Chapter Text
1.
The first sense to come back is sound.
The rushing in his ears. Sam’s breathing. His own heartbeat.
It takes another minute to feel the seat of the impala through his jeans. The steering wheel in his bare hands.
“Well.” Sam’s voice lands like a gunshot in the silence. “That was weird.”
They’d been driving: Dean can feel the pedal under his foot. Floored, even though he’s sure they aren’t moving. But they had been going fast, off—off a cliff? No, into the dark—the bunker’s tunnel—
And now—light, blinding. He throws a hand over his eyes, and Sam swears, apologizes, covering the light with his palm. Red lines glow between his fingers.
A phone.
They had called someone, before they went into the dark. No, someone had called them, and Sam had answered. He’d started writing down a Sumerian ritual, that would take them—
Here.
Nowhere.
The Empty.
Where Cas is.
Braced for it, Dean turns on the headlights. The beams fade out a few feet ahead of them, illuminating exactly nothing. No objects, no texture. No floating dust. He takes his foot off the gas, and presses down again slowly. They either lurch forwards, or start bouncing slightly in place.
“Sorry,” Dean mutters, patting the steering wheel. “Sorry.”
Rowena. Rowena was the one who had found the invocation of Inanna, which Sam had paired with a Greek ritual to wake the sleeping dead. And Rowena had thought they’d need to go through the portal in a vessel decked out with the appropriate protection symbols, after they bounced off when they tried to walk.
Baby has always gotten them where they need to go.
“Are we actually moving?” Sam asks, craning his neck to look out the window. “I can’t tell—oh, shit!” He slams his foot down like he’s hitting the brakes, and Dean mirrors him on reflex: it isn’t until they’re stopped that he sees the wall in front of them.
It’s the same shade of dark as everything else, and wide enough that he can’t see the sides or top. It’s only visible at all because the headlights don’t illuminate anything past it.
“Well, crap.”
Sam leans forward. “Is that—is that a door? Can you turn us a little more to the left?”
Dean backs up a few feet, then approaches again at an angle, slow as he can.
It does look like a door. An open one, leading to more nothing.
“Well,” Dean says. “We probably can’t fit the car through that.”
It’s a wide opening, but not that wide.
“Is it safe to leave it?”
Of course it’s not safe. But they also just drove through a portal to super-hell, and a few weeks ago they fought God, so the question is probably rhetorical.
“Think positive, Sammy. If we sink out there, maybe we’ll get lucky and be eaten by Scarlett Johansson.”
“Ha.”
They could leave the headlights on. They’re brighter than flashlights, and might help them see a little longer. But there’s nothing they could use to jump her, if the battery dies.
So when Sam turns on his flashlight, Dean turns them off.
The ground outside the car is solid under his feet, though he can’t say what it feels like. Nothing like hard asphalt, or soft dirt, or shifting sands.
“Need anything from the trunk?”
Dean checks his pockets. Angel blade. Demon knife. Silver ring still on his hand. “No. You got the Colt?”
Sam raises it, wiggling its newly repaired barrel.
Okay.
Wait.
Dean leans back in, grabbing his jacket from the backseat. The one from—the one he’d been wearing when—and maybe it won’t matter, but maybe they’ll need some—blood or—anyway, it’s not cold here, but he still feels safer when he puts it on.
“I’m sorry, Baby,” he says, tracing the hood with his fingertips. They catch in a dent he hasn’t hammered out yet. “We’re coming back for you.”
When Sam closes the car door, Dean jumps. It doesn’t echo, but he can’t shake the feeling that the sound is traveling great distances. The car door slam heard ‘round the Empty.
He leaves his own door open.
2.
The doorway in the wall is about seven feet high, and just wide enough for them to walk through it side-by-side. They usually go through doors single-file, to check for threats, but now—now they walk next to each other, the way Dean walked Sam to his first day of school a dozen times over, clutching his sticky fingers. They’re not holding hands, but Dean can feel his brother’s body heat to his right. Maybe it’s Sam who is walking Dean, this time.
Sam holds his flashlight—still illuminating an awe-inspiring amount of fuck-all—so Dean leaves his own off, keeping his hands on his weapons. It would be easy for something to get the drop on them, but they won’t catch him unprepared.
If there is anything here.
No point in wasting batteries, either way.
“Hey Dean.” Sam points the light at him for a moment. “Do you remember that time we got high and watched The Descent?”
“Was that the one where all the British chicks got murdered in a cave by those blind Gollum-y fuckers?”
“Yeah.”
“Then no.” Dean looks around again, but if there are more walls for a creepy crawly to climb on, he can’t see them. Though that might be because he’s still blinking spots out of his vision. “No, I don’t remember that, and I never will.”
Maybe they should have followed the wall, instead of going forwards. Or maybe that door was the way out of the Empty, instead of the way in: maybe they’re getting further from Cas with every step.
“Did we get the ritual wrong?” he asks, a few minutes later. “In every other afterlife there’s, you know. The souls of the dead.”
“This isn’t an after life, though, is it? If you go to Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, you’re still conscious. Cas said here they just sleep.”
Dean did not need to be reminded of that. “Well, he shouldn’t be sleeping now. If you did your job right.” But even awake, Cas could be anywhere. At the other end of an expanding universe.
“We’re going to find him, Dean.”
They have to find him. Cas’s life does not end in a basement, with nothing left but a bloody handprint. Dean reaches up to his shoulder, but doesn’t touch it: he knows full well how hard it is to get dried blood out of fabric, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that it will flake off at the slightest agitation.
“Do you think there’s one Empty per universe?” Sam asks. “Or do you think they’re all here? Every Castiel, every Michael… every Lucifer.”
Dean shudders. “Let’s hope not. One of each is enough for me, thanks.” Every other Castiel had followed orders, Chuck had said. If he hadn’t been lying, that means that, in every universe put together, there was only ever one Cas.
“Yeah, it’d be—hold up.” Sam catches Dean’s arm. “Something’s there.”
Some one, it turns out, as they get closer. She’s perfectly visible past the edge of the flashlight beam, despite neither giving off nor reflecting any light.
“Meg?” Dean asks, at the same time Sam says, “It’s the Empty.”
“Wrong,” says the thing that may or may not be Meg. “You’re not in the Empty just yet. You’re in the driveway. A liminal space. A transition.” She wiggles her shoulders a bit. “I’m familiar with that feeling. Kind of thought dying would resolve it. Kind of thought dying would mean I didn’t have to deal with you two anymore, either.”
Sam shines his light past her, and Dean is able to make out another wall, with another door. It’s as high as the other, but only half as wide.
This one is closed.
“The Empty.” Dean points. “It’s through there?”
“Eventually,” she says.
Trying not to be obvious about it, he adjusts his grip on the demon knife. “We’re looking for Cas. Are you going to let us through?”
She doesn’t make any move to step aside. It’s not as though they can’t just walk around her—there’s been no sign of the ground disappearing yet, at any rate—but Dean doubts it’s that simple.
“Of course,” she says. “One of you.”
Sam turns his light from the door back to her, but if the brightness hurts her eyes, she doesn’t react. “What? What are you talking about?”
“That door isn’t big enough for both of you. That’s not how this works. One of you walks one way, one the other.”
Oh. Sure. That doesn’t make Dean suspicious at all. “Why?”
“The ways of the Empty are perfect.” Her mouth twists. “If you drop something, it falls. If you put a leaf in water, it floats. Cut off a vampire’s head, it dies. If you walk through this gate? You do it alone.”
“Yeah? And what happens to the one who goes through?”
“He’ll reach more gates.”
“And the one who turns around?” Sam asks.
“He goes back through the first gate, gets in your car, and goes through that portal to wherever you started. I suppose he could make another attempt, if he waits for the other to die.”
“Yeah, screw this.”
She doesn’t stop Dean when he elbows her out of the way, or when Sam matches his steps forward. Dean reaches for the handle—
And the door is gone.
“I told you,” Meg says.
Dean hits the wall, just in case it’s an illusion. It feels solid under his hands, but that doesn’t mean much when the door can disappear.
“There’s got to be a spell,” he says. “Or a sigil.” All their ingredients are at the bunker, but he’s still full of blood: there's almost always a solution, if he's willing to bleed for it.
“There is a spell. It’s a really difficult one called one of you goes back. ”
Sam is swinging the flashlight around like it’s going to illuminate an answer. “Okay, Dean, you get the car and—”
“No.” No, no, absolutely not. “He came here for me, Sam. Me and Jack.” And Dean won’t survive having lost all three of them. But Sam might. Sam might also punch him in the face if he says that out loud.
“If this is some sort of suicidal—”
“It’s not.” He thinks he means it. Cas died so Dean could live, and he’s going to.
Just as soon as Cas is there to live with him.
“If I don’t come back,” he starts, but Sam cuts him off.
“I’m not going to just leave you!”
“Damn right you’re not. If I don’t come back in three days, get help. Rowena, Eileen, whoever’s left. Tell them Cas and I are stuck in limbo, or the Empty, and that I have full confidence that they can get us out without getting themselves dead.” Sam is still looking at him, jaw clenched in the way that he thinks makes him look tough. “I need to find him.”
He never really explained what happened in that basement. He doesn’t know how much Sam knows about—about Cas. He doesn’t want to know how much Sam knows: then they might have to talk about it. But maybe, maybe, he knows just enough to not argue.
“Fine,” Sam says, more air than word. “Fine. But you’re taking the Colt.”
“You still have to get back to the car. You might need it.”
“You want me to leave you, you take the Colt.”
“Fine.” Dean holds out the demon knife. “Then you’re taking this. If I can shoot something, I won’t need to stab it as well.”
“Okay,” Sam says. “Okay. Okay.” And then he’s pulling Dean into a hug. “Three days, and not a minute longer.”
Time runs slower in Hell than on Earth: it could be the same here. Three days could take a decade.
Or maybe it will only take a minute, and he won't have time to move forward.
“I’ll see you soon, Sammy.”
Sam nods, sharply, first to Dean, then to Meg.
And then he turns.
Dean and Meg watch his flashlight grow smaller and smaller, until it blinks out. Hopefully it means Sam made it through the door. Dean doesn’t hear the car start, but he has to believe Sam will get there safely, or else he’ll lose his fucking mind.
“What happens to you, when I go through?” he asks Meg. “Are you stuck standing here for eternity?” That would be its own kind of torture. Maybe she has it coming—she’d be standing with Ellen and Jo’s blood on her hands. But she’d had Cas’s life in those hands, too.
He doesn’t know what she deserves.
Since when do we get what we deserve, Adam had said.
Adam hadn’t. Cas hadn’t. And Dean can only make one of those things right.
“I don’t know.” Meg wiggles her fingers. “It’s weird, how I’m appearing now. This isn’t what I really look like. Meg isn’t really my name. I don’t think I was here before you two showed up, and I’ll probably go back to wherever I was when you leave. But at least right now, I have a purpose.”
“If all it took to kill you before was walking through a door…”
Meg laughs. “You can’t kill me. I’m already dead.” She gestures at the door like she’s a magician presenting a completely ordinary object. “Go on, then.”
The knob is heavy, but even when Dean turns on his flashlight, he can’t tell what it’s made of.
“What was your name, anyway?”
He doesn’t look back when he asks, so he doesn’t know what expression she’s making. Or if she’s lying when she says, “I don’t remember.”
Yeah.
He turns the knob.
“Give Clarence a kiss for me,” Meg adds, and he can’t see her, but she must be able to see his face, because she laughs.
And then Dean takes a step forward.
Nothing changes. The door doesn’t close behind him. But he is still sure she’s gone.
He is very, very alone.
3
A light in the dark means nothing if the dark is empty and infinite, but it’s still unsettling when his flashlight dies. He tries holding one hand out in front of him, but there is nothing, and continues to be nothing, and at some point it just starts making him feel off-balance. So instead he traces the engravings on the barrel of the Colt, seeing if he can memorize them by touch. He tries humming, wondering if he can count time with repetitions of Houses of the Holy, but there might be something out here that can hear him—and he can’t keep the track list straight anyway, because his mind keeps snagging on that tape he made Cas. One hand on the speaker, one hand on the tape recorder, waiting for the perfect balance.
Waiting for Cas to come back.
Were you in love with me then? He’s not sure if it’s a thought or a prayer. Were you in love with me when you betrayed me?
It probably isn’t even a question worth asking: If Cas was dumb enough to fall in love with him, it certainly wasn’t after all of that.
I’m getting you out, he thinks. If you can hear me, I’m looking for you, I’m going to find you, I’m—
There’s another smudge up ahead.
As he gets closer, it resolves into a very unimpressed-looking dude in a v-neck. Dean doesn’t recognize him until they’re only a few feet apart—but he’d only met the man a handful of times, ten years and a few apocalypses ago.
He doesn’t pull the angel blade, but he gets ready to. Just in case.
“Balthazar?”
“Dean,” Balthazar says, with affected boredom. If he had gum he’d probably be blowing bubbles. “Huh.”
“What are you, then, the Angel of Christmas Present?”
“Don’t know,” the angel says. “Don’t care.” He nods towards Dean’s pocket, which means he can see Dean as clearly as Dean can see Balthazar—even though Dean can’t see himself. This isn’t comforting. “I’ll be taking that blade.”
“What?”
“That little sword, the one you, presumably, took off the ash-framed corpse of one of my siblings?” He takes a step forward, hand outstretched, forcing Dean to back up.
“Slow down, Alan Rickman. I need it.”
“For what? Every angel here is already dead.” Balthazar wiggles his fingers. “Isn’t that why you’ve come?”
He doesn’t let go of the handle. “I’m here to get Cas. Have you seen him?”
“Of course.”
His heart jumps, like the traitor it is. “Where?”
“Kansas. In his and Crowley’s little love nest. When he, literally, stabbed me in the back. Because I betrayed him—in his war that he started for you—by helping you, so you’ll forgive me if I’m a little confused, right now.”
Dean tries not to think about that year, if he can help it. Cas and Crowley, Ben and Lisa, Sam and… everything. “He wasn’t himself, then. He had all those souls from Purgatory—it—it wasn’t really him. And he’s spent the last decade trying to make up for it.”
“It’s only been a decade? You look at least thirty years older.” Balthazar drops his arm. “Philosophers and drug users have spent a lot of time staring at their navels, trying to determine what makes the self. Look at angels. One of the few sentient beings created exactly how they’re supposed to be, for a grand purpose, and I left it all to waste away in Margaritaville. Cas was the same, and he ditched it for you—or, what he thought was for you. I suppose it didn’t all go your way.”
“Shut up.”
Balthazar puts both hands up in a don’t mind me gesture. “I’m just saying, I’m just saying. You can’t separate your boyfriend from the guy who was going to swallow a billion nukes. You don’t know what he’s going to do next—with the best of intentions, of course. What domino effect you might be unleashing on the world for the next several eons.”
He was doing what he thought was right, Dean wants to say. “I may not have liked how he did it, but he stopped Raphael from destroying the world.”
“Oh goodie. The whole plan went well, then? He took the souls, he gave them back, no muss, no fuss?” Balthazar mimes raising a glass. “Fantastic! We were all wrong to try and stop him. You wouldn’t mind if he did it again, I assume.” He adopts a look of affected surprise when Dean’s jaw twitches.
“I don’t care.” If he has to watch Cas walk into a reservoir again, this will be worth it for the time in between. “God-Cas, human-Cas, angel-Cas, I don’t care. I still want him back.”
“Then give me the sword.”
Dean can’t even see the door. There’s no light for his eyes to adjust to. Maybe there’s not even a wall behind him.
But he’s got no reason to think it won’t work the same as the last one. And if he stabs Balthazar, and he dies—or whatever happens if you stab an angel here—and it turns out that Dean does need to give the sword to him… he won’t be able to. He’ll be stuck at this gate until Sam gets him out. Without Cas.
Fuck.
He takes the blade out of his pocket. Holds it out, point first.
It only becomes visible to Dean when Balthazar grasps it by the sharp end, his mouth twitching. If it hurts, he doesn’t let on.
“Get a move on, then.”
Dean can see the door now. He can’t tell if it’s smaller than the last one.
He considers telling Balthazar that Cas is sorry, but he thinks Balthazar probably knows. And even if he doesn't, it's not like it would do him much good.
So he opens the door.
4
If time is passing quickly, or slowly, Dean has no way to tell. He isn’t getting tired, and he isn’t getting thirsty, and Balthazar has gotten Jimmy Buffett stuck in his head, and maybe Dean should have killed him again for that crime alone. Added another angel to his count. He wonders if he and Sam hold the human record for the most angels and demons killed. On earth, at least.
Killed and sent here. Where they’re probably lying in wait.
So he’s not surprised, when the darkness parts around Ruby. He’s not surprised when she holds out her hand.
“Colt, please.”
Not surprised, but that doesn’t mean he likes it. “Why? You’re all so annoying the Entity wants to be able to kill you twice?”
She shrugs. “The ways are perfect. Don’t hurt yourself trying to think about it too much.”
“Oh, yeah. Perfect. Sure.” Perfectly targeted, at least. The Colt is a tactical advantage they bought with blood and sweat and goddamn lives. And the painstaking efforts Sam went to to make it work after Dagon destroyed it. Maybe, maybe, Dean could have handed it over to Balthazar, but like fuck is he giving it to Ruby.
Perhaps that’s the point. Maybe the Empty is trying to make him turn around.
“Can you make your morality crisis a little more expressive? I’m short on entertainment options, here.”
Jesus H. Christ. “Do you decide what to take from me, or do you just appear with that knowledge programmed into your backstabbing little brain?”
Ruby crosses her arms. “Either way, you gotta admit it’s fitting. That gun would have been useless to you after—what was it, ten bullets?—if I hadn’t been there.”
“Maybe.” He has to take it out by feel, and he can’t shake the sense that it’s going to heat up in his palm. Either because it’s betraying him, or because it’s angry at what he’s considering.
But of course it doesn’t. It doesn’t get angry. It’s not the One Ring. It’s just a gun. A historical, legendary, lifesaving gun.
“No maybes about it. Whoever you killed with that, I made that possible.” She sounds weirdly proud of this.
“What does the Empty even want with it?”
Ruby shrugs. It’s over-exaggerated and obnoxious. “The only thing I know is that you guys stabbed me with my own knife, and then I was talking to your angel pal, and now I’m here, watching you walk around. The angel said he’d try to get me out. Should I assume you’re here to keep his promises? Live up to that famous Winchester reputation for helping the people who help you?”
Cas said what now? Was he saying what he had to, or did he find genuine sympathy for her? His heart already bleeds over the entire goddamn world. It doesn’t need to leak into the Empty, too.
“Eternal rest too peaceful for you? You want to go back to Hell?”
For a minute she looks—well, not as smug as usual, at any rate. “It’s not rest when the Empty’s awake. When it’s awake, it’s pissed, and so it traps us all in nightmares. Reliving every regret. Forever.”
Oh, fuck.
That’s going to destroy him.
“Sorry, sweetheart.” He’s not sorry. “I’m just here for my angel pal. ”
“One of the regrets I dream about is not killing you on one of my multiple chances, if you were curious.”
“I really wasn’t. Are you going to get out of my way?”
“If you give me the Colt.”
If he gives it to her, it doesn’t just mean he has to go through the Empty without it. He’s taking it out of play, forever. Every monster they could have killed quickly, every person that dies while they’re looking for special blood or ceremonial daggers, that will be on him. And not just the people in his lifetime: it could be passed to other hunters after he and Sam bite it.
And if Ruby does get out—if she or anyone else uses Dean’s presence to stage a prison break—it’ll be that much harder to stop them.
And if Cas stays here, he’ll be stuck in his own nightmares. He could relive mistakes and regrets for years before the Empty needs to do any reruns.
He’ll dream of Balthazar. Possibly Meg. But not Ruby. That mistake was Dean’s. To busy looking back at the blue eyes of a creature who could destroy him with a touch to see just what she was doing. If he had, maybe he could have killed her. Sam might have even forgiven him. Maybe then Lucifer would never have risen.
Maybe Cas wouldn’t have freed him from the Cage, years later.
But then they wouldn’t have Jack.
He shoves the Colt into Ruby's chest.
“The faster I walk through that door, the faster you disappear, right?”
She takes it, huffing. “I don’t make the plans around here. But hey, if you loiter long enough, it’ll give me time to freshen up before your brother comes running after you. Is he still single?”
“Not if he knows what’s good for him,” Dean mutters. Eileen and Sam had been doing some intense staring. If they don’t officially get together soon, he’s going to have to put a moratorium on eyesex in the bunker. For his own sanity. Because they’re right there, they’re alive, they love each other and they have no reason to not do something about it. Not anymore. “Here’s something to have nightmares about: an angel once sent Sam and I to an alternate reality where you were a human philanthropist named… Jennifer, or something.”
Ruby laughs. For someone who clearly put effort into being as hot as possible, it’s a rough laugh. Unpracticed. Unpolished.
“Thanks,” she says. “That was worth waking up for.”