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I feel the force hit my chest, knocking the unused air out of my lungs. The ripping of the fabric does nothing to slow the weapon from tearing into my skin. Piercing through veins and chipping ribs as the diagonally angled blade heads for its goal. The pull on my skin and the simmering heat from where blood is seeping into the hollowness that is my chest hardly overwhelmed the electric pulse that shot through me when the cold, silver blade struck bone. As the hyperactive muscle is slashed and my heart lacerated, I smile.
My grace halts its futile attempt to repel the damage from the divine weapon and the fragments of bone are left to course through my bloodstream. An invisible hand is dragging me out of my vessel into a cold unknown. The pain is so intense it’s almost pleasant. It’s all I feel, if I can still feel anything at all. I force it back for one last glimpse of earth, for one last tension-filled stare off with the righteous man. He doesn’t look back at me, his eyes reddening from crying, his gaze pointing daggers at the blade. I’ll miss you, I think to myself.
“Dean... goodbye,” Cas croaks, before the bright blue glow blinds them. Dean falls to his knees right where he’s standing. It only takes Sam a second to recognise the pain of losing the one you love and, with a cold, trained precision, he kills the demon and the hunter he possessed.
Pulling an angel blade out of a vessel’s chest never took so much strength. The weapon leaves no wound and when Sam closes Cas’ eyes it almost seems as if he’s just asleep.
But angels don’t sleep.
And this time, like Cas knew very well, there’d be no resurrection. None of them could escape mortality with Billy playing death and Chuck and Amara being god knows where. Once again, the brothers were completely alone.
“Sammy?” Dean’s shaky voice snaps Sam back to reality. He lifts his head from where it rested on his arms, his knees still tucked in.
“Yeah?” He replies, his voice hoarse. His brother’s body is still convulsing to supply his lungs with the oxygen his sobbing denied them. Eyes now more red than green stare through him as he looks Dean in the eyes.
It breaks Sam heart to see his brother like that, he can’t remember ever seeing him that way. His brother had always been there for him to lean on, especially when John wasn’t. With Jess, with Bobby, with Charlie, with Kevin. It just made him colder, more protective. For Dean to break like this must be the worst form of torture. Something neither hell, nor purgatory could offer him.
The brothers don’t notice, their shirts already soaked with each other’s tears, but the clouds pour down rain as though the sky is crying for the death of the angel. The outside cold feels like a gust of wind compared to the inner blizzard of loss.
Dean licks his lips and says under his breath “I wanna wake up now.” The pitch of his voice rises with desperation, “when are we going to wake up?”
Sam tries to stop the unbearable questions, “Dean-”, but his brother doesn’t hear him.
“This is a nightmare, it has to be,” Dean continues, his voice turning into a whimper.
The rain stops, the universe moves on, their aching muscles urge them to do the same. It’s Dean who gets to his feet first. He’s unsure of his footing but determined to reach Cas. Sam can only follow, they know what they have to do.
“I’m sorry Cas.” Are the first words Dean speaks after they numbly prepared the hunter’s funeral.
“Yeah, me too,” Sam adds, at a loss for better words. He lights the match, his hands shaking. He looks over to Dean and, after he nods, tosses it to the pyre.
The flames are a warm yellow, like the sun that’s soon to set. They turn a fluorescent blue when they reach Cas and Dean digs his fingers into the trench coat. He couldn’t let everything that is Cas just burn, as though he never existed. Like his mother’s picture and his father’s car, he’ll carry around a piece of Cas.