Chapter Text
Cas was smiling. For a second, Cas was smiling, before his eyes pinched and his mouth dropped. And now he looks devastated, he looks broken, and Dean has to stop looking because there is something over Cas’s shoulder.
Black slime oozing out of the dark, reflecting the orange light, and this is not happening again, this is not happening again.
He gets his arms around Cas’s torso and lurches backwards, hoping he hits the portal and they can both fall through.
He doesn’t.
They land on the ground, tangled in each other, immobile. In the perfect spot for the Empty to get its tendrils around Cas’s feet. As it pulls Cas away, Dean curls up with them. Hands slipping, then landing around Cas’s wrists as they both try to stay on their knees.
“It’s okay,” Cas says. Like he’s trying to be gentle about it.
“No.” Dean kicks one foot backwards, and there it is—he can feel the tingle of the portal around his ankle. He’s got one foot in reality, and maybe he can hook his boot around the edge and hold on. “Stay with me, Cas.”
Cas’s fingernails are digging into Dean’s wrists, and the Empty is pulling—there’s a rope of slime crawling around Cas’s middle—he’s being hauled backwards, and Dean’s foot isn’t going to hold them. He’s on his belly and he’s sliding and—
Something catches him.
He can hear faint voices, none of which sound like Jimmy Buffett, and someone is pulling on him. Pulling hard enough that he thinks his shoulders are going to come out of their sockets.
“It’s okay,” Cas says again. “I love you, it’s okay.”
“You are not—” Dean braces himself as there’s a tug on his leg. “—saying that—and dying—again.”
Another pull. He slides backwards a few inches, and it feels like they’re tearing him in half.
But Cas slides with him. A hand’s width closer to home.
He’s staring up at something above them, something high in the light, but Dean can’t look. If he turns now, he’ll lose his grip, and Cas will really be gone, nothing but scratches on his skin—
There’s another tug. He thinks his knees are through the portal.
“Hold on,” someone is saying, voice cutting in and out. “—Two— Heave! ”
Something curls around his waist, and he cringes away on reflex before he realizes it’s an arm. Not slime. An arm that’s helping pull, which is good, because he thinks they were one heave away from ripping his legs off.
“We. Had. A deal.”
Dean doesn’t look up to see how the goo is talking—if it’s made itself a mouth, if it’s taken on human form.
“I don’t care,” says a familiar voice.
A sneakered foot comes down in the corner of Dean’s vision, but that’s when the Empty gives a yank and he’s moving forward again, and the foot is out of sight. The arm slips from around his waist. There’s another shout of “Heave!” from behind him. Then —“Leg!” and someone has his ankle again.
“You have no power here,” the Empty snarls. “You exploded.”
“I got better,” says Jack. “Let go of my dads.”
Jack?
“He’s mine. He was promised to me. Him, for you.”
That son of a bitch. That divine little son of a bitch. Dean can’t afford to look at him.
“Heave!”
Dean and Cas don’t move.
“I don’t care,” Jack says again. “He went with you, he fulfilled his end of the bargain, whatever, however you want to spin it so you can sleep. If you don’t let go of him, I’m going to make you.”
“Do you want to go in his place?”
“—Absolutely— not—” Cas spits.
“I think we are done trading.” There’s light coming from somewhere— Jack is doing something, but Dean can only guess what it is based on Cas’s expression. “I’m so tired of it. I’m so tired. I understand that, now. I understand why you are angry all the time. I didn’t mean to wake you up, two years ago. I didn’t mean to, but I am sorry for what it put you through.”
With the next “Heave!”, Dean’s shoulders pass through. It’s just his hands on the other side, now: he can barely see Cas through the sparks.
Stay with me. It’s a prayer. A demand. A plea.
“I didn’t want you to suffer then. I don’t want you to suffer now. You don’t have to do this. You can let go. You can finally sleep.”
“Heave!” it’s Sam who’s shouting, and there are more hands on Cas now, too—someone’s gotten Cas’s elbow—Eileen?—and someone yells something, and Cas slides forward, so quickly that Dean falls backwards, and Eileen falls on top of them both, and Jack is scrambling back through the portal hollering “Close it! Close it!”
Other people are yelling, and someone moves—someone is stepping on Dean’s shoulder, launching themselves at the portal, and then the lightning is gone, and everything is spinning, and quiet, and dark.
The first sense to come back is sound.
Sam’s breathing. Eileen’s wheezes. The voice of—is that Garth? When Dean’s vision clears, he can see Jody saying something to—Kaia, that’s who had stepped on Dean earlier—and Dean lets his head drop forwards, resting his face on the ground.
It’s cement. Hard, solid, real cement. With a lingering smell of dankness and gasoline.
Dean still hasn’t let go of Cas’s hands.
They have to walk through the tunnel back to the garage. There’s light at the end, and Dean doesn't blink in case it disappears. He looks forward. He doesn’t turn. He doesn’t let go of Cas’s hand.
Twelve years ago, he woke up in a coffin. He had to kick it open, holding his breath so he didn’t choke on the dirt that came down faster when he dared try to move. He'd thought he was back on the rack, where he would choke over and over again, and he'd felt more alone than he had ever been in his life. But he wasn’t alone, because Castiel had been there. Dean just couldn’t see him.
This feels like the same thing.
Jack is talking, explaining the last few days: apparently it’s been over two weeks since Sam and Dean drove into the portal. Sam and Rowena spent five days manifesting Jack, and a few more setting up a tracking spell on Dean. At some point, they’d realized they needed Kaia, and then had called Garth for additional backup. Possibly because of what happened last time they’d needed Kaia for an alternate-dimension rescue.
But when the spell showed Dean getting steadily closer, they’d paused their invasion plan.
And then every single one of them—Sam, Jack, Rowena, Kaia, Jody, Claire, Alex, Patience and Garth—spent the last four days in the tunnel, watching for them.
Dean wants to thank them. He needs to thank them. But he can’t make himself look to the side. Can’t make his mouth move.
He’s so hungry.
If he eats, he’s going to throw up.
“—Think it really is sleeping again. I can’t make it, but it’s what it wants, and it let go of Cas. You ever been so tired you’re… absolutely unhinged?”
“Yeah,” Sam says. “I know the feeling.”
They step into the garage. After endless darkness, it looks huge. It looks tiny.
The Impala is there. There are cracks in the back window and both rearview mirrors.
Dean can fix those.
Later.
There’s so much noise around them. That’s a good thing, he’s pretty sure, but he can’t keep track of it. Doesn’t know who is saying what. The main room of the bunker is so much brighter than the garage, but Dean isn’t going to squint. Doesn’t have much time to, anyway, because he’s being hustled down the hall to his room.
Cas’s hand is warmer, now.
Is that because he’s properly alive? Or because Dean is warm, and has held him so tightly?
He can’t look. He can’t risk it.
Sam guides Dean towards his bed, and he can feel the dip in the mattress as Cas sits on his left. Alex is in his face, looking at his pupils, his mouth, his pulse. She tries to get a blood pressure cuff on him, but he isn’t going to let go of Cas to take his flannel off, so Sam frees his right arm. This is a convoluted process that involves bending and moving Dean’s elbow around for at least two full minutes.
He doesn’t know what his blood pressure is. But Claire shoves a sleeve of saltines and a Gatorade at him, after.
“—Didn’t steal them,” Jack is saying, “left money and everything—”
“Dude, I don’t care if you stole them. Uh, no, pretend I just didn’t say that to God—”
He thinks Jody is shooing Jack and Claire out of the room, and Sam is closing the door, and then it is quiet, and he and Cas are still sitting.
The clock on his desk is visible from here, so Dean knows that it’s twelve minutes later when he remembers how to speak.
“Cas.”
Cas’s fingers tighten around his. “Yes?”
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—I convinced myself you were planning to stay behind, like you did in Purgatory, but I shouldn’t, I shouldn’t have turned—” He was talking, back there at the portal. Maybe even shouting. But somewhere in that week of silence, he might have forgotten how to form complete sentences.
“It’s okay, Dean.”
“I—we—almost lost you forever—Jack could have gotten hurt, I’m so sorry—”
“Hey.” Cas raises a hand, and Dean can’t stop himself from flinching away. “None of that happened. I’m here. Jack is fine. Because you—we—have people that will help us. You were never alone, Dean.”
But he was. It was his own fault, all of it, but he was. “It would have all been for nothing—we’d have woken you up just to leave you to suffer. We’d have made it worse.”
“No. No.” There’s a shift, and he knows Cas is looking at him, but Dean can’t look back. “Even if you had failed—it would have meant everything to me that you tried. That you came for me.”
“Of course I did.” Maybe Cas hadn’t been listening, then. “You think I wouldn’t—Don’t you know that I’m in—”
“Don’t.” Cas’s breathing is harsher now. “Don’t, I can’t.”
That’s fine. That’s fine. He’d considered that. He know that was a possibility. He’d made it all the way back with his heart still in his chest, and he’s not going to let it break now. He’s not. “I’m sorry, I’ll—”
“No, it’s—” Cas was calmer in the Empty itself than he is right now. “Two years, Dean, knowing that if you—if you said that to me—the Empty would come. I can’t seem to stop bracing for it.”
Oh. Yeah. That’ll do it. “And now I can’t shake the feeling that if I look at you, you’re going to disappear.” Dean huffs. “Match made in Heaven.”
“I can assure you that it was not.”
Dean’s lip twitches, trying to restrain the laugh on instinct—but he can’t, and there’s no reason to. And so he laughs. Eyes closed. Chest aching. Possibly sounding a little hysterical.
It takes a coordinated effort to scooch up and lean against the headboard, without letting go of or making eye contact with each other. But once they’re there, he never wants to move again.
Dean has been awake for hours. Dean has been awake for weeks.
“Do you want me to turn the light off?” Cas asks.
“No.”
He watches the white and orange patterns on the back of his eyelids. It’s not the same as it was, in the Empty: this is an echo of existing light, and not his brain desperately grasping for some. He has to remind himself of this.
“Could you hear me, praying to you?”
“No,” Cas says. “You were praying?”
“All the time, I—” That means he’s going to have to say it all again, as soon as Cas is able to listen. “Well, I guess it means you also missed about a million repetitions of ‘Margaritaville’.” He can’t say everything, but it doesn’t mean he can’t start on the rest. “Have you ever listened to Jimmy Buffett?”
He can feel Cas adjusting next to him. Getting comfortable. Like he’s going to stay. “A little. I like ‘Party At The End of the World’.”
“I… don’t know that one.”
“A lot of the lyrics are… distasteful, but it’s got a… a sort of desperate joy in resignation to it that I find myself able to relate to. It’s probably too recent for you. ”
“What are you, some kind of hipster? I’ll play you ‘Margaritaville’ sometime,” Dean says. “It’s a classic.”
“Alright.” Cas is rubbing his thumb along the side of Dean’s hand—one Mississippi down, two Mississippi up—and Dean uses the motion to count time, for a minute, for two minutes, three minutes, until he’s asleep.
Dean wakes up lying on his right side, hand out in front of him. His eyes are open, and Cas is gone.
The ground didn’t fall away from him in the Empty, but might have now: his stomach jolts, his hands are tingling, and he flings himself out of bed and down the hall. Jack said the Entity was asleep again, but he’ll be able to wake it up. Dean can go back, he did it once, he can do it again, and—
And Cas is in the kitchen, letting Claire steal bacon off his plate. Dean jerks his head away before he can think about it, looking instead at Claire, Jack, and Garth, who are staring back at Dean with various bemused expressions.
“Hi,” he says, giving up on salvaging that situation. “Morning. Is that food?”
“Sure, I’ll fry you up some more—”
“Oh, it’s fine, I can—”
“No, no, I insist, you’ve just been…” Garth waves a hand. “I’ll take care of it. Just… sit down.”
Well that answers the question of whether Dean looks like power-hammered crap. He sits down next to Cas.
“Morning, Dean,” Jack says, overly bright. “Sleep well?”
He doesn’t remember, but that probably means he did. “Where the hell have you been, kid?”
“Heaven. There was… Chuck left a mess. I’ve been working on it. I’ll have to go work on it again, but I wanted a break. Sam said you needed help, and I wanted to watch the new season of Riverdale.”
He’d make a joke about God having priorities, if he wasn’t just so relieved that Jack is here. “What… what have you been working on?”
“Oh, I can’t tell you.”
Dean scowls, mostly for effect. “You’re seriously going to ‘mysterious ways’ us?”
Jack stuffs his mouth with bacon. There is exactly as much bacon on his plate after he does this as there was before. “I uth ‘on’t ink—”
“Jack,” Cas says.
“Sorry.” Jack doesn’t swallow, but the bacon is no longer in his mouth. Dean didn’t think he had anything left to melt, but something warm is expanding in his ribcage. “I just don’t think that people should know. What Heaven is like. I’m making a lot of changes, first of all; I don’t know what’s going to stick, but I also don’t want people to be… excited for it. I don’t think that is good. Living is the most important thing you can do. You shouldn’t be in a hurry to be done.”
“We can keep a secret,” Dean says, just to be annoying.
“You absolutely cannot. It always blows up in your faces.”
Alright, well, that’s a little more real than he wants to be this early in the morning after his tour of the fourth afterlife, when he still feels like he’s getting over a heart attack. “Cas, your kid is being rude.”
Cas just sighs. “He learned that from you.”
“I did,” Jack says proudly. Claire snorts, and that’s when Garth dumps what looks like an entire pig's worth of bacon in front of Dean.
He hasn’t even reached it yet when Claire swipes a piece.
“Is that bacon?” Rowena takes the seat next to Dean as though she’s sitting on a throne and not a fifty-year-old mass-produced army chair. She also helps herself off Dean’s plate.
He needs to tell her. He doesn’t want to.
“I saw Crowley.” He says it before he can get in his head about what Cain had said about fairness, and wonder if Rowena will be angry that he didn’t get her son out too. He says it, knowing that if their situations were reversed – if Rowena had saved Crowley and left Jack behind – he might kill her.
“You did?” Rowena and Cas say at the same time.
“Yeah, the Empty had these—these checkpoints. I had to keep giving them stuff. One of them was Crowley, he said—he said to tell you, Rowena—uh, well, his actual words were to tell you that you’re an evil hag, but… you know.”
She stares at the bacon for a moment, and then excuses herself.
Claire gapes. “Well done, Dean. Very tactful. Your dead son says you’re an evil hag?”
“He meant it affectionately, I think. She… she’ll know that.”
“Who else was there?” Cas asks quietly.
Ah, shit. “Well, there was Meg. Uh, and then Balthazar. Ruby. Uriel. Crowley. And Cain.” He doesn’t like the way Cas’s shoulders are hunching, in the corner of his eye. He shouldn’t have said anything. But Jack is right, secrets blow up in their faces. “I think—I think Uriel is, uh, proud of you? Through all of the disdain and sarcasm, he seemed pretty happy when I said we beat God.”
“And… and Balthazar?”
He doesn’t know how to salvage this, especially when he can’t see Cas’s face. “I told him it wasn’t really you.”
“Who’s Balthazar?” Claire asks.
“An angel,” Cas says. “A friend. I killed him.”
“It wasn’t really you,” Dean says again, trying to sound firm.
“It was me.” Cas puts down the fork he wasn’t using.
“Two for two, Dean,” Claire says, watching Cas’s face. “Bravo.”
“I’m not sure that’s something we should be celebrating,” Jack says seriously. “…Wait, was that sarcasm?”
“Yes, that was sarcasm! Garth, do you still have the gold stars?”
“Right here in my pocket.”
Dean can hear Sam’s bigfoot steps coming up behind him, so he’s able to catch his brother’s wrist before any more of Dean’s bacon can get stolen. Sam pulls himself free, sitting down in Rowena’s empty chair.
“What’s Jack getting a sticker for?”
Claire finishes applying the star to the tip of God’s nose. “Recognizing sarcasm, when I complimented Dean on his tact.”
“Oh. Yeah. That’ll do it.”
Dean isn’t fast enough to stop Sam’s bacon heist this time. This is probably what he gets for not inhaling it like Jack did. He picks up a piece himself, staring it down for a moment before taking a cautious bite.
The flavor is overwhelming.
“Do you want to go for three?” Claire asks. “Meet anyone there that Sam should know about?”
Dean puts down the bacon.
“Oh, yeah,” Sam says. “I was going to ask. Oh—” He jumps up, apparently alerted by his chivalry radar that Eileen is approaching and clearly needs him to pull out a chair for her. Dean can’t look at Cas to roll his eyes, so he looks at Garth instead. But Garth just smiles, like Sam and Eileen are his favorite couple in a chick-flick.
Sam signs something, presumably bringing Eileen up to speed, and then they’re both looking at Dean, expectant.
“Think carefully before you ask,” Dean says.
Sam looks around. “Why? Was there anyone I knew?”
“Someone you knew very well.”
It takes a few seconds for the penny to drop. “No.”
“Yep.” Might as well rip the whole band-aid off. “I gave her the Colt.”
He expects his brother to start being outraged, or yelling, or something, but Sam just shrugs. “I guess that makes sense.”
“She said that too.”
“I’m sorry,” Eileen says. “Who?”
Sam steals another piece of Dean’s bacon, and thus, seals his fate. “Sam’s evil demon ex,” Dean tells her. “And she asked if he was single, by the way, so you better lock that down.”
She nods thoughtfully. “I’ll take that under advisement.”
“I’m going to kill you,” says Sam, through a mouthful of Dean’s food.
Cas sighs one of those long-suffering, I-have-been-alive-since-before-the-Big-Bang-and-yet-still-have-not-had-coffee sighs. “Please don’t. He only just brought me back from the dead, and I’d like at least a few days to recuperate before I have to return the favor.”
“Y’all lead very special lives,” says Garth. “Who wants French toast?”
Jack and Claire raise their hands.
Dean opens the door slowly. “Cas? You in there?”
“I’m sitting on your bed,” Cas says. “Left side, facing your wall of guns.”
Dean keeps his eyes on the ceiling as he closes the door behind him and makes his way over to the bed. “Talk to me. You okay?”
Cas is quiet for a moment; but it's the quiet of searching, not refusal.
“I’d made peace with it,” he says. “All of it. What I’ve done. What I was willing to do. Dying, even. But dreaming in there… I killed Balthazar, over and over. And Daniel and Rachel and Ishim and Theo and Samandriel and David and Ion and Jonah and Dumah. And you.”
“You never killed me.”
“Not when the moment came, no. But I’ve hurt you. I’ve come close.”
“Well, I’ve almost killed you a couple times, so fair’s fair.” Dean grabs Cas’s elbow, then slides his palm along his sleeve until he finds his hand. “Those dreams were supposed to fuck you up, because the Empty’s a vengeful little shit. But they’re just dreams, just memories—none of it changes anything. It only matters what we do now, right?” Maybe it’s just about who loves us. “And I—”
“Dean.”
“Yeah. Sorry.” He holds on tighter. “You know, they… they stripped me bare in there, man. I told myself—God, I’d told myself so many things. Who I was. What I wanted. What I could handle. Why I was doing what I was doing. And I had to give all of it up, to get to you.”
“I know,” Cas says. “I saw your soul. I can still see your soul.”
“Cain said it’s naked.”
Cas untangles their fingers, putting his hand over Dean’s sternum. “It’s not naked,” he says. “Just… open.”
“Cas.” He doesn’t know what he’s asking for. He doesn’t know if there’s anything he’s not asking for, when he curls his fingers around Cas’s wrist to hold him there. Against his chest, against his soul. “Cas—”
“You can close your eyes,” Cas says. Dean does, and he can feel Cas’s fingers on his chin—and they are warm, now, because he’s alive, he’s properly alive—gently turning his head to the side.
Dean doesn’t look.
He does kiss back, though. Cas’s lips are dry and chapped and Dean wants to stay here forever, but Cas lingers for just a few seconds before pulling away,
Dean keeps his eyes closed. “Is it here?”
“No.”
So he reaches up with his free hand, feeling the edge of Cas’s face. Pulls him back in. Cas’s hand finds the back of his neck, and that’s—good. It’s safe. Nothing can sneak up on him while Cas is protecting him. Nothing can take Cas away, when his lower lip is caught between Dean’s teeth.
He wishes he could see Cas’s true form. Wishes he could crawl inside it, the way Cas lives in his vessel. But he can’t, he can’t, so he licks his way into Cas’s mouth instead. Lets himself be pulled closer, and it’s almost as good.
There is no great yank. No one is sucked into the void. Dean lets go of Cas’s wrist and reaches a hand into his coat instead, so that he can swing himself around to straddle Cas’s lap. Feel Cas's thighs between his own.
He's so warm.
Dean is, too: he thinks he’s burning, where Cas is touching him. In all the places he wants Cas to touch him. He can’t live in Cas but Cas could live in him, and if he asked, Dean would let him. He’d let his Grace curl around Dean’s soul. Let him use Dean’s hands, his mouth, his body. He could take Cas everywhere he goes: out of sight but always, always in his mind.
He settles for getting his hands under Cas’s shirt. He swears he can feel the Grace, buzzing just below skin—alien and beautiful and so very alive.
Cas pulls away, pressing his lips to the bruise on Dean’s shoulder, where Kaia had stepped on him. Dean keeps his eyes closed, and a hand in Cas’s hair.
“Let me,” he whispers. “Please, let me.”
He can feel Cas’s forehead against his neck. Cas’s hands on his hips, keeping him on earth.
“Okay,” Cas says. “Okay.”
“I love you.” He’s always had to scrape the words out of himself, with a plea attached: I love you Mom, wake up. I love you Sam, drop me into the ocean. But this—this is easy, and now he's started he doesn’t think he can stop. “I love you. And that—that scared me, and I’m so sorry, but I love you, I’m going to try to love you right—” Cas puts a finger over his lips, and Dean freezes. For ten, twenty seconds, they wait. Dean can feel Cas’s heart racing under his hands. He can feel his own pulse in his throat. Against the back of his eyelids, colors move.
The Empty does not come.
Cas removes his finger.
“I love you,” Dean says again.
There are hands on either side of his face, now. Those hands could destroy the world, but they’re so very gentle.
“Dean,” Cas says. “Dean, look at me.”
And Dean does.