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Dean hasn’t dreamed about the kids in Baba Yaga’s lair since before Hell.
He’s got enough to take their place. There are nightmares that take pieces of it all of course; his brain likes to twist it up and spit his greatest hits back at him - he’ll be torturing someone or something in Purgatory with Alistair leering over him or have a hellhound drag him screaming into a Ma’lak box or be standing on the coast in North Cove, Washington with the Mark burning on his arm, a knife in his hand, and Cas dead at his feet. Maybe sometimes there’s a pile of dead children in the background or a body he has to step over on his way through the muck. Maybe sometimes there are bodies he recognizes: Ben or Kevin or Charlie or a child Sam with yellow eyes. Maybe his own brain doesn’t do him any favors, and he’s known that for a long time.
It’s all why he doesn’t sleep more than he has to, and why there’s booze under the bed, but that particular warehouse with its particular chill, that particular feeling of being 15 and alone and the closest thing to an adult in the room - that’s a place he hasn’t been back to in awhile.
He dreams about it that night, though, and when he pulls the tarp back its Jack’s face staring at him, wide and unseeing. It’s the kind of nightmare that hurts almost physically. He wakes up with the knife he keeps under his pillow clutched in his hand, and it leaves him disoriented afterward, blinking at the walls in the dark as he comes back to himself, chest aching and head hazy like the fog of hangover. Usually after something like that there’s at least some temporary relief as reality settles back in. Not this time.
It’s a little on the nose, he thinks later, huddled over a bottle of whiskey in the library in the low lamplight, but there’s not much subtly left in this story. It’s not even a new story. Keep a secret, tell a lie, make a desperate choice when your back’s against the wall. These are the story beats of his life, echoing in shadows and musty hotel rooms and deals at the crossroads where all paths led here.
It’s not even the first time one of them has turned himself into a suicide bomb to take out God. Dean would rather it was him again, of course he would. He’d take it on if he could, but that’s not the way out. There’s not actually a way out. Not for them, and he’s coming to understand that now. Cas won’t come back from this one; Sam may not forgive Dean, and if he does Dean won’t ever forgive himself. And that’s if any of the rest of them even make it out of this. All that’s left is the way that saves the wider world, and all the ways that don’t. That’s the choice, and maybe the only one they’ve ever really had.
---
It isn’t true that he never told anyone about what happened in Wadsworth.
He never told Sam, both to protect him and because telling Sam things makes them real. Dean barely remembers a time when he didn’t know for certain that all the monsters under the bed were real; any memories from before the fire feel like someone else’s life. But he helped their dad keep the monsters from Sam as long as they could (not anywhere near long enough), and it let Dean pretend too, just for a little while.
It’s not totally fair that he still uses Sam for that now, sometimes, but if Sam doesn’t know, he can’t look at Dean with those wide, pitying eyes, somehow still surprised when the latest round of bullshit comes to light. Dean figures that the fact Sam still has some capacity for surprise means Dean did something right in all this, kept enough from him early on that he was at least fully formed before he was broken, even if they’re both a shattered mess now.
So he never told Sam, but he did tell his dad, once. It was years later, after Sam went to Stanford, when John was drinking too much and Dean was hunting with Lee more and Dean was trying to explain to his dad that Sam didn’t have the same kind of memories they both had and how, maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t so bad that Sam felt like he had options. Dean didn’t like it either, back then; he’d never wanted Sam out of his sight (still doesn’t, really), but he also didn’t like the way John didn’t like it, this sense that this life was all there would ever be for any of them. If that was true, then didn’t it mean that Dean failed too in the one thing he’d been tasked with? Keeping Sam safe.
John had just looked at him over the edge of the beer bottle in the seedy hotel room and set it down on the table with a clang and said, sympathetically, “I know, Son. But how do we protect him if he’s not here?”
So Dean was a failure either way, because there wasn’t a way to win. There wasn’t a way out then, there’s not now, and there never has been. John barely reacted to Dean’s revelation about what happened in Wadsworth, and why should he have? It was years past by then, and Dean had seen worse. It was the kind of thing that happens in their line of work. He told Dean matter-of-factly, with something like pride, that he’d made the right call, and Dean took some solace in that, and it was several more years before it even occurred to Dean that it wasn’t a call he should have had to make.
---
It’s silent in the bunker, and not a normal 3 am silence. He can almost feel the energy of Sam awake and fuming through the walls. It’s a weighted, heavy quiet, like the way the sky goes black and eerie before a storm.
Jack had met them in the map room and just said “It’s time” with a calm and chilling resignation, and Sam had just clenched his jaw and looked away. Jack had tried to reassure him, and that had only made it worse.
Sam is so, so angry. Well, Dean’s angry too. That’s how it feels to find out the game has always been rigged. He doesn’t want Sam to accept it, though, not really. He can do accept it so Sam doesn’t have to. He can take this one for the team, help Jack and Billie do what has to be done, so Sam and Cas do...whatever they’re going to do. He can make the impossible choice and sacrifice whatever he’s got left so Sam can rail against this, can do the hopeful and futile thing.
This choice feels like it could damn him, but it's not the first time for that either.
He checks his phone when it buzzes again in the pocket of his robe. He has three missed calls from Cas and about a dozen increasingly frustrated and worried text messages. This one just says are you okay? and something clenches in his chest.
When Cas left, Dean made him promise to stay in touch, so he should have answered well before now. He just didn’t know how to tell Cas that there was still a tiny part of him that was hoping he wouldn’t have to tell Sam this and make it real, that he was still hoping Cas would turn up some alternative. But he looked into Billie's eyes and he knows they’re past that now. Sam knows and Jack knows they both know. They're out of time, and here they are at the end of the line where different kinds of failure are the only options again. That’s also not a new story.
I told him he texts Cas. And then Billie’s been here, and she came to see me. And then you need to come back.
Then he turns off his phone.