Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Sunk deep into the darkness, Castiel is drifting. There is no smell or texture to anything. Just the endless weight of sadness pressing down on him. Without a floor beneath his feet or walls around him, movement and stagnation taste the same. He’s wavelengths again, lost in an endless shuffling of particles. Dreams push through him, spearing him on his every sin.

Lives lost and tormented beneath his hands. Wounds that failed to be healed. People, angels and humans, who died with his name on their lips. Massacres unretractable. Dean looking back over his shoulder at Castiel’s betrayal. Walking into a lake and letting horrors lose on the world. Dean’s bloodied face beneath his fists.

More than anything, Castiel dreams of the angels. Naomi blurs into Metatron, who blurs back into Balthazar and Hael and Hannah, passing through his memories one by one. So many brothers and sisters with his sword through their throats, over and over again. To human eyes, they glow in death— to his, they burst into darkness. A sliver of the divine, snuffed out like a candle. Castiel lives each of their deaths over and over again. 

He has lived through so much sadness, he thinks faintly as he drifts through the memories of it all. Naomi stands over him, bearer of pain and suppression. What a privilege, he thinks, to have lived through such a life. He looks out at the warehouse, littered with bodies in Dean’s likeness. Their faces bloodied, their eyes burned out and mouths open in pleading. What a privilege for such memories to hurt him so. He wonders if his brothers and sisters, marble statues in a gallery, hurt so much. Probably not, he thinks as darkness blooms where Raphael once stood, where Samandriel and Duma and Rachel once stood. Friends and foe alike swallowed by the Empty. Each of their last moments corrupted by fear and horror and pain.

Maybe they can feel after all, Castiel thinks as he murders them again and again. The angel blade moves as easily in his death as it did in life.

The Empty lacks any kind of temperature, isn’t hot or cold or anything in between. But in the swimming nothingness of it all, the endless pressure of despair manages to be chilling. Like an iceberg pinned to his chest, trickling ice-water down his skin for eternity.

When the light comes, it’s such a shock that Castiel can hardly blink. He’s standing outside on a cool and cloudy night, watching his brothers and sisters, the forces of Heaven, fall to Earth. In his head, angel radio reverberates with their screams. Then it stops.

There’s a split second of silence that makes his ears ring. A burst of light.

Then it’s all gone.

The weight of despair is lifted off his chest, and Castiel gasps for breath.

For a moment he’s sure he must be reliving another memory. He’s standing at an intersection between two white hallways. Everything shines with sanctity here. The same Heaven he used to serve, emptier than it’s ever been before. Its very foundations threaded through with laws and violence. Up and down the hallways are closed doors, labeled with names. Individual heavens, hand-crafted and sealed by long-dead angels.

And there, in front of Castiel, stands his son.

In Heaven, Jack glows. The angel in him is blinding, the way the sight of Castiel’s brothers and sisters always shone in his vision like the sun. It should be the same warmth, the same flavor of divinity that runs through every angel and nephilim, but something about it is different this time. Something about Jack is different.

“Jack,” Cas says. Speaking feels foreign after such long silence. And he isn’t sure whether to be confused or worried or grateful.

“Hello, Cas,” Jack offers, his hand sneaking up into its usual half-wave. He looks different, but he smiles. “How are you feeling?”

Cas looks around. Angels used to fill these halls, and now they’re empty. The doors are all sealed, glowing with Heaven’s light, but the longer he looks the more cracks Castiel sees in the foundations.

“What’s going on?”

“I brought you back.”

“How?” Cas asks. “Where’s—” He hesitates. “Where are Sam and Dean?”

“They’re fine,” Jack assures him. “They’re safe, they’re on Earth.”

“What happened?” Castiel asks. “What—” He blinks, trying to place the difference in Jack. There’s a reflection to his soul, maybe, or a second gleam behind his eyes. He’s full of power, like he was when he was young and new, fresh to the world and brimming with potential.

“We defeated Chuck,” Jack says. “He’s human now. I absorbed his power.”

“You . . . absorbed his power?”

“Yes,” Jack says, like it’s obvious. And that explains the twist in Jack’s neck, the way his eyes are darker and lighter than they’ve ever been, and the extra sliver of light in the highlights of hair. He’s bleeding divinity.

And when he looks around Castiel wonders why he didn’t see it before. Every molecule of Heaven has turned its face to Jack, like he’s the sun and moon and stars rolled into one. The faintest of shadows— always scarce and cowering in Heaven— have been blasted away, and the only landscape is gradients of light. Jack doesn’t even seem to notice.

“Are you— ” Castiel hesitates, unsure of what exactly he wants to ask. He has stood where Jack has stood before, or a dozen places like it. On a ledge above a cliff, with every chance to fly and every possibility of plummeting. And at every turn Cas had fallen. For now, Jack is solid and here, two feet on some kind of ground. But Cas wonders for how much longer. It's so, so easy to fall. And for a moment a memory of the Empty, and the weight of despair, threads through his heart. “Are you okay?”

“I think so,” Jack says, and sort of looks down at himself. And despite the change he looks the same as he always has. His shoulders are square and stiff, like he doesn’t quite know how to use them. Whatever precipice he’s standing on, the wind hasn’t yet arrived to ruffle his feathers.

“You’re the new God,” Cas says.

“I don’t really know what that means yet,” Jack admits. And he still talks the same way as he always has, like the words are new in his mouth and too precious to be mispronounced. Every sentence a precise, articulated thing. “But I know I want to do it differently. And I want to start here.” He gestures around at him at the crumbling halls.

“Heaven?”

“Some things are running on autopilot,” Jack explains. “All the individual heavens are like closed loops. Like cars on racetracks,” he says. “They go around and around on their own, for now.” And there’s the briefest second where Jack’s brow furrows and Cas can tell he’s distracted himself thinking about racecars, hurtling viciously around a track for the sake of speed. Jack has never been to a racetrack, Cas realizes. But when he thinks about it, maybe Cas hasn’t either. Jack blinks back to the conversation. “But they won’t stay that way forever. Without anybody here to keep Heaven running, things are falling apart. Souls are already being turned back to Hell because nobody’s here to take them in and build their heavens.”

“What?” Cas asks. “What about Naomi and the others, and the angels you created—”

“There are six of them left,” Jack says. “They aren’t enough. They can’t do it forever.” He tilts his head, and it’s like staring at a reflection of Castiel so many years ago, back when he was brimming with wisdom and no sense. “And I don’t want them to.”

That makes Castiel blink.

“I never got to see Heaven when it was working right,” Jack continues, looking around at the white and blinding world. Thoughts churn behind his eyes. “But I have memories, I think, of how it worked. Like Chuck’s blueprints. I want to change it.”

There’s a purpose in his eyes that Castiel is all too familiar with.

Every lesson Castiel has ever learned, he has had to learn the hard way. And he has paid the price, in his own blood if not the blood of his brothers and sisters, his friends and allies, and the many innocent humans who got in the way. And with every chance he gets to turn things around, he manages to trap himself into learning one more doomed and bloody lesson. Cas would give anything to spare Jack that pain. But Jack is three years old now and no longer new to horror. He’s seen death and destruction. He’s seen the divine wrath of Heaven, what happens when the plans of a wicked and temperamental God go astray. He has lost good people. He has learned hard lessons. And he stands in the ruins of Heaven, full of determination to change it. As Castiel had tried so very many times. What a blessing and a curse, Castiel thinks, to have a son so much like him. So falling over himself to do it all over again and better.

But, a voice reminds him. Jack might actually be able to do it.

“What about Dean and Sam?” Castiel asks.

“They’re okay,” Jack confirms. “I told you, they’re alive. They’re on Earth.”

“How do you know they’re going to be okay?”

“I don’t, exactly,” Jack says. “But it’s up to them. I told Sam and Dean that Chuck was too hands on. He wanted everything a specific way, and he wanted a role in the story.” He holds his hands up. “I’m hands off. No more strings.” He blinks at Cas. “Like Pinocchio. So whatever happens to them now is up to them. I can’t be a part of it.”

“You left them behind?” Castiel says. “For good?”

“I couldn’t stay,” Jack insists. “I had to go do this.” He shrugs a vague gesture at himself, exaltation rolling off him in waves and swelling against the walls of Heaven. Light and sound and force incarnate. “Be God. And—” He looks up at Castiel, a child again. “I had to bring you back.” He shakes his head. “I’m doing this for you, and for Sam and Dean. I want to build Paradise,” Jack says. And his eyes light up in a pleading. “I want to give them that. I think they’ve earned it.” By all logic Jack should have run out of people to plead to. He’ll never need permission or forgiveness again. But he turns his face up to his father anyway.

“Will you help me, Cas?” Jack asks.

And because it’s Jack, Cas can’t say no.

* * *

There are six angels left in Heaven. Five of them are angels Jack created at Duma’s behest. It seems a lifetime ago, as it all does. The sixth angel is Naomi, stern and white-haired. She stares at Jack, and his radiance shines right through her. If Cas focuses just right, he can see where she’s been snapped in half and stitched back together, held together by the grace of Heaven. Naomi has been through a lot. She doesn’t look too happy to see Jack, but she doesn’t say anything. Jack is God now, and the ruler of Heaven. And Naomi, for all her many, many faults, has always been loyal to Heaven.

“You’ve come a long way, Castiel,” Naomi says, turning her gaze from Jack to her one-time inferior. Naomi used to be good at holding that steady gaze, the kind of look that could entice and implore and demand in succession. Naomi’s has been tempered by time and tragedy. It makes her look a little more human.

“It seems we both have,” Cas agrees.

“Are you happy now?” Naomi challenges. “After all these years of defiance—” She gestures at the Heaven around them. “And you’re right back where you started.”

It’s meant to be a challenge or a curse, maybe. And Cas expects to feel some remaining guilt or fear, some shock of self-hatred or guilt, but it doesn’t come. Naomi is only a ghost from his past. There’s nothing she can do to him anymore.

“Naomi,” Jack reiterates, interrupting anything Cas might say in return. “Do you understand?”

They’re standing in Heaven, in the great white warehouse where once, years ago, Naomi had forced Cas to kill a hundred different versions of Dean. Around them, the walls are shining, Heaven’s white glow obscuring the cracks. Corners fade to rounded edges without shadows, and columns stretch upwards without meeting a ceiling. The only solid things are the eight of them— Castiel and Jack standing before Naomi. And behind her stand the last of the angels Jack created. They’re waiting— maybe on Naomi, maybe on Castiel. And Jack is waiting for an answer.

“Can you do it.” Jack says. It’s not a question.

Naomi hesitates. Castiel can see the change as it moves through her— the softness she lets tug at the corners of her mouth, the way she smooths her voice out into a careful murmur. 

“Heaven’s role is to protect and maintain the balance of this world,” Naomi ventures. “To act on behalf of God and His creations. This plan—”

“Heaven is dying,” Jack says, cutting her off. “And from what I hear—” his eyes flit over at Cas for a moment, then back to Naomi. “You’re the one who let it.”

“If our enemies had had their way, Heaven would have died long ago,” Naomi says, her level voice all milk and honey. “I’ve been the one keeping it alive.”

“Heaven’s role should have been to serve and protect humans,” Jack says. “Instead it got caught up in useless wars and fighting. It’s time for that to stop.”

“Jack,” Naomi ventures. She allows such a motherly softness into her voice that Castiel is almost fooled. “You’re young. And you have so much responsibility on your shoulders. All I’m asking is that you trust my judgment, and all the years I’ve—”

“No,” Jack says, and the sliver of harshness that slips into his voice sounds so familiar that Cas is surprised to feel a stab of heartache. He sounds just like Dean before an enemy. Unyielding. “You’ve heard our plan. Yes or no: can you do it?”

Jack wants to tear down Heaven. Around them, it’s already crumbling. It’s half ruins, half autopilot— a ghost ship with less than a bare bones crew. It’s time to put it to rest, Jack explained. And even though he knows his son is right, there’s a fist-sized aching in Cas’s chest. Heaven was his home, once. Long ago, when there was nothing in his world but blind faith and an army of brothers and sisters.

But Cas does agree. Watching Jack now, the way the very fabric of Heaven seems drawn to the divinity in him, Cas knows that his time has come. Heaven must give way to Paradise. Jack’s still so young and it bleeds through in every gesture and word. He holds himself so stiff. His eyes so wide. But the time has come for Cas to have a little faith.

What an odd thing to find here, Castiel ruminates in the ruins of Heaven. Faith.

The difficulty is the how. Jack wants to usher in Paradise, and he could very well do it. It would only take a moment, one burst of pure Creation. The problem is what to do with all the souls of Heaven in that moment between the demolition of the old and the birth of the new. There are millions of souls in Heaven, each tucked into their own personal afterlives. If they’re still there when Heaven is destroyed, they’ll cease to exist.

They need to be moved. At its core, it’s what Cas did for Dean. Ferry a soul through the vacuum between realms. But Cas was stronger then. Heaven was stronger. Now Cas could hold some souls, maybe a hundred at most. Nowhere near enough. Their only options are the six angels standing before them. The last warriors of Heaven.

So can it be done?

“No,” Naomi tells Jack. “ We aren’t enough. When Heaven had thousands of angels, maybe then we would have had that kind of power. But not now.”

Naomi is right. Around them, Castiel can feel Heaven breaking up. It’s on borrowed time, but it’s not just that. Ever since the Fall stripped every angel of their wings, their power has been weakened. Once they might have done it alone, just the seven of them and even with Heaven in the condition it’s in. Now, because of Castiel, it’s impossible.

“Heaven drew its power from the angels, from the divine, and from the souls in our care,” Naomi says. And for better or worse there’s a familiarity to her stability. She talks like a college professor speaking lore to children. She had been a good leader, Cas muses, distracted. In her own way. “This plan would take you, the divine, off the board. You’d need all your strength to create Paradise. So without the angels, our only source of power are the souls of heaven themselves.”

“Not an option,” Jack says immediately.

“I agree,” Naomi says. And that question is settled there.

“There—” Behind Naomi, one of the other angels speaks up. She’s a short woman in a gray pantsuit. Like the rest of Jack’s angels, she shines with a garish newness in Heaven’s storied halls. “There are other souls,” she offers.

“The only collection of unclaimed souls is in Purgatory,” Naomi says.

“That’s not a good idea, Jack,” Castiel interjects, having been there himself. How odd that such horrors were in his past now. Too far away to haunt him. “Believe me.” Jack nods, and doesn’t press it.

“If we had more angels,” Naomi urges. “If you could retrieve them from the Empty, like you brought back Castiel—”

“No,” Jack says flatly.

“Even a couple hundred angels would have the power—”

“I think the time of the angels is over,” Jack says. And as soon as he’s said it, it rings with a finality. Naomi doesn’t pick up on it.

“Jack,” she urges. “Think it over. The angels are your family, they’re Castiel’s brothers and sisters. Castiel,” she turns to her old subordinate. “How many good, loyal angels did you know? Dutiful soldiers, angels who would do anything to serve God?”

For a moment Cas wants to be tempted. The possibility of seeing his old garrison again. Seeing Inias and Hester and again, seeing Anna and even Uriel and the others. For all that had passed between them, they were family once. Of course, that was when they were warriors of Heaven. Perfect marble statues without even the knowledge of how to love each other. All this— this sentiment— is just Cas’s too-human heart acting up.

“Too many,” Castiel says, and he remembers sliding his angel blade through all their throats. Good, loyal soldiers who died bloody. And for what, at the end of it all? “Jack is right,” he confirms. “That time is over for angels, and over for Heaven.”

“Heaven was never perfect,” Naomi concedes. The perfect administrator— explaining away an oil spill or a power plant outage or a nuclear meltdown with a level head and a steady hand. “The last God left us to run Heaven without any orders or direction. We’ve made mistakes—”

“You’ve made more than that,” Cas says.

“We’ve made mistakes,” Naomi repeats, glaring at Castiel before turning back to Jack. Her voice is rising. “But with you here now, with you to guide Heaven, it could be a new beginning. You can make it whatever you want it to be. Heaven could be a protection again, it could be beautiful .” And Cas can hear the unspoken urgency in her voice— it could be full of angels again.

“I think you’re confused,” says Jack, wearing a solid expression that Cas remembers on his own face. A set jaw and a furrowed brow. “I’m not interested in Heaven.” And he looks at Castiel. “Heaven has hurt too many people.”

“Is that what this is about?” Naomi asks, turning her glare on Cas. A scoff casts a shadow against her diplomacy, and the smoothness of her voice slips away entirely. Her eyes are sharp with a familiar viciousness. “It always comes back to one wayward angel, doesn’t it?”

“It’s about Heaven,” Jack says, frowning. “And Heaven’s crimes.”

“All I have ever done has been for the good of Heaven,” Naomi insists.

“And now Heaven has to die,” Cas says, adding a little viciousness of his own.

“What is so rotten in you, Castiel,” Naomi demands. She spits his name like a curse, and there’s that familiar, lashing tongue. “That it insists on defiance at every turn? Defiance against Heaven, against God, and what else? What will you destroy next, Castiel?” Her voice is threaded through with grief.

“Enough,” Jack says, and he steps in between Castiel and Naomi.

Jack raises his hand. The air hums. Naomi’s eyes widen.

“Jack,” Cas warns, but Jack ignores him.

Then Naomi is gone without so much as a flash, and there’s only empty space where she was standing before. A vacuous creaking rumbles throughout Heaven, like a distant earthquake is twisting and warping the foundations. The very molecules of Heaven are weakening. The ties that bind them together are disintegrating.

“Jack,” Cas insists as Heaven quakes around them, nearly knocking them to their knees. “What did you do?”

“I sent her to Earth,” Jack says simply. “Without her grace.” He waves a hand, and a thread of Naomi’s grace appears, hovering in the air. It’s bright blue and pulsing like a heartbeat. Almost alive. “She’ll get to live a full life as a human. She won’t remember being an angel. And she won’t hurt anybody ever again like she hurt you.” He waves Naomi’s grace away and turns his wide eyes up at Castiel. And for all that he burns divine in Cas’s vision, his brow furrows. His voice softens. “That was okay, right?”

Heaven decays like a rotting log around them and every angel Castiel has ever known is gone. Naomi was the last of them. A former tormentor and a sometimes-friend. Heaven’s leader when it had needed her, when it was still brimming with power and angels. She had been good in her own way, Cas lets himself think. And here, surrounded by Heaven even as it’s slowly ceasing to exist, Cas remembers how hard it is to ask an angel to be anything but what they are.

Dean would have put a bullet in between Naomi’s eyes. Or doused her in holy oil and tossed a lighter at her like he had so many times before to so many monsters before her. He would have done it with a satisfaction. One more enemy gone. He would have set Naomi alight and turned to Cas, green eyes full after a job well-done, and said— 

Cas doesn’t know what Dean would say. He probably wouldn’t say anything at all. That would be more like Dean.

And Jack hangs somewhere in between them, already a step into ushering a new world. A world where crimes have consequences, and a God shows mercy when it would be all too easy not to. Where even Naomi gets a second chance. One day she might arrive to Jack’s new Paradise as a human soul. Cas might see her again, in a place where they could never hurt each other again. Where rewards aren’t just the memories of lost times, but their essence. Maybe they’ll get to sit and talk somewhere. With no animosity between them. One day.

“Yes, Jack,” Castiel decides. Maybe it’s true what they had said about him so many years ago. Maybe too much heart was always Castiel’s problem. He nods to his son, whose uncertainty falls away from his face. “I think so.”

Around them, the warehouse is blurring into an empty white landscape, the columns disappearing. The rest of the angels seem to shine brighter in Naomi’s absence, and one of them steps forward. She’s the angel who suggested using unclaimed souls for power.

“My name is Olga,” she says. These angels are stained with humanity, a blotchy patchwork of human and divinity like a vitiligo of light. Olga gestures at the angels behind her. “This is Jackson, Iris, Myrtle, and Mike.”

“I assumed the name ‘Michael’ was taken,” a sandy-haired angel quips in the back.

Castiel blinks. A funny angel. How long has it been since he’s heard a funny angel.

“Weren’t there more of you?” Cas asks. They seem to have mellowed out since Jack first made them. There’s a weariness dragging at their eyes, and a stiffness to their shoulders that takes after Heaven’s tyranny. But they still shine.

“Some were killed,” Olga explained. “Others tore out their own grace and fell to Earth to be human again. The five of us,” she looks at her comrades, still barely newborn. “We’re the last angels in Heaven.” She looks at Jack. The kind of gaze only angels have— the pure conviction of faith. “We want to help you build Paradise. However we can help, we’ll do it.”

The simple fealty of angels makes Heaven shine a little brighter for just a moment. Jack blinks once, twice in surprise and then nods.

“Thank you all,” he says. The angels nod, and there’s an understanding.

“We’re going to need the help,” Cas assures Olga. “We still haven’t solved our problem.”

“What to do about the souls,” Olga agrees.

“Do you know of any other way?” Cas asks Olga. “Anything Naomi might have mentioned?”

Olga shakes her head. “Heaven hasn’t had that kind of power in a long time. Not since before we got here. I’m not sure what does anymore, except cosmic entities.”

“Maybe we could speak with Rowena,” Cas offers Jack. “Hell might be able to hold on to the souls for a moment during the change.”

Jack shakes his head.

“Rowena will want something in return,” he says. “And it’s too much of a risk. Even if Rowena can be trusted, the rest of Hell can’t be. No.” He shakes his head. “I want to do this right. No more bargaining.”

Castiel thinks it over. Olga is right. Only cosmic entities have that kind of power anymore. Billie is dead, and there is no new Death. The Empty wouldn’t lift a finger help. The only entity left is Jack. And though Jack might have the raw power to do both, to hold the souls and to create Paradise, he couldn’t do them at the same time.

A light switch goes on in Cas’s head.

“Amara,” he realizes. “What about Amara?”

Jack’s eyes light up.

“I can feel her in here with me,” Jack says. “She knows what I’m planning.”

“What does she think?”

“It’s not quite like that,” Jack explains. “I can’t hear her voice or anything. But I can hear her intentions, sort of. She’s at peace right now. But to do this I’d have to wake her up.”

“Can you do it?” Cas asks.

Jack thinks about it.

“It’s not easy,” he warns. “It’s like stepping out of harmony.”

“Do you think she’ll listen?”

“I don’t know,” Jack says. “But do we have a better idea?”

He looks at Olga, who shakes her head. Around them, Heaven trembles again.

“I guess not,” Cas agrees.

“Okay,” Jack says, taking a deep breath. “Hang on.”

He holds out his hand and takes another breath, his shoulders rising and falling like he’s sighing energy itself. Another breath. Then another. And a pooling power begins to emanate from him. The light in his body seems to condense in the palm of his hand. A darkness sprouts, and bursts forth like a billowing smoke. Jack’s angels stumble back. The smell of ozone fills the warehouse.

And when the smoke solidifies, Amara is standing tall in her dark dress with her hand in Jack’s. In Heaven’s glow her hair is so brown it’s almost red. True to Jack’s word, there’s a heaviness to her eyelids, like she’s been interrupted at meditation or massage.

“Hello, Castiel,” Amara says. “And young Jack.”

“Hello, Amara,” Jack says.

“You look well,” Cas offers. Amara looks at him, her gaze piercing. There’s a depth to her eyes unlike anything Cas has ever seen, and it takes everything in him not to look away.

Around them, Heaven quakes and roils. Behind Olga the angel Myrtle stumbles and thuds to the ground. Her brothers help her to her feet again. Heaven is collapsing. The shadows of the warehouse are fading, along with the lines that make up columns and ceilings and corners.

“The individual heavens are starting to break down,” Amara says, her voice aimed at Jack and her glare still fixed on Cas. “You shouldn’t have killed Naomi.”

“I didn’t kill her,” Jack insists.

“Whatever you want to call it,” Amara says. “She was the last of Heaven’s original angels. The second you leave, Heaven will fall apart. And every soul housed here will fall to Earth.”

“That’s why you have to help us,” Jack insists.

“This is your last chance to restore Heaven,” Amara warns, ignoring him. “This place is the manifestation of the divine. It balances out the influences of Hell and Earth and the Empty. You don’t know the chaos you’ll cause if you get rid of it.”

“But we’re not just getting rid of it,” Jack insists. And for all the echo of sanctity in his voice he’s still Jack. Just a child with a dream, cursed with the power to make it real. “I’m replacing it with Paradise.”

“We need your help,” Castiel says. “With you, we can do it easily.”

“Why should I help a Winchester?” Amara asks. Her voice is caught between anger and peace, slivers of both fading into each other until Cas can’t tell what exactly she’s feeling. Her eyes are sharp as darts, like she could peel back the layers of his skin and see right through him. “When you were all going to kill me and my brother both?”

“We thought it was the only way to stop Chuck,” Jack insists. “We were wrong.”

“And we didn’t,” Castiel says. “You’re alive, and so is Chuck.”

“And I’m sorry,” Jack insists, and a little bit of his child self slips back into his voice. “Amara, this world was Chuck’s creation, but it’s my home. I love it— you’ve felt how much I love it. And I know how much you love it, too. I want to do this for all the people down there,” Jack says. “I want to give them Paradise.”

“I’ve heard the same before,” Amara says. “From you, from Chuck, from Dean, even. How do I know you mean what you say?”

“We’re half of each other now,” Jack says like it’s that simple. He’s wearing sincerity so plain on his face, his eyes so wide and serious that he looks like Dean. And Cas can understand Amara’s hesitation. Dean has always been a good liar. “Can’t you tell I’m not lying?”

Amara thinks it over.

“And after?” Amara asks. “After you’ve made Paradise?”

“It’s up to you,” Jack says. “You can stay or go. I won’t stop you either way.”

Amara thinks it over a little more. Around them, the warehouse is fading quickly to almost a smearing of white. Without shadows, everything is flat and empty, like a cartoon. In the featureless white, there’s a flash of blue somewhere that makes everybody turn.

Olga disappears and comes back, her closed fist shining. She bears a soul in her hand, its blue glow pulsing like a heart.

“The individual heavens are collapsing,” she warns, a prophet of danger. “The souls—” Another blue shine bursts somewhere and darts through the emptiness, then another. Then another.

“Go,” Cas orders. “All of you.” The angels disappear one by one.

“You told me you wished we could get to know each other,” Jack tries, a panic rising in his eyes. Though he turns back to Amara, another flash of blue light catches his eye. And Cas knows what he must be thinking— any one of those souls slipping out of their heavens might be Kelly.

“And you lied to my face and stabbed me in the back,” Amara says. She holds up a hand to stop him from responding. Blue lights burst around them, and Heaven quakes once more, nearly tossing Castiel to the ground. Amara stands steady, and after a brief wobble so does Jack. Amara’s voice is measured and level. “Why didn’t you kill my brother?”

For all that Heaven crumbles around them, Jack stops to blink. “Chuck?”

“You could have. It would have been very easy.”

Jack thinks it over, the way Cas has watched him mull over old questions.

“It wasn’t the right thing to do,” Jack says. “It wouldn’t have been fair to punish him for being bad when there were parts of him that were good.”

“Nobody is ever all bad or all good, Jack,” Cas says gently.

“I know that,” Jack says. “But killing Chuck wouldn’t help keep anybody safe, or build Paradise. It would just be for revenge. It would be cruel.” He tells Amara like an offering. “This way he’ll never hurt anybody again. If he wants to be, he has a chance to be happy on Earth. And maybe in Paradise, one day.”

Every outline of Heaven has faded. They stand in a blank smear of whiteness, nothing to separate up from down. The polar opposite of the Empty. Around them, flashes of blue rush through the white, like looking through a glass of milk. Souls. Falling out of reach of Jack’s angels. Falling to Earth. Swirls of golden light— Jack’s angels— chase after them while they still rattle around in Heaven before falling. They aren’t enough.

“Fine,” Amara says. “I’ll help you.”

All the tension lets out of Jack’s shoulders.

“Thank you,” he says. “Really.” He hesitates “And— you’ll be careful, won’t you?”

Amara raises her eyebrows at him.

“My mother is here,” Jack says, and his voice is quiet. “She’s one of the souls.”

“She’ll be fine, kid,” Amara says, and at that she softens a little. She lets a shadow of a smile tug at the corner of her mouth. She’s all shadow, but she’s got family, after all. “I’ll take care of her.”

Amara lifts a hand. For a moment nothing changes. Then a single flash of light races out of the blinding white and into her palm— a soul, plucked from its individual heaven. It races in through her palm and skitters underneath her skin, lighting up her veins with its glow. A human soul, a pulsing heartbeat that comes to rest in her chest. Then another flash, then another, and a shower of souls until they’re arriving so fast there’s nothing but blinding light. Olga and the others crash into the warehouse again and turn away, their latent humanity on fire at the sight. The souls they’re carrying are hauled out of their bodies and they stumble with the whiplash. It’s less than a few seconds, maybe, before the blinding light fades and it’s just Amara, lit up with the brightness of every star in the universe.

“Now, kid,” she orders, her voice echoing with power.

Jack lifts a hand. He breathes in deep.

For a moment, they exist in nothingness. Then the world bursts into light. Somewhere, Jack’s angels cry out, cowering. Cas stands it for one blinding moment before he recoils, pressing his face into his hands. The world roils around him. He presses his eyes shut as tight as he can.

When he opens them again, he has to blink. He tastes the wind before his eyes adjust. It tastes, impossibly, like honeysuckle. They’re standing on a cliff overlooking a river. Around them, the world is packed with forest, dense trees that race up and down the hills like a covering of snow. Their branches dance in the wind. The river carves between the cliffs, wearing away at bright white and gray stone like it’s been there a thousand years. Like it’s not newborn and yawning. Shadows churn gleefully in the depths of the river. Above, the sky is wide and endless.

Around them, Paradise is blooming.

“Close your eyes!” Amara warns, and Cas obeys.

Amara releases the souls like an atomic bomb exploding out of her. Even with his eyes closed Cas is blinded by the light. He’s flung backwards, skidding across the cliff. When he finally manages to open his eyes, he catches sight of the last souls escaping her like shooting stars. They burst forth and race across the land. They crash like meteorites. And the world is lit up with life and light. A shining that warms Cas down to his toes.

Paradise is new. There is no remnant of the old that came before. And in the sky, the broad noon o’clock sky, hang a couple stars— the last fragments of Heaven. One by one, they wink out. And the last one seems to wave before it goes.

And just like that, Castiel has betrayed Heaven for the last time.

Sunlight comes down, rich and syrupy with joy. Cas turns his face to the sky and out of the corner of his eye he can see Amara doing the same, smiling. Wonder blooms on her face. Somewhere, Jack’s angels are laughing. The humanity in them has gone giddy.

Standing in a new Paradise, Jack looks around like he’s forgotten something. His eyes land on Castiel and he smiles. He raises a hand.

Cas topples over, a sudden weight yanking him to the ground.

“Jack, what—”

There’s a bellowing in his blood, a drumming that outpaces his heartbeat and runs through every vessel and vein in his body. A power Castiel hasn’t felt since before the Fall, when his wings, inextricably tied to Heaven, had fried and crumbled.

Cas stands. A burst of wind rushes into him, swirling through his coat like an excited sprite. The air tastes like jasmine. Cas is too stunned to smile, but there’s a bubbling growing in his chest that’s making his eyes water. If he speaks he’ll laugh.

A pair of wings, strong and new, sprout from his back. In his chest, his grace is whole again.

* * *

Paradise is a bare bones kind of operation at first. It’s still new and fresh. Not enough growth. The soil is fertile but nothing yet has grown.

It’s on a hill, above a river that looks like the Mississippi, that they find themselves. It’s not the Mississippi, not properly. It’s missing the people, the towns and cities and roads, but it curves in the same eternal bending this way and that. Cas has crossed it many times in the Impala, and Dean always pointed it out. Just another hundred-fifty miles to Memphis, he’d chirp, messing with the tape deck. What do you think: Zeppelin next?

The sun is high in the sky, shining for the sake of a beautiful day. Kelly is standing at the peak of the hill. She’s whole and dressed in white. She’s smiling broader than anybody has ever smiled before. Clouds, white as pearls and shining, race above.

Jack stares up at her, his mouth ajar, eyes wide and shining. He takes a step forward, then another. He still walks with his hands clenched, his feet hesitant, like he’s not sure if he’s doing it right. Until Kelly takes a step forward and then they’re surging towards each other.

Kelly Kline holds her son and the world is new again. 

* * *

The second Dean touches down in Heaven, Cas knows. There’s an echo that moves through his body and catches in his throat. He couldn’t put it into words if he tried. But twelve years ago he had held Dean’s soul in the palm of his hand and dragged him, burning, from the inferno. A human soul is heavier than stone, more fragile than glass. Castiel would know the feeling of Dean’s anywhere. And now the knowing nearly brings him to his knees.

It means that Dean is dead.

“How did it happen?” Cas asks.

Jack shows him— a hook, a piece of rebar sticking out of the wall of a barn like the one where he and Cas first met. Where Cas had stormed in, straining against the boundaries of a human vessel, power seeping out of him and electrifying the air. How easy things had been then, when humans were foreign creatures and the only one he truly knew was the one he’d known inside out. So many years ago now.

“You should go to him,” Jack says.

They’re standing in the grassy clearing of a garden. Colors bloom around them, wildflowers bursting from the soil alongside orchids and lilies, vines creeping up trees bearing fruit, and runners race across the ground, sprouting pumpkins. Rows of corn, intertwined with bean and squash, stick up at the edge of the garden. Trees bear ripe peaches and cherries, and apples in green and yellow and a bright, squealing red. Cherry blossom trees pattern the air with swirling petals. Between it all, the air is crisp and cold. The kind of air that’ll shock a passerby into breathing deep and living well.

It’s the Garden of Plenty— the heart of Paradise. It’s Jack’s favorite place here. By now it’s as familiar to Cas as the bunker. It’s where they’ve been rebuilding Heaven from, if they can still call it that. Kelly is there with them, standing beside their son. She hasn’t yet stopped smiling.

“You should go, Castiel,” Kelly agrees. Jack is serene. Despite the power that flows through him, Jack carries himself the same as he always did. His chin is ever tilted up to the beauty of the sky. A smile cuts through his face and makes him look new to the world again. Only his eyes are different— a little lost in a view far away, that Cas can’t quite reach to see. A little older, now, than the rest of him.

“Is he okay?” Castiel asks. Dean is dead, and that’s all he can think to ask.

“I made sure to bring him to Paradise. Sam will join him soon,” Jack says. Before Castiel can register shock, Jack quickly adds, “Not soon. Soon for Dean. But Sam is still alive.”

“Sam’s still alive,” Castiel repeats.

“When he gets here, it’ll be like they’ve only been apart for a couple hours,” Jack promises. And he insists again: “You should go see him.”

He means Dean. Around them, the Garden is swirling with movement— the cherry blossom petals are fading as they fall, and tiny buds are sprouting across the tree branches, unfurling into bright green growth. The trees fill out like they’re inhaling, new things thriving.

“We have work to do,” Castiel says.

“Nothing that can’t wait,” Kelly counters.

Then it ripples out from the hills beyond the Garden. The faintest outline of a prayer. Not a prayer at all, even— a trace of a feeling, felt all the way through and then cast out to the world beyond: Dean breathing so, so deep. Wondering who else is here. A simple subconscious longing. Cas.

The prayer tears through Cas and terrifies him.

Amara is standing at the edge of the clearing, a vision in darkness. Every shadow in the garden, down to the breezy shade beneath the trees and the slivers between the blades of grass, seems drawn to the folds of her dress. She’s looking out at the world. Past the garden, there’s a lake. The broadest, widest, deepest lake imaginable. It laps up against the shore, where the roots strain out past the soil into the sweet water. A willow tree curves over the edge of the lake, its tendrils skimming the dark water. The depths hum with power. Amara breathes in deep.

“There’s something out there,” Amara promises them. She’s said it before, in the weeks they’ve spent breathing life into Paradise. “I can feel them stirring.”

The promise of a threat. Something that could endanger everything they’ve built. Could threaten Jack, and all the souls in their custody. Could threaten Dean, newly arrived and tucked into a corner of Paradise. A Paradise that isn’t quite fleshed out yet. Cas had counted on so much more time to make it ready for Dean.

“I’ll stay,” Castiel decides.

“No,” Amara says, turning those steel eyes on Castiel. “Go, Castiel. But keep it brief.”

“I’ll come with you,” Jack offers, and his eyes are big and round, their ancient power pushed to the back. And he means it— he’s ready to drop the reins and follow Cas to Dean.

“Soon,” Cas offers. The ripple of Dean’s prayer lingers in his chest. “Soon.”

* * *

Cas doesn’t go to Dean, not right away.

His first time back on Earth as a fully fledged angel is odd. Away from Paradise, the world feels black-and-white, like the only source of light is the grace inside him. His senses feel dulled. He touches down in Lebanon and nearly stumbles. Castiel hasn’t been this powerful since he first stepped foot on Earth twelve years ago, and his wings have never been so strong. He’s grown too used to their absence.

The bunker is dead silent. Every light is off. A couple, sensing his presence, switch back on and light his way as he moves between rooms. He already knows he won’t find anybody, but for one last walk through an old home he can stand the solitude. There’s a fine layer of dust on everything. It’s been a while since anybody was home.

The map table is turned off. The alcove with the strange telescope is dark. The kitchen is empty. Somebody, presumably Sam, had made sure to take all the perishable food with him. Pots are scrubbed and tucked away into their places, and every surface was swiped clean sometime before the dust arrived. There isn’t a spare crumb or empty beer can anywhere. It would be just like Sam to clean up well and leave no trace.

The hallways are lit better than the rest of the bunker, and Cas remembers his last walk through here. His arm around Dean, whose heart was locked in Billie’s vice grip. After so many years, Cas’s own heart never stopped beating a little faster around Dean.

He passes the room where Billie had cornered them. The door is still broken, still marked with a faded sigil in Cas’s own dried blood. Beyond the doorway is the open space, lit up by a devil’s trap, where the Empty had come for him. Where he had summoned the Empty. The room looks bigger than he remembers it. At the time it had felt like the walls were closing in around them. Like the world had slowed down. He remembers watching Dean, the tiny shifting of his lips, his eyes, the movements that might be imperceptible to anybody else. Cas staring like he had an eternity to drink the sight of him in. In all this time, he’s never gotten tired of looking at Dean.

Cas remembers the way those words fell from his mouth. Years too late, and yet just when he needed them the most. The way his heart skipped a beat when he heard himself speak them.

I love you.

And the quiet breath of a response. Dean’s rumbling, unmistakable voice punctuated with the hint of a cracking. Like the breath it took to say them had gotten trapped in his throat:

I love you, too, Cas.

Cas still wonders if it was real, and he has no way of knowing. Maybe just imagining it was enough. It had all happened so quickly after that, and the Empty had swallowed him with such insidious glee that nothing else had mattered. Maybe this has all just been a dream. The last twelve years, all of it. Maybe he’ll wake up any moment surrounded by his old garrison, and never have to feel this yawning feeling in his chest again.

No. Cas shrugs away the thought. What a cruel idea. Then he never would have met Dean.

Dean, who is dead now.

Cas leaves the room behind, and realizes why Sam must have left the sigil intact, left the door ajar and busted. It’s a shrine, in its way, to what happened here. To Cas, and to whatever Sam knew about what had been said in that room. Better to leave this space, and that moment, untouched. Sacred. He should go see Sam, Cas muses. He trudges further into the bunker. Maybe he’ll go see Sam.

Cas’s room has never been a place of particular attachment. He much prefers the kitchen, or the map room, or the library— places where he and Dean and Sam and Jack could sit around a table together. But it was always nice to have someplace he could go to be alone. And everything here is how he left it. The bed is made and never slept in. The desk is cleared away. There are a few books on a shelf, and of course a little radio with a cassette player. Dean had dredged it up from a yard sale someplace, as half a Christmas gift. The other half was the mixtape. Cas looks around. The cassette tape usually sits on the desk. It isn’t there. It isn’t in the cassette tape player, or on the nightstand. It isn’t anywhere in his room.

Dean’s room is down the hall.

It’s half empty. Sam must have taken the more meaningful things. Photographs and clothes and the like. Bigger things, like Dean’s laptops. But there are still a set of sheets on the unmade bed, a couple beer bottles scattered around the room, and a heap of papers on the desk. But for the dust, Dean might have just left.

The cassette tape isn’t here either. Sam must have taken it.

Cas looks around once more at the room where Dean lived for so many years. Longer than he lived anywhere, unless you counted the Impala. And Cas had learned years ago to always count the Impala. Cas shuts the door to Dean’s room gently, and walks the long way back up to the exit. He could fly out, but he wants to run his hand along the hallway wall one more time. This was home, not so long ago. He wanders back up to the library, looking around like the cassette tape might be sitting on a table or a shelf somewhere. Like he’s forgetting something else.

On the table in the library, where they sat together so many times over the years, are a series of scratches. The letters S.W. and D.W. are older. They’re worn into the wood, rounded out by years of absent fingertips running over them. Below them are two words freshly scratched in. CASTIEL . JACK . And from something about the shape of the letters, Cas can tell that Sam had carved Jack’s name. And Dean had carved Cas’s. Castiel . Dean has always said Cas’s name like a blessing or a curse, never anything in between.

Cas runs his fingertips over the indentations. They come away covered in dust.

He has no way to find Sam, not without calling him or somebody— Bobby or Jody or somebody— on the phone. That would send up flags that he’s back, and Cas doesn’t know if he is back, exactly. He isn’t sure. If Sam prayed to him, Cas might be able to find him. But Sam thinks Cas is dead. And for all that Jack has given him his wings back, and the full power of Paradise, he could never override the warding he had carved into Sam’s ribs.

But he hadn’t done it to everybody.

Cas ponders. It’s a long shot. But worth a try.

He closes his eyes and centers his focus. He would never have been able to do this before. But no matter how far he strays from Paradise, he can feel it pulsing at his back. He breathes in deep. Tunes in to the specific pull of an almost-foreign soul: one Eileen Leahy.

There.

Illinois.

Cas drops into the house silently, invisible, and he’s glad because he nearly trips over a rug in the landing. He rights himself, cursing that he flies like some freshly hatched egret. He looks around.

Cas is in a living room. It’s Christmas. 

The living room is lined with windows. The Christmas tree is fat and round, and the star atop it skims the ceiling. Presents are stacked beneath them in a variety of patterned wrapping paper. There’s a fire in the fireplace. In the next room, the kitchen, he can smell a roast cooking in the oven. There’s a pie waiting on the kitchen table. Cas can sense every piece of warding on the house. It’s warded against ghosts and monsters and demons— but not one warding against an angel.

Eileen is curled up on the couch, combing through a stack of photographs. She’s surrounded by a mess of mismatched boxes, each bearing photographs, and several haphazard heaps of picture frames. She pulls a couple photographs out of the stack— Sam and Eileen at a bar, Sam kissing Eileen’s grinning cheek, and Eileen teaching Sam to sign ASL. They’re taken by somebody else, and Cas thinks that’s good. Good for them to have other people to take pictures for proof of their love.

The wedding photo is larger than the other ones, and Eileen retrieves a frame for it from the heap. The photo is perfect. They look at each other, surrounded by greenery. Sam in his suit, and Eileen in her long white gown. She’s beautiful. And Sam looks like he knows it.

A pair of heavy feet thud down the stairs, and Sam appears.

His hair is threaded through with a couple strands of gray— just enough to glint in the light of the Christmas tree. He’s wearing a quarter zip sweater, and a pair of reading glasses are pushed up over his head like sunglasses. He looks tired, but happy. He’s holding a round-cheeked baby.

Sam touches Eileen on the shoulder,

“Look who’s up,” Sam says, signing along with one hand. The baby’s mottled with his and Eileen’s features, a soft array of dark hair capping his head. His hands are the size of walnuts. Once, Cas would have been human enough to surge forward, give in to the urge to coo and smile.

Eileen shakes her head.

“Like this,” she says, repeating the sign.

Sam does it again, and Eileen beams.

“Perfect,” she praises.

The baby stares at them both.

“Hey, sweetie,” Eileen croons, the words barely a breath. She slows her signs down, looking the baby in the eye as she does. “Merry Christmas.” The baby gurgles, reaching for her, and Eileen takes him from Sam with a chuckle.

Sam takes a seat next to her and begins to sort through the photographs. They’re all from different times. They must have gone ahead and printed as many as they could dredge up from over the years. There’s even a couple of Jack, caught smiling here and there, and Cas. A face Cas no longer thinks of as belonging to somebody else. Sam and Dean as kids. One photograph of Sam in college with Jess, that Sam tucks into the pile to be saved, not displayed. The tiny photo of Cas in a cowboy hat. Then there’s a portrait of Dean against a white background, evidently taken during the same photoshoot as the little photos they used for their fake IDs. He’s winking and grinning. He’s younger than Cas ever knew him. And there’s a wickedness to his eyes that Cas never knew.

“I like this one,” Eileen suggests.

“Are you kidding?” Sam chuckles. “He looks like a criminal.”

“Tough talk from a grave desecrator,” Eileen says, eyes dark with mirth. She leans the baby against her stomach to be able to sign. The baby blinks, eyes trying to follow his mother’s hands. “And what, a witch? A demon blood addict?”

Sam laughs with his whole chest. The kind of laugh that fills a room. Cas doesn’t know if he’s ever heard Sam laugh like that. The baby cackles along, eyes on his father. Eileen bounces him in her lap. They sort through the pictures, matching them to frames and setting aside a pile of the ones they plan on getting new frames for. The rest are sorted into boxes, to be put into photo albums. It’s a quietly bustling kind of peace, and when the baby claws at Eileen’s chest to be fed, Sam takes over slipping the photographs into their frames. He goes around the house to hang them up, and here it’s to Eileen’s advance to have married a mountain-sized man.

“Higher,” she orders from her seat on the couch, left breast stuck in the baby’s mouth. Sam is trying to hand a photograph high above the mantle, on either side of a mirror. The mirror’s wrapped in mistletoe and wreaths that make Sam wrinkle his nose as he hangs the picture frame. Eileen shakes her head and points. “Sam. Sam, look at where I’m pointing. Higher, right there.”

They go on like that, and when that photo is hung there’s another and another. Throughout the foyer, on the kitchen wall, all around the living room. Shining faces. Eileen’s parents everywhere. And that tiny photograph of Cas in a cowboy hat is tucked into an old silver frame and placed on a side table. Next to the bowl of chocolates.

Stood up across the mantle are yet more photographs. Sam and Eilen’s wedding photo goes there, and the baby photos of their son. The photo of young Dean and Sam. Eileen’s baby pictures, cradled by her parents. There’s a set of pillar candles, decorative to anybody who wouldn’t know how useful a candle could be. There’s an elegant vase with a fake rose stuck in holy water. A rosary sunk to the bottom.

And in the center of the mantle, above the fireplace, sits an urn— Dean.

Though he knows Dean is whole and walking free in Paradise, Cas can’t help feel a gaping hollow in his heart. He stares at the urn. Dean’s smile is in there somewhere, reduced to molecules. Dean’s heart, and that liver he was ruining. His eyes, a hundred shades of green. And those hands. How many times has Cas healed those hands? Poured out his grace into an open wound and made it whole again? And for what, Cas thinks. When it all ended here.

Dean is dead. And he’ll never have all this. Cas looks at Eileen and Sam, lost in bickering about where to hang a family portrait. Nothing but love in their eyes as they fight. Dean could have found this somewhere. A nice girl and a house. A job, something with his hands that pays the bills and puts food on the table. Kids to come home to.

And Cas would have grieved, but Dean would have been happy.

Somebody knocks at the front door, pulling Cas from his thoughts and Sam from hanging photographs. Cas sighs, and blinks away his melancholy. It’s Dean who’s lost this life, after all. Not Cas. Cas never would have had it.

Sam carries no weapon, but there’s still the slightest tension to his shoulders when he goes to answer the door. Old habits. He peers through the peephole, bending over to do it, and smiles.

“It’s Jody,” he calls, leaning back into view to sign.

“They’re here already?” Eileen wonders. With the baby done feeding, Eileen shrugs her breast back into its bra and retrieves a burping cloth.

Sam opens the door, and Jody is there, surrounded by girlfolk. Like the three kings she and Alex and Patience bear gifts; covered dishes that steam in the December air. Behind them, Claire has a tote bag of wine bottles over one shoulder, and her other arm around Kaia, who bears a bag of wrapped presents.

“Merry Christmas!” Jody exclaims, beaming.

“Hey, Jody,” Sam greets, enveloping her in a hug. He ushers them all in and they stomp the snow out of their boots. Cas is impressed they’ve braved the drive from Sioux Falls. The way Dean talks, winter drives in the Midwest are riskier than any hunt they’ve ever been on. The way Dean used to talk.

There’s a bustling as coats are pulled off and hung up, dishes are directed towards the kitchen, and presents are tucked under the tree. Then they all have to hug Eileen and coo at the baby, and Sam asks them how the drive was.

“Claire hit a raccoon,” Alex accuses.

“I did not,” Claire insists, glaring at Alex. “It went under the car and it was fine .”

“I felt the car hit it.”

“We didn’t stop to check,” Patience explains to Sam and Eileen.

“Okay, girls,” Jody intercedes.

“Can we put some goddamn music on, Sam,” Claire suggests.

“Hey, no cursing,” Jody accuses. “There’s a baby here.”

“He’s not gonna know,” Claire posits. And before Jody can say anything she darts away to the corner of the living room, straight to the music collection. She knows where everything is. This is a second home to her, and she’s comfortable here. Safe. Surrounded by family.

She’s taller than she was before, and she’s cut her hair a little shorter. Her features have finished sharpening, and the jury’s come back with a decision. Claire looks like Jimmy, and looks like Cas. She’s got at least three different knives on her, and a fresh anti-possession tattoo on her rib that still smarts. There’s a twitch in Cas’s fingers, an urge to reach out and heal, but he just clenches his hands in his trenchcoat pockets. He’s never healed a tattoo before and doesn’t know if he’d ruin it. Besides, he reflects. Claire’s been through worse. 

She thumbs through a mismatched collection. Sam loves music, Cas knows, but there’s a collection of cassette tapes with familiar labels. Metallica, Black Sabbath, AC/DC, and the familiar Led Zeppelin. Dean’s tapes. Not quite to Sam’s taste, but there isn’t a speck of dust on them. And when Claire pops open the cassette player, it’s a Nazareth tape that comes out. Sam still listens to all Dean’s music.

Claire’s picking from the collection when her fingers stop on a particular tape. She pulls it out. It’s Cas’s tape. Dean’s Top 13 Zepp Traxx .

“Dean made that for Cas,” Sam says, coming up behind her.

Claire holds it and looks at it. Her black nail polish is chipped and scuffed, with a bit of dried blood still stuck in her cuticles. She’s been hunting.

“You can have it,” Sam offers gently. “If you want it. I’ve been saving it, just in case.” The unspoken comes through loud and clear. In case Cas comes back. Or Dean. “But it belongs with you, if you want it.” He’d want you to have it .

Sam wears grief well. The simple sorrow of remembering the lost, years after putting away mourning garb. The pain of having known them well enough to speak for them now. He must be used to it, after all this time. After losing so many people.

“It’s okay,” Claire says. “I don’t have a cassette player anyway.” She sets it back in its place in the collection. “It’s better that it stays here, anyway. Just in case.”

They’re both too familiar with it by now. Dead things don’t stay dead, not always. And those in the life are cursed to wait on the just in case .

“Try this one,” Sam offers, pointing out a different Zeppelin tape. Led Zeppelin III . Claire plugs it into the machine and hits play. The guitar comes in loud, making everybody turn their heads. Immigrant Song. Kaia smiles, and Claire slips away, laughing, to pull her in by the waist and plant a kiss on her cheek. They giggle into each other.

Sam stares at Dean’s cassette tape collection.

“This is Uncle Dean’s music,” Sam murmurs to his son, who’s got his fist firmly wrapped in the fabric of his father’s sweater. Sam looks down on him, and they meet eyes. Sam’s mottled hazel eyes, struck through with Eileen’s warm brown. They look a different color in every light, but they’re never threaded through with Dean’s vivid green. “He loved Led Zeppelin, didn’t he? That’s right. You hear that?” He sways, bobbing the baby up and down as the opening wail fades out and the words fade in. The shadow of a love song, all chilling rhythm. This is the first song on Cas’s cassette tape. Sam plants a kiss on his son’s head and murmurs along. It’s hardly a lullaby. But there’s Dean in it. “ We come from the land of the ice and snow, from the midnight sun where the hot springs flow. ”

Cas watches, invisible. It’s good to see Dean so loved.

Sam’s pulled away— Donna’s arrived, pulling the Apocalypse World Bobby and Charlie after her. Charlie’s got her girlfriend by her side, and they greet Claire and Kaia with a familiarity only kindred spirits understand. A few moments later, Garth arrives with Bess and the twins in tow. They smile and wave. They know every face here. Each new person to arrive adds a dish to the ever-growing stack in the kitchen. Sam hands the baby off to Eileen and goes to pull the roast out of the oven. Alex passes out glasses and Jody pops the champagne.

Throughout the chaos, the living room is full of chatter.

Alex is a nurse now, and Patience is in college. She’s applying to grad schools. Claire and Kaia are joined at the hip, and they ask so eagerly after Charlie and Steve’s shining engagement rings that there’s no question what’s in their future. They drop mentions of hunts— a ghoul in North Dakota, a haunting outside Cincinnati. Claire shows off a scar from a recent tangle with a rougarou. Charlie hands Eileen a pack of forged documents. Donna’s seeing somebody named Jacob, and they spend a good half hour prying details out of her. Apparently he’s blonde. Bobby’s eggnog sells fast, and Garth talks child-rearing with Eileen and Jody. Alex, ever good with children, interrogates Garth’s twins about school. Patience, terrible with children, is chased away. They all heap their presents under the tree.

When all the food is set on the table and everybody has a glass of champagne in hand, they turn to each other.

“To those who are gone,” Jody offers, raising a glass. She’s long past somber and into nostalgia. She’s opened many toasts like this before. “To all of us still here. And to Dean’s first Christmas.” Cas blinks. Jody gestures at the baby in Eileen’s arms. A room full of people smile down at him. The baby, cloaked in a dead man’s name, blinks and gurgles. He doesn’t understand grief. Somewhere behind them, the Zeppelin tape draws to a close. Alex gets to the cassette player before Claire does, and connects her phone to the bluetooth speaker next to it. Christmas songs take over, and Jody mouths a thank you to her.

The room is so warm with love that Castiel forgets he isn’t really here. He stands out of the way, watching them eat and talk. At some point Sam excuses himself to put baby Dean to bed. They eat, and stay up until early hours of the morning. It isn’t until nearly three in the morning that Eileen retrieves the inflatable mattresses from a closet somewhere.

Bobby gets the guest bedroom. Charlie and Stevie share the futon. Jody and Donna help Eileen with the air mattresses, and claim one for each of them. The rest of them— Alex, Patience, Claire, and Kaia— set up a sardine collection of sleeping bags and pillows and blankets. They mill around, brushing their teeth and still telling stories. When they finally fall asleep, it’s Claire, her arm around Kaia, who starts to snore gently first. Jody smiles like a mother. There’s peace on Earth, and in hunters’ hearts. Nothing can touch them here.

Cas wonders for a moment if he should stay until Christmas morning. A passing car’s headlights shine through the windows and light up the living room. Golden light dances across their faces and not one of them stirs. Everyone Cas cares about here is safe. There’s nothing he can do for them.

He walks over to the cassette collection, and picks his out. It’s his, after all. Not Dean’s. It was a gift. The marker is faded, but Dean’s handwriting is still bold as always. Cas tucks the tape into a trenchcoat pocket. He hopes Sam won’t notice, though he knows it’s unlikely. But maybe this is the kind of thing he’ll be able to push to the back of his mind. And think of Cas as long gone. Cas would be alright with that. Sam is a good man to be mourned by.

Before Cas leaves, he looks around for baby Dean.

The nursery is the most protected room in the house, and it burns in Castiel’s sight. Sigils are carved into the door frame, holding several protective spells in place all around the room. Charms against intruders and threats, and against fire. Sam never gave up on the magic, then, Cas thinks. There’s a flowery wallpaper pasted all around the room, but beneath it Cas can sense every manner of defensive warding possible. There’s a devil’s trap beneath the carpet. Several hex bags are tucked under the crib. A box of salt sits at the ready on the windowsill. And high up on a shelf, out of reach, is a little jar of holy oil. Just in case. Though, noticeably, no warding against angels. Sam has left the door open for Cas.

Castiel stands over the crib. There’s a baby monitor tucked in the corner, and a mobile hanging over it with a plastic solar system. There’s no way the baby could know that amulets are tucked inside each little planet. The baby is fast asleep. He looks like Sam. He’s hearing, too. But there’s Eileen in the baby’s nose and eyebrows, the shape of her lips. And for all that he’s named for his uncle, he doesn’t look like Dean at all.

Good, Cas thinks. What a shame it would be for such a child to never meet his namesake. As it is, the child has enough of a shadow to grow up in. Cas wonders if Sam will ever stop thinking of his brother when he says his son’s name. He wonders if any of them— Jody and Claire, Bobby and Charlie and Garth, any of them— ever will.

Baby Dean sleeps so still. Only the faintest breath indicates he’s even alive. His little hands close into fists. Cas used to wonder, many years ago, if God ever regretted human babies’ design. To be so helpless and small when other animals of the same age could already run for cover— it always felt a burden. Even now Cas still wonders. There are far too many threats in this world. Baby Dean doesn’t know anything about that. He’s sound asleep. He’s new, and he has the world ahead of him.

“Good luck, Dean,” Castiel murmurs. And he leans forward and presses two fingers to the child’s chest. Sigils carve themselves into the bone of his ribs. Warding against detection by angels.

The baby’s eyes fly open and he wails like a siren.

Immediately, Sam bursts into the room— Cas stumbles back away from the child. Sam scoops Dean up out of the crib. He presses the screaming child to his chest, looking towards the window, then the ceiling and the door. Sleep weighs heavy on his eyes, but panic has his heart pounding. Cas can hear it like a drum in Sam’s throat. He’s rattled. He was here too soon.

Eileen runs in, a robe open over her pajamas. She switches on the light and both of them squint away the glare.

“What’s going on?” Eileen demands.

“I thought I heard somebody,” Sam explains, sleep-fogged and trying to sign with one hand. “Over the baby monitor. Before Dean started crying, I thought I heard a voice.”

Cas realizes he forgot the baby monitor.

“Is he okay?” Eileen demands, reaching for the baby. Sam hands him over, and Eileen holds him close, her hands running across his soft head, his scrunched little features. He’s screaming, but of course Eileen doesn’t mind. Checking him once, twice over. She tucks him against her chest, swaying him like she’ll never part with him again.

Sam yanks back the carpet, checking every line on the devil’s trap. He checks that every hex bag is in place beneath the crib, checks the window is locked and that nothing’s come in. He runs his hands across every warding mark on the doorway. Everything is whole and safe. Every enchantment and protection they can think of is still there. Still whole. Baby Dean is safe.

The baby settles, after a while, and everything passes Sam’s checks. When he’s checked everything a second time, and a third, he plops himself onto the floor and lays back, staring at the ceiling. Cas can still hear his heartbeat pounding. With his feet stretched out before him, Sam is almost as long as the nursery. Eileen waits until the baby’s eyes are shut tight again, and settles him ever so gently his back into the crib. With some kind of peace having fallen across the house again, Sam’s heartbeat is the loudest thing in the room.

“You okay?” Eileen asks in a discordant whisper.

“Yeah,” Sam says, rubbing at his eyes. His voice is quiet, his eyes pink around the edges. “I think I’m gonna sleep in here tonight, if it’s okay.”

Eileen nods. She disappears, and comes back with a pair of pillows and a couple blankets. And a pair of machetes. They lay on the ground like teenage lovers, curled into each other and the blankets. The machetes rest on either side of them, each within reach. As Sam drifts off to sleep, his thoughts turn and twist into a prayer. It isn’t addressed to Cas in particular. But it reaches Cas all the same. Keep him safe, Sam prays. Whatever else happens, let me keep him safe. Outside, the sun is coming up somewhere behind the heavy clouds. The world is lit up gray and white. Snow is falling on Christmas morning.

Cas considers doing the same to Eileen, carving runes into her ribs to keep them all doubly safe. But he doesn’t. Aside from the panic it would cause them, it’s just different. Eileen can take care of herself, and she and Sam can take care of each other. But keeping their son safe— this is something Cas can offer them. One last thing he can do for them. One prayer he can answer.

Before he heads back to Paradise, Cas stops by a video store. It’s closed for the night, and he doesn’t have any money anyway, so Cas just pops in and out. Walkmans are rare these days, but this one is in decent condition. The plastic is faded and scuffed. The headphones have been replaced several times over. It’s lived a life. And Cas is taking it to Paradise.

* * *

Cas has never heard prayers so loud before. He picks up on every longing, every nostalgic reminiscence. It’s been so long since anybody has really prayed to him. And even then, it was different. The farther he fell, the less he could hear prayers. The more they sounded like he was underwater, bobbing in a current that drowned out almost everything else. But now every prayer reverberates back through his very bones. Like he’s new again, fresh off the line. Crack in his chassis or no.

On Earth, he can hear Claire praying to him.

Castiel. I miss you. If you’re out there and you can hear me, I’ll admit it: I miss you.

She prays to him on Christmases and birthdays, on the morning and evening of her wedding day. Claire talks to him, but never asks him to go to her. She knows he’s dead. As time passes, she prays less, but the longing remains. Cas tells himself he’ll go see her soon. There are things still too unsettled in Paradise. And as long as she keeps praying he knows she’s okay.

Cas can’t see Sam’s son. But now and again he can hear a prayer.

Dear Castiel — ever formal, like Sam used to be. Dear Castiel. My mom and dad have both come back from the dead before and I think you should, too. My dad really misses you. The prayers are like letters from home, especially as Sam’s prayers— more reminiscing than praying— fade over time. Little Dean Junior doesn’t yet know it’s useless to pray to dead things.

Jack’s angels are searching for all the souls that fell to Earth when Heaven was destroyed. Among the first of them is Charlie Bradbury, whose soul slips through Castiel’s fingers like cool water and flows out into Paradise. What a beautiful soul, Cas thinks. She deserves Paradise.

It’s hard work— scouring Earth for the echo of a soul, pulling it from whatever hole it’s found itself in. Those fallen from Heaven, those lost and wandering when Chuck opened Hell. And in between them all, the misplaced. The ones who have found themselves in Hell when they should be topside, in Paradise. The ones who deserved better. Like Dean deserved better. Jack sends them after those as well.

Olga leads the angels. She’s a good leader. She’s the shortest of the angels, and has none of Mike’s bravado or Iris’s quiet peace. She reminds Cas of Naomi, the version of Naomi that had always managed to calm and reassure. And she’s loyal. True, with a good heart. She had offered Cas the chance to lead them in pulling souls from Hell.

“You’ve done it before,” she had said. “You know how it’s done.”

And Cas had. He had pulled Dean out of the deepest inferno of Hell and it had changed him forever. Touching a soul, remaking it and flinging it back into a brighter realm— something about it had rearranged him. And he knew it was Dean. But just in case it was something else, he hesitated. Cas had changed so much in his twelve metamorphic years on Earth. Somebody else could take this one.

“You’ve got this,” he had told Olga, going for a jovial tone. “Go get ‘em.” Cas never knows how to talk to Jack’s former-human angels. Olga just blinked at him.

One by one, they pull souls from Hell. Among the first had been Ellen and Jo Harvelle. Their souls were accented with whiskey and shotgun shells, singed with hellfire. It had been good to see them again. Friends from different days. Jack had seen them safely to the hills of Paradise, and days later Cas had heard the faintest of Dean’s prayers: drinking whiskey like mother’s milk and half-turning to find Cas wasn’t there. Cas was gone.

They retrieve hundreds, then thousands of souls from around Earth, and from Hell. The Garden of Plenty dances with light, souls flashing through the sky like shooting stars and rushing through the Garden like leaves caught in a current. Jack watches them.

“I’ve been thinking about Purgatory,” Jack says one day, with Cas at his side..

“What about Purgatory?”

“Well, there are monsters there who are people,” Jack reasons. “And when they die, they don’t get a choice of where they go. They all go to Purgatory.”

“That’s true,” Cas acknowledges. Jack hasn’t met too many monsters who are people. But he’s heard Dean and Sam talk about Garth and Bess and their children. And he knows Dean and Cas have been to Purgatory before. Dean has even mentioned Benny to him, the distant memory that makes Cas grind his teeth every time.

“It’s not right,” Jack asserts, goodness bubbling up in him. “They don’t deserve that.”

“Are you talking about letting monsters into Paradise?” Cas asks.

“I wouldn’t just let them all in,” Jack says. “And I haven’t decided yet. But they could be judged like everybody else is.”

Right now, Jack is doing the judging himself. He weighs each soul and decides its place, releasing it into Paradise or sending it back downward to Hell. He’s erring every time on the side of Paradise, but Cas can’t bring himself to stop him. It’s too much of a blessing to have too good a son. Sometimes he and Kelly catch each other’s eyes and smile.

Castiel and Jack work on the individual heavens, or rather the individual experiences of heaven. Every soul is in Paradise together, and they have to sort out the rules. It’s like picking through computer code, fitting together the puzzle pieces of Paradise itself. Cas builds the landscape, designs the roads and forests and lakes and the sky. The corner that belongs to each individual, and the corner that belongs to Dean. They still seem so empty. Dean drives and sees nobody for hours. Jack and Cas talk through the problem again and again. Slowly, ever so slowly, Jack is working to weave all the little pieces of Paradise together. He wants to get them to touch and overlap, build a perfect world with all the good and without all the bad. It’s a hard balance. Castiel is thankful that he, Jack, and Amara have all spent time on Earth, and none of them have to explain the simple pleasures of Earth to each other. They smile and nod when he talks about the ideas he has. Earth is a blessing in their eyes. What luck to be among gods dedicated to love.

There’s still something on the horizon. Amara can sense it. But none of them can quite reach whatever it might be. There might be a new Death woken up somewhere. Maybe Paradise’s birth has done something to Hell, or Rowena isn’t taking kindly to the souls Jack’s angels are snatching up. Whatever it is, it’s in the distance. But for now, nothing can reach into the Paradise they’ve built. And there’s plenty of work to keep them busy here.

Amara goes down to Earth now and again. She still loves Earth, loves to drink in humanity. Castiel knows the feeling. And Amara visits Chuck, too, on occasion. But she always comes back.

“There’s nobody you want to visit?” Amara asks him in the Garden, her stenciled eyebrows raised. Cas never knows how to talk to her. She’s a cosmic deity, an only-sometimes ally, and his son’s great-aunt, technically. But more importantly she’s had her lips on Dean’s, where Cas has always wanted to be.

“It can wait,” Cas says, brushing the question off. “There’s work to do here.”

* * *

The sixth song on the cassette tape that Dean gave him is called Fool in the Rain. Cas listens to it standing in the Garden of Plenty.

“ Well there's a light in your eye that keeps shining

Like a star that can't wait for the night

I hate to think I've been blinded, baby

Why can't I see you tonight? ”

Cas often thinks about Dean’s taste in music, and why he seems to like Led Zeppelin so much. Dean likes loud music that rattles around in the Impala like it’s a pinball machine. Music where the instruments outscream the vocals. Music that at first listen always sounded to Cas like distilled movement and rage.

Though there’s something in the building rise of Zeppelin’s music that does remind him of Dean, when he thinks about it. The way the notes ring back through his ears and reverberate down the length of his spine. It’s a raucous game of sound and rhythm. The endless, reverberating drumbeat that Castiel’s come to expect of open roads and American horizons. Dean with his hands on the Impala’s steering wheel, bobbing his head and mouthing along unintelligible lyrics.

When Cas had first received the cassette tape, he had sat down and listened to it all the way through it in one sitting. And when it finished he had let the tape run out and found himself staring at the wall, head empty but for gratitude. A buzzing warmth in his chest. How lucky he was that humans had invented music. And how lucky he was to have fallen from grace so many years ago, to be able to sit on the edge of his bed in an underground bunker with his family and feel his heart beat in time to a love song.

It’s the same kind of love song as sharks hum to each other in the depths. As vultures, clashing with talons outstretched in thin air, screech at each other. A vicious kind of love song that’s all howling wind and the taste of copper pennies and too-harsh sunshine. Castiel can’t explain why he hears it in a Zeppelin song. But it chills him like the song itself is marching down his back. He plays the cassette tape over and over. Maybe he’s coming around to Zeppelin.

* * *

It’s a bright sunny day without time— somewhere past noon and before the sun’s started sauntering towards the horizon. The sky is clear and the air is crisp with spring.

“Sam is dying,” Jack informs Cas. Sam is in his eighties. “Dean will meet him.”

“Go,” Amara encourages. And Castiel supposes he has run out of excuses. Kelly nods a blessing and presses a kiss to Jack’s forehead.

They disappear in a flutter of wings that makes Cas’s stomach drop. He fights to stay steady— he’s still getting used to the wings, and distance is different in Paradise. Jack is a smooth and steady flyer. They drop onto a bridge over a river. A broad, shallow creek opens up onto a forest and an open sky. The air is fresh and new, like it’s never been interrupted by a spoken word before.

Then the Impala pulls up, rumbling like it’s never broken down on the side of the road or trapped Dean in the garage for three days for repairs.

Dean steps out.

As he always does, every time he sees Dean again after death has parted them, Cas forgets to breathe. For the first time, somehow, Cas notices the wrinkles in the corners of Dean’s eyes. The way the bags beneath his eyes sink a little deeper than they used to. A dozen tiny indicators of every year he’s lived. A thought flits across Cas’s mind— reaching out to hold Dean’s face and brush his thumb against those wrinkles. The sunlight catches in his eyes as he strolls— all the time in the world— to the railing of the bridge.

“Are you gonna say anything?” Jack asks. He’s invisible to Dean, too.

“Are you?” Cas asks.

“It’s just good to see him,” Jack says, shaking his head. And there’s an expression Cas can’t place. Peace, with a little grief. And a serenity that Cas still finds foreign, and a distance to his eyes. Like his attention is split and he only has half his mind on this moment.

“It is,” Cas agrees, watching his son.

Then Sam is there. And without needing to see or be told, Dean just knows. Cas can hear the smile blooming on his face.

“Hey, Sammy.”

Dean turns. And Dean grins like the sun’s come out after a hundred endless nights.

Sam looks the same age as he did the last time Cas saw him, holding a brand new baby and still mourning. The reading glasses are gone, but otherwise it could have been yesterday. But he carries time in him, in the weariness of his eyes. He’s dressed in a much younger man’s clothes, layers upon layers. Castiel’s never met another human who wears as many layers as the Winchesters do.

For a moment Sam is hesitant. There’s forty years between them. Then he softens, cracks a smile, and the brothers pull each other into a hug. Dean tucks his face into Sam’s shoulder, like it’s he who lost a brother too soon and not the other way around. He shuts his eyes tight. Dean has always loved with his whole heart.

When they pull apart, the world is new before them. They turn and look off the bridge out at Paradise that Cas and Jack have made them.

Cas could show himself, could say a simple word and Dean would turn. Would forget Sam immediately. His mouth might drop. His eyes might widen. Those shining green eyes. Cas could speak to him again. Make a mistake somehow, like he always manages to do, and watch Dean’s mouth twitch at the corner with a little laugh. Oh, Cas.

And they would have to talk.

No, Cas ponders. Dean and Sam turn away from the bridge, saying something to each other. An offer to drive off into the sunset, to go see what Paradise has for them. To visit the people they’ve lost. A busy, busy future together. This is enough, for now.

“I don’t know if it was the right choice,” Jack tells Castiel as they watch the boys climb into the Impala and roll all the windows down. The Impala purrs. Cas thinks about all the times Dean talked to it like it was alive, running a hand along the car’s length and smiling.

“What was?” Cas asks.

“Bringing them together so soon,” Jack clarifies. “Making this feel like just an hour for Dean. I thought Dean needed Sam to be happy. But I don’t know if he should have had some time to be happy without Sam first.” He looks at his father. And he’s Jack again, all too focused on this moment and earning a furrow in his brow for the trouble of it. “What do you think?”

As the Impala pulls away, Dean cranks up the music. It’s a Zeppelin song, the second one on the cassette tape he made Cas:

“Good times, bad times, you know I've had my share

When my woman left home with a brown-eyed man

But I still don't seem to care ”

The Impala disappears down the road, and as it’s fading into the depths of Paradise Cas hears a wordless prayer in its wake: Dean looking at the backseat through the rearview mirror and finding it empty. How empty it looks without Cas there to meet his eyes and smile ever so slightly back. Longing, and a foreign, piercing fear.

“I think we’ll have to see,” Cas tells Jack.

* * *

Dean wants to drive, so Castiel builds him a highway. He writes the code that keeps the Impala breaking down, keeps bugs away in the summer heat and keeps the river rushing strong. Dean’s Paradise is peace and movement intertwined, but for some reason it’s never enough.

“I can hear him,” Jack tells Cas one day, talking about Dean. Jack’s looking out at the sky, weighing souls as he speaks, and his eyes bely his inattention. “He’s praying to me.”

Cas can hear him, too. Dean is speaking aloud, and his prayers reach Cas as an intermingling of words and thoughts, and wordless feeling.

“They tell me Cas is giving you a hand— ” and a stab of longing so sharp Cas is surprised it doesn’t draw blood. Cas has had a dagger through his chest so many times in his life. But behind the familiar pain of it there’s an aching he wants to feel forever. Dean is thinking about Cas, and the thought is so strong it hurts him like he’s dying all over again.

“Nevermind,” Dean says, and tries so hard to push the thought of Cas away that it’s all he can think about. Cas’s hand over an open wound, stoppering it up with grace. Cas’s face so quizzical and confused. Cas swallowed by the darkness of the Empty, leaving Dean alone forever. The prayer rings like church bells in his mind until Dean cuts himself off and turns his attention to Jack again. “Just— we miss you, kid .” His thoughts are interrupted with other things. Sam. A house they’re sharing, for now. Working on the Impala. How good it would be to have Jack there with them. Smiling Jack. Like a son. “Drop us a line when you get the chance .”

And after a long, lingering moment, Dean is gone again. There’s a buzzing, gaping hole where he was.

“Did you hear all that?” Cas asks Jack, who nods.

“I don’t understand,” Jack demands. They’re standing in the Garden. Behind them, the lake is still and clear. Like drinking water. A small path, new but already worn down with use, trails out of the Garden towards a little yellow house. In the window, Kelly is cooking in a kitchen. She’s learning to make Jack’s favorite. Cheeseburgers. But nobody makes them like Dean does. “You can tell how much he misses you. Why haven’t you gone to see him yet?”

In the distance— so far away that Jack and Cas wouldn’t have heard if they weren’t God and an angel, respectively— Kelly curses. A pan bangs against the kitchen floor.

“Screw it!” Kelly exclaims out the window, but there’s a joy in her voice she can’t mask with fake frustration. “I’m making spaghetti and meatballs!”

Jack’s smile is full of fondness.

“We have so much to do here,” Cas says, gently. “I can see Dean later.”

“When?” Jack asks. He’s softer now, asking like he’s worried. He looks like Dean when he’s worried. His brow furrows, blurring the line between caring and scolding. “When are you gonna go see him?”

“Jack,” Amara interrupts. 

The Garden is open, and they all come and go as they please, but Amara’s arrival doesn’t so much as make a sound. She appears at Jack’s side, looking severe as always. For all that she could leave at any time and hasn’t yet, and for all that she’s good with Jack and with Paradise, Cas still isn’t sure what to make of her. She’s all cheekbone hollows and eyebrows like slash wounds. And there’s a weight to her voice this time.

“Do you hear that?” Amara asks.

“What—” Jack tries to ask.

“Listen,” Amara directs. She holds a finger up, and the Garden quiets around them. The wind disappears. The lake goes still. Not a single branch on a tree moves out of place. The world goes silent, until all Cas can hear is Kelly’s breathing in the house hundreds of feet away. Then, far beneath the silence, there’s a pulse of something. Not quite a heartbeat. Not a humming. Not even a sound. It’s distant, but it’s there.

Jack can hear it. The divot between his eyebrows deepens.

“What is it?” Cas asks.

“I don’t know,” Amara says.

“How can you not know?” Cas demands.

“I don’t know everything, angel,” Amara says. “Whatever it is, it isn’t here yet. But it’s out there.”

Jack looks at Cas. For guidance, maybe, or reassurance. For what to do next.

“I’ll make sure the angels are on the lookout,” Cas promises. “Whatever it is, if we can hear it coming we’ll know to be ready.”

Jack nods.

In the end, there’s almost nothing to do about it. Cas lets the angels know, but he can’t answer their questions. He doesn’t have any answers. They’re still pulling souls from Hell. One of them, Mike, peels off from the others to patrol the border of Paradise. Olga checks in like she always does, reporting when every mission is a success, which it always is. Things stay the same.

Kelly calls them in for spaghetti and meatballs. She teaches Jack to use a spoon with his fork to swirl spaghetti. Amara’s invited to dinner, too. It takes a moment before she drops the dark look and accepts a plate of spaghetti and meatballs. On Earth she had been one for finer things— lobster bisque and quail eggs and boar sausage— but a warm kitchen with happy faces is hardly something to sneer at. Especially when her own family is so far away. She picks at her plate, and watches Kelly and Jack talk about food. They talk over the best ways to eat pasta, whether Jack has ever made meatballs by hand, if Kelly likes spaghetti better than mac and cheese. And the kitchen warms. Cas’s favorite pasta is the mac and cheese Dean makes, but he knows better than to say it. He just serves Jack another helping. And when the meal is over, they debate what food should be tomorrow’s dinner. It’s Cas’s turn to cook.

When they leave, Amara looks glad to be back in the open air, the wind dragging at her hair like it’s trying to pull her away into the universe. Jack and Kelly wander around the Garden. They drift off from here and there, distracted by the look of the flowers in the dusk, but they always come back to each other.

Cas does what he can. He builds Dean’s Paradise, and includes open roads, clear-sky nights, and a river. A broad, open river with a little dock Cas has been on before, in Dean’s dreams.

* * *

When Eileen arrives, Cas registers her soul as it flies out to meet Sam. Cas can feel it in the air— there’s a happiness ahead. A reuniting.

Eileen touches down. There’s a beat. Then another.

Then Sam’s heart bursts with such emotion that it becomes a prayer. It rushes through the Garden, rustling the leaves of every tree and settling into Jack and Cas’s hearts. They look at each other, and smile. Sam has wrapped his arms around Eileen. Eileen’s own heart is racing. They have had so much time together. And they get to have the rest of time.

Thank you, Sam’s prayer pleads. Thank you for all of this. Thank you.

In the Garden, Kelly offers Jack a wildflower, picked from a ground littered with fallen leaves. Her son raises a hand and turns it into a sunflower. Kelly’s smile is as bright and broad and warm.

The joy around them all is so strong so that it almost drowns out Dean. In the guest room of Sam’s house, Dean is staring at the full moon, still high in the sunrise sky. He watches it fade away. An emptiness in his gut festers, eating away at him. For all that he wants to be happy for Sam. Who found love and built this house and a family. Who had everything. Dean stares at the moon in a brand new Paradise. For all that the world is new he wonders why old things still haunt him. He wonders if he’ll ever be free of them. Free to have things he wants. And his thoughts stray to things he’s lost. Teaching Jack to drive and fish. Piling into a diner booth and ordering cheeseburgers with Sam and Cas. Shooting practice with Claire. Hiding the guns from Jody. Hiding the guns from Cas. Cas . Cas, standing in front of him with Billie at his back and the world falling apart around them, taking the time to say—

Around Castiel, leaves are falling off the trees in the Garden of Plenty. Dean’s prayer is wordless. All Cas can do is feel it.

* * *

The angels flit in and out of Paradise. The rescuing of souls slows.

“Hell isn’t happy,” Olga reports. They’ve upped their fighting back. Cas wonders what Rowena’s thinking. But though Hell’s pushing back, and the angels have to slow down, they still get all the souls out. So there isn’t much to do except keep going.

Amara is still here, helping them expand the reach of Paradise and connect all the pieces. They need more room for every soul that’s added. And when she’s here, things are better. Jack seems more focused, more balanced. She’s a good aunt, Cas thinks, though he watches her carefully. She teaches Jack to do things, to invent and create and direct. Jack sends a storm to end a drought, and lights up the northern lights particularly bright one winter. He brings good weather to a wedding. He saves a child who would have been born dead. He heals a mother who would have died giving birth. Then he stops, and Cas can tell he’s wrestling with it. With what kind of God he wants to be. How many fingers he wants to stick into pies.

Amara is gentle.

“It’s your decision,” she tells him. And Jack nods.

Jack’s carrying his power well these days. Paradise is tuned in to his every thought and need, and he moves through it like he was born to it. He gets better at judging souls, learns not to blink when he casts them down.

“I can make you forget him,” Jack offers to Cas one day, when the Garden is yellowing around them. They’ve discovered that everything that is born also dies, so the fruit and vegetables will rot on the vine unless they’re picked. Kelly’s retrieving the pumpkins to make a pie, like she used to do with her mother when she was a kid. She and Jack are going to make one together. And Cas is glad. He never begrudges Kelly time with Jack.

“What?” Cas asks.

“If you’re hurting because Dean is here,” Jack explains, though the confusion is evident on his face. “I can make you forget him, if you—”

“No,” Cas says immediately, but the thought sends a vicious chill through him. Worry takes root in his chest. He tries to tell himself that Jack has no way of knowing what Castiel had been like before Dean. No way of knowing what kind of unloving person Cas would be without him. And the idea of forgetting Dean himself, of never again thinking of the lives they’ve lived together— “Jack, how can you ask me that?”

“I don’t know how to help you,” Jack insists, taken aback by the firmness of Cas’s answer. “I don’t understand why you won’t just go see him. It’s Dean .”

Cas doesn’t respond. 

“I know you’re staying here to help me,” Jack continues. “But I want you to be happy, too.”

“I’m not staying here with you because I have to,” Cas says firmly. “I’m staying here because I care about you. And as long as you need me, I’ll be here. Nothing is going to change that.”

“Even if it makes you miserable?” Jack demands.

Cas racks his mind for a response that won’t make things worse. This is too much like arguing with Claire.

“Jack?” Kelly calls, cutting them off. Jack looks over. Kelly has heaped several pumpkins at the edge of the clearing, and carries a basket brimming with pecans. She carries herself like a mother, diplomatic in her intercession. “Could you give me a hand? I want to make a chocolate pecan pie as well, but I’m having trouble getting enough chocolate.”

Jack nods, and turns away from Castiel. Going to the edge of the Garden, he waves a hand, and before their eyes one of the trees begins to sprout great bean pods that swell until they’re bigger than fists. They drop, mottled green and red and yellow, and Jack raises his hand again. They split open, revealing the white, fleshy seeds inside.

With Jack distracted, Kelly approaches Cas. She’s got a sweater wrapped around her. The Garden is cooling as some semblance of a harvestime passes through it. Her presence is comforting, like a kindred spirit. The only other person whose presence had been so reassuring to Cas was Charlie. And maybe Meg at one point. That was so, so long ago.

Kelly and Cas turn their gazes to their son. He’s drying the seeds, and beckoning more pods to sprout. Watching it feels like watching whole seasons pass. Jack does it with such ease. The moisture in the seeds evaporates in puffs of humidity. The simple wave of a hand.

“You know he’ll be fine here,” Kelly tells Cas. “If you ever do want to leave, just for a little while. He has the angels and Amara to help him.”

“It’s not just that,” Cas says, shaking his head. He wishes Sam was here. Dean was so good with Claire’s vicious teenage rage, but Sam was the one who had always understood Jack’s soft confusion, the terror of having power and no way of understanding the world that was asking him to use it. “We had so little time on Earth in between tragedies and disasters. He should have had the chance to be a child and grow up. He should have had a whole lifetime with us. And now he has to bear the burden of all this power, and he’s still only a child. I—” He hesitates.

“What?” Kelly asks, no judgment clouding her voice.

“I don’t know if he can do it,” Cas admits. “I want to have faith in him, but with so much power at his disposal, I just—” His voice tapers off as he searches for words. Jack is aging the cacao beans before his eyes, still sprouting new pods from the branches above his head. “I know how easy it is to think you can handle power. And every time, I was always wrong.”

Kelly shakes her head.

“Castiel,” she orders. “Look at our son.” And Cas does.

Jack has moved on to roasting the cacao beans in midair, the beans crisping before their eyes, and then grinding them to a fine powder, like the dust beneath the Impala’s wheels. The smell of bitter chocolate fills the Garden of Plenty. Like a chocolate shop outside Chicago, or a bakery in Phoenix, or a dozen other places across the country. Like the bunker the first time Jack had tried to make chocolate chip cookies. The breeze catches the smell and whirls it around them, and the smell dances with the sight of souls arriving in Paradise. And for all that his back is turned, Cas can recognize a quiet happiness in Jack’s shoulders. The letting go of a tension he’s been holding.

“He is so good,” Kelly says, her voice brimming with wonder. “Look at where we are, Castiel, look at everything he’s done. You raised Jack so full of goodness.” She cuts him off before he can say anything. “I’m glad you’re worried about him. That means you love him. But you and Sam and Dean raised him so well. You have to have faith in yourself.”

“I guess I’m just always waiting for the other shoe to drop,” Cas says. It sounds like something that Dean would say.

“It’s all you’ve done your whole life,” Kelly reasons. “But it might be time to let that go.” She takes a deep breath. “Castiel, I owe you more than I can ever repay you.

“You really don’t—”

“I owe you,” Kelly insists. “For raising my son. So I promise you this. Whenever you leave, for however long you’re gone, Jack will always be safe with me. I’ll keep him good.”

Jack is churning the cocoa powder in with butter and milk and sugar— turning it into proper melt-in-your-mouth chocolate. The kind of chocolate that always made Cas grateful to be on Earth. Jack’s chocolate is a swaying, melted blob hanging in the air, churning without a bowl or a whisk or spoon. Leaves fly off the tree branches, and the willow tree waves. Nothing touches the chocolate.

“That’s not the only thing,” Cas ventures. Something tells him she would understand. “Jack isn’t the only reason I’m avoiding seeing Dean.”

“Then what is it?”

Cas thinks about the last time he saw Dean. The way his eyes widened, the slight dip of his head into a soft, shaking no . The way he swallowed, the way his lips fell open with something unspoken. Dean Winchester, speechless at being loved. Castiel, loving Dean with his dying words.

“I don’t know what will happen,” Cas confesses. “The way we parted, and all the things I said— I don’t know what to say to him, or what he can say to me.”

Kelly purses her lips to suffocate a smile.

“Castiel, you never know what will happen when you choose to care about people,” she says. “You should know that more than anyone.”

Jack comes back, bars of chocolate in hand. It would have been easier to just wave a hand and make chocolate appear, but Cas understands. The pleasure’s in the growing and making of the thing. Bringing things into the world here, in the heart of Paradise. And for all that the chocolate is threaded through with the power of creation, Jack has cocoa powder under his nails and a smile on his face. He offers the chocolate to his mother, who snaps off a piece and pops it into her mouth. Cas can guess— it tastes divine.

“Thank you, Jack,” Kelly says, beaming. And she’s in deep, deep love with this place, with having Jack here, with the possibilities of the future. There isn’t a doubt in her mind as to what to do next or where to go with her eternity.

Maybe she’s right, Cas wonders. Maybe he should go see Dean soon.

Jack offers Cas the chocolate, and Cas snaps off a piece. It tastes like heaven.

* * *

Cas is listening to Led Zeppelin. He’s sure that he must have listened to it too many times. That any second the tape will snap in half or the music will fade, or whatever happens to cassettes when time takes its toll on them. But it never does. He stands in the Garden, watching apples ripen on a branch above his head. He listens to the ninth song on the mixtape, Ten Years Gone. The words come in distant and warbling beneath a guitar.

“ Then, as it was, then again it will be,

And though the course may change sometime,

Rivers always reach the sea. ”

It twangs and rumbles, and that love song comes through as steady as the eternal buzzing of honeybees. Not for the first time, Cas wonders what Dean was thinking when he put the mixtape together. How much did he think about the order of the songs? The way they fade into each? More of them are love songs than not. About having love. About losing love. About missing love when it’s right in front of your eyes. But the whole thing opens with Immigrant Song, so he can’t be sure. And after all, every time he thinks he understands Dean, the man proves him wrong. What luck to love such a curious man.

Dean’s prayer is faint at first, and Cas almost doesn’t hear it. It’s Dean turning and walking and walking. It’s not even properly directed at Cas. But whenever Dean feels alone his thoughts always stray back to Cas. It’s raining in his corner of Paradise, and the wind is picking up.

Something about Dean’s prayer makes Cas pause the mixtape. He slips the headphones off. The air is humming with humidity. Dean feels a yawning grief. Sam is happy, Cas realizes. Sam is brimming with love and happiness. His son has arrived in Paradise. His family is whole again. And it’s a punch to Dean’s gut.

Clouds race to gather above the Garden of Plenty, and Cas looks at Jack. His eyes are far away, lost to things beyond Cas’s understanding. He can hear Dean’s prayer. Dean’s thoughts cast out to the Almighty. And to Cas.

And when it comes through clearly, the faintest prayer strikes Cas like lightning. 

If I disappeared, would anybody miss me? And Dean doesn’t even seem to realize he’s demanding it of Cas. The thought’s bound up with the same ideation as characterized everything Dean did in life. I died and everything went on fine without me. Sam was fine, and Eileen and everybody else— And everybody got to have a life. And I didn’t get to have anything. I lived so long, and for nothing .

“It’s Dean,” Jack tells Kelly when she puts a hand to his shoulder.

And then Dean wants to kick himself, and tosses that thought up like a prayer as well. It’s his own fault, his own fault that he’s here alone, with nothing to show for it. His own fault that all his life nobody loved him enough not to leave him.

“Cas,” Kelly calls, and her eyes are sharp. Her voice comes like an order. She has to shout it above the wind that’s picking up, tearing through the trees. Around them, the Garden darkens. Clouds start to block out the sun. “Cas, go.”

Dean will be fine, Cas wants to say. You know how much worse he’s been through. How much he’s suffered.

And I’ll never have a chance to get it right, Dean thinks, flinging the thought out half wallowing and half asking. Everything that he passed up on. Everything he turned down and turned away. Never again. And beneath the words, there it is. The wordless ask. Dean doesn’t say it. But Cas hears it. 

And then a prayer from Sam. Clear as crystal, direct to Cas and practically written with a subject line and a signature. With his own love and child warm in his arms, Sam prays.

Castiel— ever formal in prayer, for all there’s a desperate pleading in it— Dean needs you. You know he needs you.

The sky’s gone dark above the Garden. The clouds are heavy with darkness and crackling with lightning. And Cas doesn’t understand why. Until he sees the tear rolling down Jack’s cheek. Wind whips at Kelly’s hair. She wraps her arms around Jack, pulling him down into her shoulder. She meets Castiel’s eyes.

In Paradise, every stab of pain bleeds like ink across a page. It’s infectious. And every one of Dean’s prayers goes straight to Jack. Of course. Dean is Jack’s father, too.

Kelly closes her eyes and prays.

Don’t be afraid, Castiel, she prays. It’s time .

Without the sun Paradise is dyed a haunting blue and gray. It washes out Jack and Kelly, and they look like ghosts in a drowned garden. Dean’s aching pulses through them, chanting: alone, alone, alone. And underneath it, every single time, Castiel hears it. He hears it, and realizes he’s been hearing it in the undercurrent of every prayer until now. Cas. Cas. Cas.

And Castiel is a fool. After all this time, he’s a fool. He should have gone to Dean the second he arrived in Paradise. The second he was yanked out of the Empty.

Cas takes a deep breath. He’s faced worse than Dean Winchester. Hell, he’s even faced Dean Winchester.

Not like this, the little voice in his head tells him. The voice that raises panic in his chest. Never like this . But there’s nothing to do about it now. He turns a face up to the sky. Round, heavy raindrops are starting to fall around the Garden. Each one plummets to the ground like there’s a reward for getting there first— each one bursts when it hits the ground. It’s raining where Dean is. Raining so heavily Cas can almost feel it already.

“Take care of Jack,” Cas calls to Kelly above the wind. Kelly nods. For a moment, Cas wants to run to Jack instead. But Kelly will take care of him.

He shoves his Walkman into a trenchcoat pocket.

Cas flies, and the Garden disappears around him. And then he’s there, on the dock jutting out over the river. Rain is pouring down around them, staining the world gray and freezing. The wind crashes through the trees all along the riverbank. The water’s white and churning, swollen with flooding and scraping against the dock. Ready to sweep them away. 

And Dean is standing there, looking out at it all. Soaked to the bone. He’s wearing his jacket, the one with Cas’s bloody handprint across his shoulder. He had probably put it on that morning without even thinking about it. The rain hasn’t so much as smeared it.

The slightest shift tenses Dean’s shoulders.

Cas holds his breath. When he speaks,the words are stuck in his throat. He has to fight to bring them to his lips. They fall like beatitudes.

“Hello, Dean.”

The rain stops. When Dean turns, his eyes are wide and shining.

“Cas,” he breathes.

After twelve years, Cas never gets tired of hearing his name in Dean’s mouth.