Archive of Our Own

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.”

Chapter Text

5

When he waves his hand in front of his face, he swears he can see a shadow of motion.

There is no way that is possible.

You helped defeat God, Dean reminds himself. You have been to Hell and you have been to Heaven and you have been to Purgatory and you are not going to be defeated by a deep dark Nothing. They don’t even have thumbscrews here.

Maybe his body is gone, and he hasn’t realized it yet. He can move his feet, his arms—but people can have phantom limbs, can’t they? Do they feel like this?

But he wouldn’t have a phantom jacket. Or a phantom tear on the hip of his jeans. He can rub his thumb along the smooth line of his ring.

It’s too early to start going crazy. 

Cas and Sam walked through Dean’s mind. Cas and Jack walked through the Empty. They all came out with their marbles more or less intact. He can do the same.

But he’s not used to walking without a gun in his pocket. Shit, his dad would be having kittens over this: you gave the Colt to a demon? A demon that corrupted your brother and set Lucifer free?

He’d probably be just as upset about Dean walking into the void for an angel, but John didn’t meet Cas.

John never knew how to treat the people who loved him.

Maybe Dean doesn’t either, but he’s going to try.

He thinks he can see someone ahead, and tries to speed up. He’d jog, perhaps even run, if he was sure he wouldn’t get tired later.

And if he didn’t recognize the figure waiting for him.

“Is this a joke?”

“If it is, it’s not a good one.” Uriel gives him an up-and-down that just radiates disdain. Dean flexes his hand, wishing for the angel blade. “Always somewhere you shouldn’t be, aren’t you? Humans don’t belong here.”

He tries to smile. “Well, soon as I get what I came for, I’ll be out of your hair. Uh, so to speak.”

“Though I suppose it’s fitting. Dean the torturer, going where demons go to die.”

Dean reaches for his shoulder again, but doesn’t touch it. “That’s not who I am.”

“Isn’t it? I supported Lucifer, so I’m a traitor, right? Doesn’t matter what I was before that, or who I might have been later. Why would it be different for you?”

Because Sam knows—and more than that, because Cas knows. Cas saw him in Hell, and Cas saw him in Purgatory, and Cas saw him as a demon and Cas saw him. Cas saw him. Cas, who watched humanity for millenia, and who had evolved such a strong sense of goodness—he saw Dean and loved him anyway, and that has to be worth something.

He can’t explain that to Uriel. He doesn’t want to explain that to Uriel.

“I’m not here for Philosophy 101,” he says instead, letting his arms drop to his sides. “Tell me what you want.”

“Angels don’t want. ”

Oh, if only. “Bullshit. All angels do is want. You wanted Lucifer to rise, Raphael wanted the world to end, Cas wanted—” one thing — “Just tell me what I have to do to get through that door.”

Uriel tilts his head, his eyes on Dean’s shoulder. “Give me your jacket.”

This time, Dean does touch the handprint. Tries to keep it safe from Uriel’s judgmental gaze. “How cheap of a date do you think I am?”

“I suppose I was murdered before I had a chance to get donuts.” He grins, like Dean has any idea what the fuck he’s talking about. “Give it to me, or turn around. Or I guess we can just stand right here. Staring at each other. Forever.”

“Alright, Anne Wilkes, cool your jets.”

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

If they wanted him defenseless, haven’t they gotten that? He’s alone in the dark. “But why? I understand disarming me. Making me go by myself, even. But this is just—” It’s just a jacket, he almost says. But it’s not, and Uriel knows it’s not. In whatever freaky way these gatekeepers know things.

“Quiet,” Uriel says. “The ways are—”

“Perfect, yeah, I’ve been told—”

“And they may not be questioned.”

“Buddy, have you met me?” Dean doesn’t lower his hand from his shoulder.

“When we raised you from Hell—”

“When Cas raised me—”

“You might have gotten the impression that the rules don’t apply to you. They do.”

“I’ll give you something else. Do you want—do you want my shoes?” Dean looks down, although he can’t actually see his feet. “You can have my shoes. They’re probably collectibles by now. I’ve also got my t-shirt, don’t remember which shirt I’m wearing, but I bet it’s comfier than your suit.” 

Uriel brushes his suit, as if there's dust on it. As if there's dust in this plane of reality. “This is not a flea market.”

Cas just vanished. No body. No grave. Not even a coat. Nothing left in the bunker.

“It’s just—it’s all that’s left of him.” Is that something Uriel could even understand? 

The angel blinks. “Of who?’

Dean considers lying. “Cas. Castiel.”

He forces himself to look at Uriel’s expression. To not look like he’s afraid, or ashamed, or—or anything else. So he sees Uriel’s lip curl briefly, then his eye twitch. Human expressions, on an angel who claimed to detest them.

“He got himself killed doing something you told him to, didn’t he.”

I didn’t tell him to do anything, Dean wants to say, but that’s—that’s a lie, too. He told Cas to do many things, he just never had the power to make Cas listen.

Uriel must take his silence for confirmation. “And you’re here to get him back? Oh how things must have changed. I didn’t think he had it in him.” Dean remembers, suddenly, the way Uriel had laughed when he realized that Dean and Anna had slept together. He isn’t laughing now. “I tried to save him. Tried to show him the lies we had been living. Eons by his side, but you were the one who got through?”

“Cas made his own choices.”

“Stopped trying to follow God’s Plan, did he?”

“He was the only one who ever succeeded,” Dean says. “Until we defeated God.”

“Well how about that.” Uriel’s smile is still mostly a smirk, but not entirely. “That, I would have liked to see.”

Chuck had fucked with Uriel, too, hadn’t he. Turned his own soldier into a traitor, and then killed him off for it—just for the drama of it all. What would he have been, with his own choices?

What would any of them have been?

That’s not who you are, Cas had said.

He was the only in every universe with free will, and he’d used it to love Dean. 

But did he love Dean how he was written, or in spite of it?

“The jacket,” Uriel says, slightly more pleasant this time. 

His hands shake when he takes it off. He tries to keep his hand over the shoulder when he holds it out. When he lets Cas go. Again. 

We’re getting him back, he tells himself. I’m getting him back.

There’s no temperature, here. He doesn’t feel colder. And it’s just as dark through this door as it is everywhere else, so he doesn’t know why he feels so much more exposed.

6

When Dean was five, his father taught him how to be afraid of the dark.

Before that, Dean had balked at fire. At bright lights and the sound of sirens. Heat, all around him. The walls closing in.

But light also meant he could see. Light meant there was nothing sneaking up behind him. Nothing oozing through the cracks in the door. Light made it easy to tell if the man in the room was family or foe. Light meant Sam wasn’t getting up to something he shouldn’t be.

Clearly, we spent too much time on how to get out of the dark, and not enough time on sneakiness, John had said, when he caught Dean with his pants down. The girl had done a pretty spectacular dive-and-somersault out the window, like an action hero, while Dean fumbled the blinds cord, not at all like an action hero. He’d thought he was in for a beating, but John had just smiled. You need to know, on this job, how to charm a lady. Gets you information. Sometimes gets you a place to stay. As long as you don’t go falling in love, you’ll do just fine.

What’s wrong with love? Dean had asked. What was he, sixteen? After Sonny’s, he’s sure, and well before Cassie.

What he remembers most clearly is how John had laughed. At best, it makes you give up the job. Let the demon run free, killing more innocent people. At worst, you end up like me.

But Dean had wanted more than anything to be like his dad. He thought he already was: John missed Mary, Dean missed Mary, and he thought it was the same. He thought he understood. But he hadn’t really known, had he. Hadn’t known what it does to a person, having the love of their life taken away from them, horribly, because of a deal made with the best of intentions—

Fuck.

‘Some people claim that there’s a woman to blame…’

He tries to think of the mixtape tracks again, both as a distraction, and to try to override Jimmy Buffett. Things had felt complicated when he made that tape, but shit, that was before Jack. The complications hadn’t even started.

Did Cas keep it? Did he listen to it? Or did he throw it away, when Dean was being terrible to their son. When Dean was blaming Cas for things that were only kind of his fault.

Would he have fought Dean, for the Colt? For Jack?

The only thing Dean could have used to defend himself against Cas was an angel blade—but if Dean slipped up, Cas could destroy him with anything.

He might yet.

Dean stops walking. It still feels a lot like walking. The darkness doesn’t change, and he can’t see a gatekeeper up ahead, and he is not thinking about this. He doesn’t think about this. He cannot think about this. He has to keep his head on the job, to be a hunter, or else he might lose his head completely. That meant he couldn’t look around. Meant he couldn’t let his mind wander, when he was drinking beers with Cas while the world ended. Meant he built a little house in his chest to protect feelings he never wanted to look at. 

I’m getting him back, he tells himself again. Nothing matters but getting him back. However long the walk is. How far has he gone already? How long before Sam tries to get him out? He still hasn’t gotten hungry. His feet haven’t started to hurt. He could keep going like this, forever.

Maybe that’s all this is. Walking, eternally, nothing but his thoughts and Jimmy Buffett to keep him company.

When he sees the next gatekeeper, Dean almost wants to hug him.

“Can’t believe I’m glad to see you,” he says instead. 

“Squirrel, I’m hurt. You didn’t miss me? Didn’t spend a week crying over my body?”

“That wasn’t even your body.”

Crowley shrugs, palms raised. “It’s the principle of the thing.”

“For what it’s worth, I did ask Chuck to bring you back.” Dean scratches his neck, even though he doesn’t itch. Maybe that discomfort is just because he was thinking of John. Dean doesn’t even want to know what he’d say if he’d known Dean wanted to resurrect a demon.

“Psh. As if I’d want His sticky little fingers all over me.” But he’s looking away, and Dean gets the feeling that he’s genuinely touched. 

“Your mom made a good go of it, too. Tried to bargain with Death for your return. She’s alive again—well, she’s not, I guess. But she’s Queen of Hell.”

“I suppose everyone’s easier to love when they’re dead.” Crowley clears his throat. Twice. “Since I manifested in front of this gate, I assume you’re not here for me. Your boyfriend get himself killed again?”

It almost sounds like an accusation, but Dean has nothing with which to defend himself. “Yeah.”

“I’m sorry.” He even looks it. “That angel was fun to annoy.” 

“Thanks.” There’s something curdling in Dean’s insides. It feels a little like grief. It feels a little like guilt. “You wouldn’t be able to tell me how many doors are left, would you?” 

Crowley looks over his shoulder, but if there’s something there, Dean can’t tell. “Not many, I don’t think. Do you know what you’re walking into?”

“More darkness? A really bitchy Entity?” If it was pissed when Cas woke up, and pissed when Jack detonated…  he can only imagine what it’s feeling now. “Do you?”

“Not a clue, I’m afraid. Death is like that.” His smile has gone funny. Maybe death does that, too. “I know where I am and what I need from you, but not the important information. Like who else is here, or what’s around me, or whether my picture is still on the wall of that karaoke bar in Maine.” 

The worst bit is that Dean thinks he remembers the bar in question. He makes a show of shuddering. “Probably better not to know.”

“You can’t pretend with me, Dean. I know you’re a sucker for karaoke. It’s your ring, by the way.” 

“What?”

“To get through this door. Your silver ring.”

Yeah. Of course it is. Dean touches his finger, which had swollen around the band long ago. “Guess I won’t have to test for shapeshifters in here, huh.” He isn’t sure he reaches the level of glib he was aiming for. “I don’t even know if it’s going to come off.”

“It will. You just have to work on it.”

He pulls, twisting it slightly back and forth. It slides up in increments. “My dad gave this to me, so you better not go losing it. Had it since I was a teenager.” A strong tug gets it past the first knuckle.

“Sure, maybe I’ll be allowed to take my bling to my final resting place. I’ll put it under my pillow.”

It's harder to get it to the second knuckle, and by the time it’s all the way off, the skin on his finger feels raw. Dean rubs his thumb over the groove that’s left behind.

The ring feels heavier than it should be. But things always have, with Crowley. 

Crowley, who had magical solutions with massive consequences. Crowley, who never once depended on Dean to do the right thing. Crowley, who encouraged all of Dean’s worst instincts, and brushed off his inhibitions. Crowley, who wanted Dean to rule Hell with him. Crowley, who schemed and manipulated him with every word, but who Dean kept listening to anyway. Crowley, who died for him.

When he goes through that door, Crowley is going to die again.

Crowley has been dead for as long as Dean has known him. 

He needs to get to Cas.

“It’s alright,” Crowley says. “You be sure to tell my mother she’s an evil hag for me.” He holds out a hand, waiting. Dean has to make himself uncurl his fingers, one at a time, before he can tilt it off of his palm and onto Crowley’s.

He worries, for a second, that he’s misjudged where his hand is in space. That the ring will fall on the ground and they’ll be unable to find it.  

But it lands there, in Crowley’s hand. 

And the door is there, waiting for him.

It might have appeared when the ring landed. It might have been there the whole time. 

“If I can,” Dean says. “If I can, I’ll get you out of here.”

“Course you will.” Crowley folds his fingers over his palm, and the silver disappears. “Tell me you at least got the bastard.”

“Yeah.” Dean remembers how it felt to fly, and tries not to flinch. “I got him.”

“Good, then.” He tucks the ring into his pocket, which he buttons carefully. “Goodbye, Dean.” 

Dean nods. Clears his throat.

And he turns.

7

He thinks it’s taking longer, this time. Longer than the others put together.  But maybe the passage of time is just bending around him: maybe he really does have forever, condensed into the next three days. Or maybe it’s been three days, and Sam can’t reach him. Maybe there will never be anything but Dean, his thoughts, and the colors that sometimes swim across his vision.

The ringing in his ears sounds like Jimmy Buffett now, too.

“I am not having auditory hallucinations,” Dean says aloud, even as he swears he can hear Buffett faintly singing searching for my lost shaker of salt.  “I am not. I don’t even like Jimmy Buffett.”

That’s a lie. Margaritaville is catchy as hell.  John hated Buffett, but John also disdained beaches, relaxing, and mixed drinks, so what did he know.

Cas, though. Cas would like Jimmy Buffett. Hell, maybe he already does. Dean had never played any for him, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t pick it up somewhere else.

He spent a lot of time somewhere else.

And Dean—well. Dean always had to be in the place he was at. There were always lives at stake. Always monsters to stop.

“But I know,” he sings under his breath. “It’s nobody’s fault.”

It’s not like there’s anyone here to judge him for singing. No one who hasn’t judged him long ago, anyway. There’s got to be a pattern, in who appears, right? So far, it hasn’t been anyone who he killed personally. And no one who only ever wanted him dead: No Abaddon, no Azazel, no Raphael.

At least, not yet.

But maybe he has to get through every angel and demon who has a bone to pick with him to reach Cas. 

It would take a long time.

At some point, he’ll run out of things to give them.

Maybe then they’ll want him to start cutting off digits and limbs. A hand for this door, a foot for the next, until he’s nothing but heart and entrails at Castiel's feet.

Cas lost his Grace for Dean, more than once. It would only be fair.

“Stayed here all season.” He’s not going to keep thinking about it. “Nothing to show but this brand new tattoo—”

Someone is standing in front of him.

He wasn’t visible at a distance, like the others: first there was nothing, and then there was Cain. Still with the long hair and black coat. Minus the stab wound, but missing the hand.

“Dean,” he says. It’s almost affectionate. “You look very… human.” 

That’s oddly reassuring, considering the source. “I am.”

“And free of my mark.” 

“Yes.”

Cain smiles, and Dean thinks about how he has no weapons.

“How’d you get rid of it?”

“Uh… by unleashing the primordial darkness.”

“Hmm.” Cain isn’t acting like he had at the end, desperate for the First Blade and out to literally decimate the human population. He’s like he was when Dean thought he wanted to be like him. Calm. In control of the Mark. Murder boiling under his skin.

Fuck.

He speaks before he can stop and think about it. “I’m sorry I couldn’t save you.”

“I didn’t deserve to be saved,” Cain says. He’s got his arms crossed, feet planted, even though Dean already knows the futility of trying to go through him. “What are you here for?”

“Cas.”

“Ah. The angel.” Dean does not like the way Cain says that. “You killed him, then?”

Yes. “No.” Maybe . “He died to save me. I’ve come to get him back.” 

“Why?”

“Why did he save me?”

“Why have you come to get him back.”

Is this a test? Or an honest question? “He pulled me out of Hell. It’s my turn to get him.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s the right thing to do. He deserves better.” 

“Why?”

“Because he was trying to do good. Did do good.” Dean clears his throat. “He’s a good person.”

“Good people die,” Cain says, each syllable heavy as a tombstone.

And Cain would know, wouldn’t he. Considering he killed a lot of them. “Yeah. And I’m taking this one back.”

“Why him?”

Dean flings up a hand. “Psh, what are you, five? Just tell me what I need to give you to open the door.”

“You need to answer me. Why. Him.” 

That can’t be it. “He died, and he shouldn’t have. He died because Billie—Death—went rogue, and because God kept fucking with us, and his son, Jack, and it wasn’t—it wasn’t—” It’s Cas. An infinite number of Castiels, and only one Cas. “It shouldn’t have gone like that.”

“God fucked with everyone,” Cain says. “He certainly fucked with me. But you didn’t come to bring me back. You haven’t come to give anyone else here a do-over.”

“Did I owe you a Bible and hammer, after you tried to kill me?”

“Do you owe him?”

“Yes, I—”

“So this is to repay a debt.”

“No—”

“Between Castiel and myself, who do you think has killed more?”

He’s not going to blink, and he’s not going to turn around. “He always had a reason. He always tried. I told you, Cas is a good person.” 

“So was I, once. So were the poor people possessed by every demon you stabbed with that knife of yours, once you stopped bothering to exorcize them. So were all the people killed by demons after you failed to close Hell, and all the people killed by— well, I assume the Darkness did kill people?”

“What, is this a ‘did you bring enough for the whole class’ situation? If I get Cas out, I have to get everyone else out too?” If that’s the cost, he might even be able to do it. Set Lucifer and Michael and Abaddon loose on the world again, as long as Cas came back with them.

“No,” Cain says. “It’s a question.”

“Are you saying it has to be fair, then? They stay dead, so he has to as well? Life isn’t fair. It’s not fair Chuck chose you and Abel, and it’s not fair that he chose me and Sam. And it’s not fair that Cas had to—that Cas had to do what he did, and I’m going to make it right.” 

“Right.” Cain draws out the word, mocking. “The Righteous Man. Because what you do is always Right, isn’t it? You save people. You sacrifice yourself for the world. Over and over and over again. And if there’s collateral damage on the way, if you do something bloodier than you had to, well, at least you were right. Greater good. Cost of doing business. That’s how you sleep at night, isn’t it? That’s how you justified working with all those angels and demons you walked through back there—traitors and turncoats, all of them. Dead because of you, all of them.”

He might not have any weapons, but he thinks he could still land a couple blows before Cain knocked him out. “What do you want? What do I have to give you?” He’ll start stripping naked if it puts an end to this conversation.

“Why are you here?”

Maybe he’ll even let Cain cut off his hand. Fitting offerings, like Ruby had talked about. “To. Get. Cas.”

“And why him, above all the others here? All the angels who fought for humanity. All the angels Castiel murdered. Answer me honestly, Dean, or you’ll never get anywhere.”

There was never a moment after he died that Dean considered leaving Cas here. He never had to think about why. “He’s my family.”

Cain raises his eyebrows. 

“You’d have done it for Colette.”

Cain’s eyebrows rise higher.

“And I don’t care what he’s done, and I don’t care what he’s going to do—” a house is collapsing in his chest, and there is smoke pouring out. “And I don’t care if it kills me and I don’t care what you or anyone back there thinks about it and I don’t care if it’s fair and I don’t care if it’s right. I love him and I am bringing him home.”

Cain keeps looking at him. Long enough that Dean wonders, again, if they’re going to have to fight. Again.

“Alright, then.”

“What?”

Cain points his thumb over his shoulder. “Last gate.”

What? “I don’t have to give anything up?”

“I’d say you just did. No righteousness, no excuses. And no car, no brother. No defenses. No machismo. Not even a sign that he loved you. The soul protects itself, you know. But through that door is the Empty, and you’ve got no protection left.”

Dean swallows. He’s not sure he has enough saliva to swallow, but his throat works anyway. “Cas is on the other side?”

“Maybe.”

It’s good enough. It has to be good enough. 

Dean steps past Cain. This door opens as easily as the others. 

“Maybe none of us deserved to be saved,” he says, looking back. “Maybe that’s not something anyone can deserve. Maybe it’s just about who loves us.” 

But Cain is already gone. 

Chapter Text

What he wouldn’t give right now to be in Purgatory, with solid dirt under his feet. Real blood under his fingernails. Finding Cas there was hard, but simple: he could slaughter his way to the answer.

Here, the monsters are unhelpful and untouchable. Here, the only one he can hurt is himself. 

There’s a sandpaper feeling in his ribcage, as if he had just cried his heart out. His heart is still there, though: he can feel it working away in his chest, unaware or uncaring that his body is so no longer connected to reality. 

Maybe his heart is the only real thing left. 

“Cas?” Silence. “Castiel!” He keeps walking straight ahead. “Cas! CAS!” Silence silence silence. “CASTIEL!”

Cain could have been lying. There is just as much nothing here as there is behind him. 

“Cas!” 

It’s all he has: a heartbeat, and a scream. 

And then. 

“Dean!”

The sound is coming from somewhere on his left. If he goes towards it, if he veers off his straight path, he’s not going to be able to find his way back to the gate. All the Empty has to do to get him lost is throw around an echo. 

Dean turns anyway. 

“Cas?” 

“Dean!”

There’s something out there now, something tan colored, and Dean breaks into a jog. It’s just like walking. It’s just like a sprint.

The pain of Cas’s head bouncing off his temple is the first real thing he’s felt since he woke up in the car.

“Sorry,” Cas says. “Sorry, I—”

“No, I’m—” he’s got Cas’s cheeks in his hands. Same face. Same wrinkles. Same eyes.  “Cas—” and Dean doesn’t know how to say or explain what he needs to, so instead he hugs him, tight and desperate and real, real, real. “I found you.”

He can feel Cas’s arm across his back, his hand on Dean’s shoulder. Cas isn’t warm. But he’s here.

“How did you get here? I woke up, I thought I heard your voice, you’re not—” Cas pulls away suddenly, and now he’s patting Dean’s face, his arm, like he’s searching him for weapons. “Are you dead? Billie said she’d send you here but Billie is gone, tell me you’re not dead—”

“I’m not dead.” He grabs Cas’s hand. “See? Warm.”

Cas isn’t breathing, but he’s staring at Dean’s hand covering his own. He turns it, presses his thumb to the indentation about Dean’s wrist. Where they can both feel his pulse.

It’s only now that Dean processes the fact that he can see his own fingers. He can see his stomach, his legs, his feet. 

“I’ve come to get you out.”

This doesn’t make Cas look any happier. “No, no, this isn’t right. You were supposed to stop this. You were supposed to live—”

“I am living!” If he could he would step away, would curl into himself, but he can’t pull out of Cas’s grip. When he does, he’ll disappear again. “I’m trying to live. We beat Chuck, and Jack is God, and I am trying to live and I need you with me to do that.”

“Dean.”

“I know I’m an asshole and I know—I’ve said things, and I haven’t said other things, but I thought you knew, man.” He wants to say you’ve always had me, but Cas hasn’t. Even after Dean fell in love with him. Especially after Dean fell in love with him. “I thought you knew. And you thought I wouldn’t come find you? I’m yours however you want me to be, I—” he should not kiss Cas. He absolutely should not kiss Cas, but he aches with how badly he wants to. He’s never been more aware of where his lips were in space as when he presses his nose and mouth against the side of Cas’s head, pulling him in for another hug. 

Time passes. Or maybe it doesn’t. Cas hides his face in Dean’s neck for four heartbeats before saying, “Did you say Jack is God?”

“Uh—”

“This is not the channel I signed up for.”

Dean and Cas break apart. The voice is nasally, with an accent that may have once seen the British Isles at a distance from the deck of a gay party boat. It’s coming from behind him, and Dean knows—he knows what it is, but when he turns to face it he’s back in the basement, with certain death ahead and Cas at his back. This time, he keeps his hold on Cas’s hand.

The Entity is a blob. Black, maybe human shaped, speaking through what looks like a smile. As they watch, it changes: collapsing in on itself, turning pale, until Cas is standing in front of them.

He’d never checked. He’d never made sure that the Cas he’s clinging to was Cas, and he looks back in horror. But it’s got to be. No one else could mimic that expression. Not here, where they’re nothing but fragments of themselves.

“Sorry,” Dean says. He should make a joke about TV, or nothing being on, but nothing comes to him and the moment passes. “I’m just here to pick him up. We’ll get out of your way.”

The Entity draws closer. Or maybe it was close all along, and it’s just getting larger. “And why do you think you’re doing that?”

“’Cause.” He tries to sound fearless. “He’s with me.”

“Castiel is mine. We had a deal.”

The word sounds different, in the Entity’s mouth. Cruder. “So I’ve heard. But see, I also told him I wasn’t leaving without him, and I told him that before he even met you.”

“Dean,” Cas says quietly. 

“What? I did, and I’m still not. If it doesn’t want to let us go, I could just stay here… Can you sleep, with a living human under your fingernail?”

The Entity twitches. It moves like an angel in a new vessel who has just gone through several rounds of electrocution. “I could just kill you.”

“Sure, sure. But see, I’m just as annoying dead as I am alive. Ask anyone here.” Dean gestures around. Not that there are any other angels and demons visible. “They can all tell you. Though maybe they don’t need to—you’ve met the rest of my family, and buddy, I’m the worst of them. ”

“And you think you should be rewarded for this?” Twitch. “You think I won’t smite you into dust?”

“You can’t,” Cas says. “He’s not yours. You can let him out. I’ll stay—”

“You absolutely will not—”

“Oh my god, shut up. I do not want to watch your little soap opera. I do not want to hear about your little feelings. What I want. Is a fucking. Nap. ” It taps its chin. “So what to do, then, what to do.”

“Then let us go,” Cas says. “And we won’t bother you again.”

The Entity smiles. Somehow this smile is worse than the one made of black goop. “No,” it says. “You won’t. Because you —” it reaches an arm towards Dean, tapping its middle finger against its thumb, “—walked in, and you’re going to walk back out. Through each of those seven gates. Back to earth, where you will live out the rest of your days and death far, far away from me.”

“Not without Cas.”

“Castiel can follow you.” Dean has never seen an expression that maniacal on Cas’s face. Not even at his most Leviathan-infested. “Under one condition.”

“Hold on,” Cas says. 

Dean ignores him. “Name it.”

“He follows you. You do not look at him. You do not speak to him. You do not touch him. And he does not speak to you. He does not touch you. If you turn around, if you so much as glance his way, he’s mine. No do-overs. No take-backsies. And then for as long as he keeps me awake, I will spend my time bricking up that back entrance, jamming those doors with archangels and Knights of Hell, so that I will never. Have to suffer visitors. Again.”

Dean doesn’t need a Mon Calamari on his shoulder to tell him that if it looks like a trap and sounds like a trap and is obviously a fucking trap then it’s a trap. “What’s to stop you from grabbing him as soon as my back is turned?”

The Entity bares Cas’s teeth. “I keep my deals. But you—you’re not known for keeping promises, and I think I’d like to watch you sweat it out. I think it would be fun.”

“No. No, I don’t believe you.”

“Dean.” Cas tugs his shoulder until he spins back around. The Entity doesn’t look anything like him, really. It doesn’t have the softness around the eyes, or the hard set of his mouth. “Dean, take the deal. No matter what, you get out, right?” He leans over Dean’s shoulder. “Right?”

After everything it took to get here, Dean isn’t just turning around and leaving alone. Not even if it’s Cas asking. “We can do it the other way. Cas walks in front. I follow. If he turns, I’ll stay here, I’ll go right to sleep, I promise—”

“I don’t want your soul.” The Entity circles them. It pokes Dean in the chest, but he feels it somewhere in his gut. “Exposed. Angsty. Loud. Pathetic.”

“Hey, only one of us is roleplaying Dominique here, and isn’t me.”

Cas is giving Dean that look again. The one that he’s seen every time he closes his eyes. “Take the deal, Dean.”

When he elbows the Entity out of the way, it feels solid. “Cas, don’t ask me to do this.”

“I’ll be right behind you.” Cas cradles Dean’s hand in both of his. “I’ll be right behind you. Just say yes.”

The Entity is kind enough to point him in the direction of the door.

Dean strains his ears, trying to catch any sign of a footstep, but the only thing he hears is his own heartbeat.

His hands disappeared when Cas stopped touching him, and he’s sure the rest of his body is gone too, but he won’t glance down to check. Won’t scratch his ear. Won’t do anything that could possibly count as looking.

The gate creaks behind him, and he pauses.

Is the Empty going to close it again? What if it lied, and Cas is still in there? Maybe this is his only chance to go back, to find some better way to—to plead with or threaten it or make a trade—but there is no thud of a door closing.

It could, though. It could close any time. It could disappear without a sound—and Cain isn’t there to let him back in.

Fuck. 

Fuck.

He’s not going to fail. He doesn't have to be Sam to know what happened to Orpheus: that sucker turned around too early, and Dean won’t do that. Dean can learn from his mistakes.

Unless that’s what the Entity is counting on. It knows he knows the story, it knows he’ll try to do better—that he won’t realize Cas isn’t behind him until it’s too late to do anything about it. 

He needs to go back.

But if it wasn’t lying—

Then Dean will have condemned Cas to the Empty, again. Cas who gave up Heaven and an army for Dean. Who thought Dean didn’t love him back.

Maybe he still thinks that. Dean didn’t say it, did he? He only said it to Cain.

My love isn’t much to offer. Not without an apocalypse. Not if he can’t die to prove it. Not when the anger that always seems to come with it can’t be directed at enemies. But you have it, Cas, do you hear me? Can you hear me? There’s nothing you want that you can’t have. No matter what it is. Because I want it, and I love you, and I hope that’s worth something to you. I hope that’s worth walking out of here for.

Please be reading my mind.

Though if you are, you’re probably picking up Margaritaville. Sorry about that.

Listening to the end of a song to get it out of his head has never worked for Dean, but he thinks it would be nice to try. Sitting next to Cas on a porch swing, eating shrimp, listening to Jimmy Buffett. Maybe even the Beach Boys. Either Sam wouldn’t be there, or he would be there and not laugh. Later they could recline on the beach next to a shitty portable speaker, and Dean could put on that pop music Cas likes and Dean pretends to hate. Cas would probably make Dean wear sunscreen, claiming he wasn’t going to heal any sunburns, and Dean could wipe off the excess on Cas’s nose, just so that he’d make that confused squinting face. 

He might even be able to get Cas into a sun hat.

Because there’s nothing he can show Cas that Cas hasn’t already seen, nothing he can make him that Cas will be able to taste. But maybe it will be enough to do those things together. No end of the world, no great conspiracy gunning for them. They can play board games with Jack and make faces at each other when Sam and Eileen are being gross. Maybe Dean will teach Cas how to take care of his car, properly this time, and Cas will tell him about the inner workings of an anthill or the light of the stars in the Andromeda galaxy. They can stay up all night binging TV and arguing about whether it’s good until Dean falls asleep and drools on Cas’s shirt, and Dean could kiss him, on the beach, in the garage, in his room—

If Cas wants that, of course. He never really said what it was that he wanted. It doesn’t matter. If it’s not Cas’s thing, he’ll never ask. He won’t even sneak glances. Dean doesn’t think he’ll be able to ignore the fact that he’s in love with Cas ever again: he picked that scab clean off, and now there's blood in his footprints. But that doesn’t mean he’s going to be an asshole about it. Certainly he’s not going to save it for a deathbed confession and then dip out. He can be normal about things, as long as Cas stays—and if he doesn’t want to stay, that’s. Well. It won’t be okay, but he won’t put up a fuss about it. If Cas wants to go to Heaven with Jack, or drive around the country looking for angels, or whatever he gets it into his head that he has to do, Dean will make sure Cas knows that Dean wants him home. And that he understands why he has to go. If he’s furious at Dean for something—for letting Jack become God or not finding a way to stop Billie or any of the things he’s never been angry about over the years but should have been—and never wants to speak to him again… Dean won’t get over it, probably, but it would be worth it for Cas not being dead.

Especially if his choices here are either to stay awake with only the Entity for company, or be trapped in eternal nightmares.

Eternal nightmares, or eternal night.

He’d thought walking between gates, looking for gatekeepers was bad: this is worse. Because now there’s no indication of distance. Nothing for his eyes to focus on, and no promise that there will ever be. He has to believe he’s walking in the right direction, but if he’s not—he might never know. He might just lead Cas in circles around limbo until time collapses in on itself. Or Dean dies of old age. If he can even do that, when the stubble on his chin hasn’t gotten longer.

He wishes he’d saved his flashlight battery. Or brought his phone. It wouldn't help, but it would be nice to have something.

For a moment, he thinks he sees a light up ahead—but it’s gone when he blinks. And then it’s back, warping when he shakes his head. Blue splotches, shifting across his vision.

That’s not freaky at all.

‘….had to cruise on back home.’ He’s sure he hears it, somewhere in the distance. Maybe there really is someone out there—Ruby, Balthazar, or someone he hasn’t even seen yet. Gabriel. Belphegor. Playing Jimmy Buffett just loud enough to make him feel like he’s going insane.

He thinks it’s more likely that he really is going insane, what does he know?

‘But I know, it’s my own damn fault.’

Not funny. Dean doesn’t know if thinking emphatically is the same as thinking loudly, but he hopes so.

There are colors dancing in his vision again: he sees something out of the corner of his eye, and he almost looks sideways before a jolt of fear makes his limbs prickle.

He isn’t going to turn his head.

But it looked like spots of yellow. Like yellow eyes.

They might still be there. Still be watching. Because Yellow Eyes took away Mary, he took away Jess—and he’s here, somewhere. Maybe sleeping. But maybe not.

Third verse, same as the second, same as the first. There’s no ceiling here for Cas to burn on, but there are enough in the Bunker. If they get that far. 

He doesn’t know who else the Empty might have woken once he turned his back. Cas might not be the only thing following him out—that’s something the Empty would do. It’s childish and vindictive when it wants to be.  And if Sam’s worry was founded, maybe their spell woke up every Castiel, and that psychopathic one with the inexplicable German accent is on their heels. And without the Colt or the angel blade, they wouldn’t be able to kill him.

Would Dean even be able to do that? Now that God isn’t there, now that Bad Cas would have the same option of choice that his Cas does—Would Dean be able to turn him into light and ashes?

He might. But he's not sure if he could live with it, after.

Especially if his own Cas isn’t really there. If one of the evil versions came in his place, and was the only one Dean was ever going to see again.

But the Empty wouldn’t have done that. Right? It doesn’t know how to put Cas back to sleep, and Cas is a bitchy little guy on his off-days. He’s perfectly capable of tormenting the Entity forever.

So Cas has to be behind him.

As long as he wants to be.

And he does, right?

Regardless of what he thinks of or wants from Dean—he’d come back for Jack.

Dean thinks he hears another door creak.

Is that only the second one? Are they at Crowley’s gate? Or have they passed more, that didn’t make a sound?

Maybe Cas is the one creaking them. Reminding Dean that he’s there. The Empty didn’t say he couldn’t wiggle a door.

Or maybe something is fucking with them.

More than they’re already being fucked with, anyway. More than all the gatekeepers did.

The turncoats and traitors, Cain had called them. A demon who cared for an angel, two angels who turned on Heaven, a demon who—what did Ruby do? Maybe it was enough that she and Sam killed so many other demons.  Maybe she even cared for Sam, in that twisted black heart of hers. Dean would have said it was impossible, but Crowley—Crowley cared.

Dean hadn’t even tried to get him out.

He closes his eyes, squeezing them tight enough that he can see more splotches of color.

Maybe Cas is stuck in the same loops. The same doubts. The same questions. There’s nothing to do here but think.

Maybe he’s realized that when Dean said “Jack is God”, that it meant Jack is gone. Maybe he doesn’t want to go back to an earth that doesn’t have his son on it. Maybe Cas turned around. Sat himself down somewhere between Crowley and Balthazar and went back to sleep. 

No. He wouldn’t do that. He’d follow Dean to the portal, at least. Make sure Dean got out. But that doesn’t mean that he isn't planning to sacrifice himself for no reason, isn’t going to think that he owes—someone, something. Dean isn’t righteous, but Cas tries to be, and if he gets it in his head that staying is the proper thing to do—

It’s not like it hasn’t happened before. 

A gate creaks.

Follow me, he thinks. Please be following me.

There’s an warm light up ahead, and he thinks it’s his brain, making more mandalas. But it keeps getting larger: orange lightning, frozen in place.

The way home.

Back to the Bunker, with light and food and tangible surfaces and Sam and, if there is any justice in Jack's universe, Cas.

Dean stops in front of it. 

Two feet from home. And if Cas isn’t here, this is his last chance. To run back into the Empty and force it to either let Cas go or let Dean sleep at his side. And if Cas is behind him but has decided to stay here... it’s not like it would be without precedent, because he always leaves when he gets it into his head that it’s best. He left Dean alone at Lisa’s for a year. He left Dean in Purgatory. He left Dean for Lucifer. He left Dean for the Empty.

He can feel it: Cas’s hand falling from his. The portal closing.

He can’t do it again.

Dean won’t let him do it again.

He doesn’t care what Cas wants. What Cas thinks is best. Dean loves him. Dean wants him. Dean is not going to leave him here.

He’s going to have to be quick.

Shifting his weight to his toes, getting ready to run–  

Dean turns around. 

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.