’s lungs instead. He’s making this wounded sound in his throat, like the kiss is pressure on a bruise. Castiel isn’t sure what he’s doing, personally, but he knows he doesn’t want the moment to end. He wants to keep breathing through each other like this as long as Dean will let him, as long as Dean needs it.

While their mouths are connected, Cas can’t help but process some of what’s transpired in these tumultuous minutes out in the hall, and the significantly calmer but no less revelatory minutes in the nursery. How had he spent the entire drive back to the bunker convinced that Dean had done anything at all to harm Jack? Could Castiel claim to know Dean at all, if he believed him capable of such monstrosity? After everything, Dean isn’t even angry on his own behalf. Doesn’t even resent the way his life has molded around this infant he never intended to become surrogate father to.

And isn’t that a thought? Because for all that Cas intended to be Jack’s father, it seems that Jack already has one in Dean. Sam may be right, that Dean is struggling in some respects, but he wonders if it’s more that none of them have ever had children of their own, and have never really spent much time with people who love their children so fully, so ferociously, that it eclipses their own life for a time. If anyone is capable of such all encompassing loyalty, such consuming love, it is Dean. Castiel is sure of it.

The kiss doesn’t so much end as it wilts, each one of them wrung out with the intensity of it, drooping away from the other at gravity’s insistence. Castiel’s hand remains on Dean’s face, and Dean’s fists stay tangled in his coat’s lapels.

Something softens around Dean’s eyes, and he’s smiling, and he’s flushed, and he’s breathless, and his tear tracks shine in the warm light of the hall. Cas isn’t sure what to say, isn’t sure he remembers how to speak, isn’t sure that Dean didn’t siphon out his voice during their kiss.

“Been out here awhile, I guess. Jack’s probably wondering where the hell I got off to.” Dean casts a fond expression towards the door as he mentions his son’s name. He turns his eyes back to Castiel’s, something mischievous sparking in all that green. “C’mon, Cas. You ready to meet our son?”

It slips out so smoothly, so simply, like it’s something Dean must think all the time, must say so much in his head that his tongue isn’t afraid of the shape. It slices through Castiel more cleanly than an angel blade, more totally than Naomi’s sleek tools. He is rewired by the sound of it, is vivisected by it, rearranged down to the molecule, down to the micrometer, down to the wavelength. Our Son, Castiel’s brain exists to echo those two words. His grace is a mirror, reflecting the moment into itself, a kaleidoscope of all the emotions Castiel wasn’t created to feel.

Dean doesn’t seem to need an answer, or perhaps takes Castiel’s expression of wonder as answer enough, because he slides the door open quietly, socked feet crossing the floor without a sound. He stops beside the crib, and he waits for Castiel to join him there.

For a while, they just stand there, looking down at him in his crib. He’s asleep, and Castiel marvels at how small he is. Imagines how much smaller he must have been, when he was born, when Dean held him for the first time. Dean was the first person to hold our son, Cas thinks, warmth billowing through him like a summer breeze through linen on a clothesline.

Dean reaches down and scoops him up. Jack’s face contracts as he wakes, and Cas relishes the feeling of his consciousness blossoming out from his tiny form.

“He’s perfect,” Castiel sighs, basking in the contentment that radiates out from his soul as Dean cradles him to his chest.

“Yeah, he is.” Dean smiles. That mischievous look is back, and he ducks down, catches Castiel’s eyes, draws his attention up with a tilt of his head. “What do you think? You ready to hold him?”

He can’t speak, so he just nods. He arranges his arms to receive the baby, nervous all of a sudden, afraid he’s not going to do it right. That Jack will feel Castiel’s embrace and reject him at once.

“Hey, Jack. Remember Castiel? We thought he was gone, but he came back, just for you. You’re pretty lucky, you know,” he murmurs down at him, shifting him to facilitate a smooth transfer. “This is your dad. This is Cas,” Dean explains softly as he releases his weight into Castiel’s waiting arms.

Castiel holds him, and he stares at his bleary little blue eyes, and for a moment, nothing exists but the two of them. But only for a moment, because Dean’s words sink in, one at a time, then all at once. ‘Just for you’, he said. ‘This is your dad’, he said.

“I didn’t just come back for him, Dean,” Cas whispers. “I came back for you.”

Dean hums in acknowledgement, but it cracks halfway through, and he covers it up by clearing his throat. “Guess I’m, uh, pretty lucky, too.” Cas spares him a smile. He knows Dean probably has a bit of adjusting to do, given the circumstances. That’s okay. Castiel is nothing if not patient.

“And he already knows his dad, Dean. You’re his dad.” Dean goes so white, Castiel briefly worries that he’ll pass out, but he doesn’t, just sways a little. Holds onto the edge of the crib for a moment.

“Nah,” Dean looks away. He must think Castiel is willing to drop this. He isn’t.

“Yes, you are. You’ve raised him. That doesn't change, just because I’m here, too.” Cas pauses, waits for Dean to look back over. He knows Dean can’t help himself, that he’ll look back eventually, and he does. When their eyes meet, he continues. “In the hallway. You called him our son. And he is.”

The color returns to Dean’s face, and he looks down at Jack, peaceful and curious in Castiel’s arms. It looks like he imagined it would, Cas holding their son, and somehow it’s even better than that.

Dean smiles, might keep right on smiling for the rest of his life, if he keeps getting to look at Cas and Jack. Might smile first thing every morning, knowing Sam is safe and Cas is safe and Jack is safe. That they’re all more than safe. Happy, even.

“Yeah, Cas. He is.”

Chapter Text

Somehow, in the last two days, I have written a substantial sequel to this fic. It's called 'joy was just a thing that he was raised on', and you can get there fastest through the 'next in series' link on this page. 

It's substantially lighter in tone, in my opinion, and is entirely Sam POV (a real departure from my usual). It also takes place about four years after the ending of this fic. 

Big thanks to MyDepressionIsChronicMyTitsIconic for sparking the idea for this new fic through their comment suggestion :) The idea got its hooks in me and just wouldn't let go. 

If you're looking for something more depressing than this fic, let me know and I'll recommend something from my back catalog for you. If you want something less depressing, I think this new installment will be right up your alley, but if for some reason it isn't, go check out 'clouds got in my way', which is probably the least angsty thing I've ever written (still relatively angsty) and follows the babysitting adventures of Bobby Singer ca. 1991. 

If you have big dreams for a fic that you want to become reality, drop me a comment and I'll see what I can do!