Chapter Text
Cas comes to a halt in front of them. He glances at Michael and Jack, gives the tiniest of nods before turning to face Dean and Sam. The long black coat sways a little as he moves, the leather glimmering faintly in the radiance from the one remaining streetlight. He has a rifle tucked under his arm—a sleek, modern-looking thing, black with silver chasing. "Hello, Dean. Sam."
He sounds the same. Everything about him looks different, but his voice is the same, it’s Cas’s voice, the rough gravel of it, the susurrus of warmth under all that solemnity. Dean supposes that he's focusing on these inane details because the alternative is wrestling with something too vast to hold onto. With the way the world has turned upside-down on him.
He’s beyond saving, Chuck had said.
And yet he’s here. Dean can’t stop staring, can’t stop drinking in the sight of him, the nearness of him, the aliveness of him. He’s here, and he’s Cas, except he’s—he’s also in Death’s clothes, wearing Death’s ring, with eyes that are—
Endless, although that isn’t new. Cas’s eyes were always that—depth and stars and seas and the unknowable hint of things beyond mortal comprehension and yet still so human, no matter how Dean tried to tell himself Cas wasn’t. Human. Couldn’t be. And certainly isn’t now.
He sees Cas in that storage room, again. Tears smeared into his smile, clotted in his dark lashes. Voice aching around the words. I love you.
I love you, Cas said, and then he died, and here he is again, something different. Something new.
Sam’s mouth is hanging open. "You're...you're..."
Cas looks almost embarrassed. He runs his hand through his hair, tousling it even further. The ring winks in the streetlight, flashing like a tiny star. "Yes."
"Where's...where's the scythe," says Dean, blankly.
Cas blinks. He half-lifts the gun. "Yes, well...it seems to have modernized, somewhat."
"You," says Sam. "You just...killed God."
"Well," Jack offers, from the sidelines, "he wasn't really God anymore."
Which, well. Brings them back to the situation at hand, Dean supposes. He turns to rake his eyes over Jack, who...looks the same, honestly. A little out of place. A little awkward, a little too earnest, a little too kind.
Like Cas, some traitorous, tender part of Dean’s brain supplies. He quashes the thought.
“So, you and Michael? You’re...what, God and...Amara?” He stares at Jack, half-expecting the kid to shapeshift into a willowy woman with fathomless eyes.
Jack touches his chest. “I can feel...an echo of her. The power that she was. It lives in me now. So, a part of her does, too.”
“Are you still...I mean, are you still...?”
“Human?” Jack supplies, and the corner of his mouth quirks. “Angel? Nephilim?”
“Yeah.”
“As much as he ever was,” says Michael. “And more. Just as Adam and I, as we are...well.” He flexes the fingers of one hand, looks down at it as though examining a slide under a microscope. “Human, angel, more.”
“Cool. So the Darkness is, uh, a three-year-old nephilim. And God is...our half-brother plus his archangel cellmate. And Death...”
He can’t finish the sentence.
Death is my best friend. Death is the idiot who pulled my ass out of hell and then died for me and died for me and died for me. Death is the guy who said I love you but only because he knew he was about to die for me again, one last time.
“I told you that the changes on the horizon were shifts on a cosmic scale,” says Michael, who frankly sounds fed up with having to explain this again. “This is a new world order, Dean.”
“Right,” says Dean. “Well, me and Sam, we didn’t exactly get in on the whole new job thing, so we’re, you know, still concerned with the old world. Which, I don’t know if you noticed...”
“Can you bring them back,” Sam says. His voice trembles a little, and Dean thinks, real. “All of them.”
Michael nods. “Yes. What was done can be undone.” He looks at Jack. “Nephew?”
Jack nods, the resolute expression on his face somehow making him look even younger. He trails after Michael and Dean watches the two of them take a couple steps away—not far, just a few yards. Must not be much of a blast radius on this one, Dean thinks, feeling slightly hysterical. He shoots a look at Cas, expecting him to head over there too, given that he’s the third member of this new cosmic trinity or whatever. But bringing back everyone who got snapped into oblivion must not be something that requires Death’s help, because Cas just stands there, gun tucked under his arm, studying him. Shit. Studying Dean.
Sam glances between them for a moment, his head swiveling so quick it sounds like his neck is actually cricking, and then he mumbles something unintelligible and edges past them, toward where Michael and Jack are now having some kind of murmured conversation near the withered shrubbery.
Which leaves. Dean and Cas.
“It’s,” Dean manages. “It’s good to see you.”
He could kick himself for how inadequate the words are. He stares like he can sear Cas into his brain, overwrite the memory of Cas being swallowed up by the Empty, those few scant seconds that are going to haunt him forever. I thought you were gone, is all he can think. I thought you were gone forever.
“How—how long have you been back?” he tacks on hastily.
Jesus, he wants to touch Cas. He wants to close the distance between them, put his arms around Cas, press their foreheads together. He wants, he wants.
Cas, who had opened his mouth after Dean’s first sentence, closes it again and furrows his brow in thought. “Not long,” he says finally. “This...becoming, it takes time.”
“Does it hurt?” Dean blurts, before he can stop himself.
“More than it should have,” says Cas. “I...rushed things. Unfortunately, even with my haste, by the time I had obtained and read God’s book and returned to this plane, Chuck had already pulled you into the narrative tessellation.”
“Michael said he didn’t think we’d make it out.”
Cas frowns again. “It was fortunate you did. We didn’t have a way to draw Chuck out, from here. But you and Sam, you broke free and forced him to return to the flow of time.”
“You would have figured something else out,” says Dean. He grins weakly, makes a vague gesture. “I mean, you're a literal horseman of the apocalypse, Cas. You didn’t need us.”
The streetlight over their heads flickers as something crosses over Cas's face, an indecipherable expression. Dean tries not to read too hard into it. The guy's Death now—that's got to come with some changes. Some...inhuman things. Dean feels something clench miserably in his chest. He can't stop looking at Cas. The windswept otherness of him that is somehow still so achingly familiar. For a moment he imagines just saying it. Cas is Death but maybe Dean could say it anyway. I love you. Don’t leave me again. I know you’re a literal godlike entity now but just...don’t leave. Imagines their open mouths meeting like currents in the endless sea.
"I tried to reach you," says Cas finally. He hesitates. Looks down at the asphalt, darts his eyes back up to meet Dean’s. “I think—I might have gotten through, in dreams—”
It hits Dean, then, the memory surfacing like a drowned ghost from the depths. His dream of Cas, Cas’s desperate pleas for him to fight. Cas had reached him, even through those folded layers of illusion. Cas had tried to pull him out, tried to save him. And Dean had—
Fuck. Dean had said—he’d said—he’d told Cas how he felt—
So Cas knows. He has to know. And he hasn’t said anything. Hasn’t brought it up. Hasn’t closed the distance of those scant few feet remaining between them. Hasn’t pulled Dean against him so that Dean can press his face into the side of his neck and say I missed you—I missed you—so that Dean can tell him what he’s only said in dreams, till now—
Cas knows, and he’s just standing there, in those strange dark clothes, with that ring on his hand and with power rippling invisibly off him like a silent maelstrom.
Because—oh, of course, it’s so clear—because Cas had loved him, before, but Cas isn’t the same now. Nothing is the same now. This isn’t just Cas looking at him through tears, marveling over Dean like Dean’s something special—this isn't just Cas trapped in that room with Dean with no other recourse than to sacrifice himself again. This isn’t Cas having lost everything because of Dean, this isn’t Cas having spent so long in the mundane grime of humanity’s best shitty hits that anything would start to look good, even someone as fucked-up as Dean. This Cas has power and purpose and a place in the cosmic order of things and doesn’t need Dean, never should’ve needed Dean, never would have needed Dean, if Dean hadn’t stripped him of all that power in the first place, hadn’t persuaded Cas to bat for a shitty, losing team and fight a shitty, losing war.
Dean trembles all over with the finality of it. It’s a blade slipping between his ribs, twisting deep.
It’s too goddamn late, he realizes. Because Cas said I love you and then Cas died, and now Cas is a cosmic being, a fundamental girder of the universe made incarnate, and whatever Cas felt, whatever could’ve happened between them, if Dean had managed to get his head out of his ass any of those long years he wasted—that isn’t on the table now. Dean didn’t have jack shit to offer an angel even if he could’ve managed to enough courage to make a move, and he’s got even less he can offer a deity, or something like one.
"I don't remember," says Dean finally, grimacing in apology as he takes the easy way out. Coward, he tells himself, but what does it matter now, anyway? His chest aches. "Sorry, man, things were so messed up in there. I think I remember some weird dreams, but...uh. Nothing specific.”
For a heartbeat, Cas just stares at Dean, his lips slightly parted, his expression skewing close to something like anguish. Dean doesn’t know why Cas is looking at him like that. He parts his own lips, thoughts crowding behind his teeth, wordless, pointless. What can he possibly say, now? The fuck does an I love you mean to Death?
There’s a sudden, subsonic shiver that runs through the night, passes through him like a tidal sweep of sun-warmed air. And the world...changes. There’s sound, motion, vibrancy. The rustle of some small animal ducking into deeper shadow. Dean breaks away from Cas’s gaze and pivots on the spot, staring at the moths flitting greedily around the streetlight’s pale glow, the cars suddenly gliding through the nearest intersection, the people locking up their stores for the night as though it’s only an ordinary evening in Lebanon, and not the day the world nearly ended.
“Son of a bitch,” Dean says. His voice comes out hushed. Maybe he hadn’t really believed it was possible. He stares at Michael and Jack, who are ambling back across the street with Sam like they didn’t just restore a goddamn planet back to functionality. “They really did it.”
Sam’s phone is bursting a flurried series of chimes. Sam swipes at the screen, covers his mouth with his free hand. “Dean,” he croaks, hushed. “Eileen, she just texted me—and Donna, too—Bobby, Charlie, Stevie, Jody—everyone's back, Dean.”
Dean exhales, closes his eyes for a moment as it washes through him. They’re back. They’re okay. For a moment the sheer fucking impact of it—the knowledge that they haven’t lost everyone they’ve ever loved—threatens to knock him sideways; he has to press his knuckles against his sternum as something in him judders with raw, aching relief. Real.
He glances at Cas and immediately wishes he hadn’t, because there’s such warmth in Cas’s eyes, and it makes—it makes his chest hurt more, makes the longing worse, makes it bite deeper— god, he was always so good at keeping this shut tightly away, before. And it’s like Cas ripped that all down. It's like he stripped away all the walls that were supposed to keep it under control, at the same time he was stripping all of Dean’s fears bare, in that room in the Bunker, when he was looking Dean in the eye and saying you fought for this whole world for love, you changed me, I love you. I love you, like it was the easiest thing in the world to say. Like Dean was the easiest thing in the world to love.
Sam scrubs at his eyes with the heel of his hand. “So what now?” he asks, frowning at Michael. “What will you—”
“Adam and I will go to Heaven,” says Michael. “There’s work to be done, there.”
“Will the angels,” Sam starts, and grimaces, “I mean, will they be—alright with this?”
“With you?” Dean adds, more pointedly. “Don’t think this exactly matches up with their regularly scheduled programming.”
"They’re gonna have to take it or leave it,” says Adam drily, and Dean must be getting used to talking to two people at once because he doesn’t even startle at the change this time. Adam blinks and shifts the set of his jaw, and it’s Michael who sighs next and adds, “I’m sure some explanations will be needed. But...well, we are what we are.”
Sam turns to Jack. “Are you going to Heaven, too?”
“No,” says Jack. “I thought I’d...” He chews his bottom lip. “I thought I’d come back to the Bunker. With you guys. If...if that’s okay.”
“Of course it’s okay,” says Sam, looking startled. “But—are you sure? Don’t you...I don’t know, are there, um, Darkness things you have to do?”
Michael shrugs. “The Darkness was long locked away from this world. Jack should walk the earth, become more acquainted with creation. And...it isn’t right for us to pull strings, not the way my father did, but being close to humanity, without trying to control them—” He hesitates. “It’s important,” he says, finally. He touches his own chest, a gesture that looks almost unconscious, and glances at Jack. “And we are more than a little human, ourselves.”
Jack glances at Dean, his face cautious as he reconfirms. “So—I can—?”
“Yeah,” says Dean. And he finds himself glad—glad that Jack at least is coming back with them, that Jack’s room at least won’t be empty. “Yeah, kid, absolutely.” Belatedly, he wonders if he should stop calling Jack kid.
Jack smiles a little, an expression so full of childlike pleasure that Dean thinks it’d be easy to forget he’s looking at one-half of the beings that power the literal universe.
“I will see all of you again, I’m sure,” says Michael. His hands have found their way into his pockets yet again. Dean has a mental image of Michael holding court in Heaven like this, wrinkled green jacket and everything, amid a sea of suited angels.
Michael inclines his head slightly in their direction, and vanishes.
Which leaves—
“You’ll come back with us?” Sam says to Cas, his voice pitching up, making it into a question rather than a statement.
For a moment Dean allows himself to hope. It doesn’t make sense, but for just an instant he imagines the four of them getting into the Impala. Cas’s knees bumping against the back of the driver’s seat. His gaze meeting Dean’s through the rearview mirror, as Dean drives his family home.
“There...there are some things I need to attend to,” Cas says, slowly. He fidgets, hesitates.
"Right,” Dean says immediately, filling the pause. He can’t bear this, can’t bear watching Cas search for the words to tell them he isn’t coming back. “You’ve probably got a bunch of reapers to corral, or something. Library books to reshelve.” He almost laughs, then—because it’s so absurd, his little fantasy of Cas returning to the Bunker with them. Dean’s so stupid. Death doesn’t ride in the backseat of Dean’s car, Death doesn’t have a bedroom just down the hall from Dean’s, Death certainly doesn’t have a home in bumfuck Kansas with a middle-aged hunter with a bad knee and—and—
“Apocalypse is over,” he hears himself continuing, with a forced cheer that sounds tinny even to his own ears. Sam is looking at him like he’s grown a second head. “I think we’ll be okay without Death hovering over our shoulders keeping an eye on us.”
Because he doesn’t want Cas to think—he doesn’t want Cas to think Dean can’t handle it, that Dean’s going to—going to try to stop Cas from doing his job, from whatever continued process of becoming he needs to sort out. He's not going to delude himself into thinking he can have Cas, just because Cas looks and sounds so much the same now as he did then, when he’d said—what he said. Just because Dean was a lovesick idiot in a grieving dream in a fake reality and blurted out an I love you like it was the simplest thing in the world. Dean doesn't get to keep Cas. He knows that—he's always known that. Cas has always had to leave—that, at least, isn’t any different now.
(Don’t leave, he thinks. His eyes sting.)
“I...yes. I have no doubt you will,” says Cas. He nods, a slight motion as if confirming something to himself. He doesn’t meet Dean’s eyes, not really. “Goodbye, Dean, Sam.”
And then. He leaves.
*
Eileen’s waiting for them when they get back to the Bunker. She shoves up from the war room table as the three of them come down the stairs—Sam at the front, practically taking the steps two at a time, the big idiot, and Jack trailing not far behind. Dean comes down last. Hangs back a step, to watch his little brother catch Eileen in his arms as she launches herself at him. Sam half-spins her, his arms tight around her waist, his face buried in her hair.
“Glad you made it,” Dean tells her, when Sam finally sets her down.
“Almost didn’t,” she laughs, pushing her hair back from her face. “Some jerk took my car while I was gone.”
Sam has the grace to blush, though he’s still smiling—hasn’t stopped smiling, since they entered the Bunker. His hand slides out to catch Eileen’s. Dean watches them twine their fingers together. It makes something tighten in Dean’s chest, to watch. It’s happiness, but not it's not just happiness—there's a hollowness too, something aching under his ribs. It unsettles him; he looks away and occupies himself with unpacking their bags.
*
There’s plenty to keep him occupied, too, over the next several days. He spends a good portion of the time giving the Bunker a good thorough cleaning, which is sorely needed. In fairness it hadn’t been their top priority during the literal end of the world. And there’s groceries to buy, and meals to cook, and a salt and burn a couple counties over to handle, and the new normal to adjust to.
Dean tries to remind himself regularly that they saved the world, or at least helped. He reminds himself that Chuck is gone—that he’s free, they’re all free, they fought for it and they got it and if the victory feels hollow, well, maybe that’s just life. He certainly does not spend his time thinking about Cas, out there as Death doing god-knows-what, and he does not catch himself half-hoping every time he hears the Bunker’s front door open, he does not furiously tidy up Cas’s already painfully sparse bedroom for no reason since its former owner certainly no longer needs it.
Eileen’s over almost every day, updating the archive catalogues or cleaning her weapons on the map table or doing research in the library while Sam makes googly eyes at her over the top of his lore notes. Her company comes with the added bonus of distracting Sam, who’s been shooting Dean the kind of thoughtful, hesitant looks that Dean knows from unfortunate experience always herald an upcoming Conversation.
Dean has a pretty good idea of what said conversation is going to entail and he’s not in the mood to have it with himself, much less with his earnestly insufferable lug of a brother, so he has all the more reason to be grateful for Eileen occupying Sam’s attention. Dean’s caught the two of them kissing in the archives at least twice now, Sam always turning brick red while Eileen for her part just looks amused. Dean really, desperately wants to resent them, but he can’t—he likes Eileen far too much, for one, and even if he didn’t, he’d have to be blind not to see how radiant Sam always is around her. He can’t resent them, even if the way they touch each other’s shoulders as they walk by each other opens up something inside him, a ragged chasm that makes it hard to breathe.
As for Jack, Dean hasn’t actually seen much of the kid. He supposes Jack could be spending a fair amount of time outside the Bunker—catching up with Michael or Cas on...universe business, or whatever. He knows that Jack is around—Dean'll hear Jack’s voice floating out of the library sometimes, or catch sight of Jack rounding the corner ahead of him, or see Jack’s empty cereal bowls littering the sink. You’d think a deity could just snap their fingers and magick their stupid dishes clean, but nope, Jack is just as much of slob about dishes as Cas is—well. Was.
He kind of feels like Jack’s avoiding him, almost, but it isn’t confirmed until one night when Jack walks into the kitchen, where Dean’s been drinking at the table as a way to have a change from drinking in his room. Jack instantly freezes like a deer in the headlights, then starts to edge back toward the doorway.
Goddammit. Dean exhales and sets his beer down next to the couple of empties he’s already polished off. “Kid, stop.”
Jack looks guilty, his shoulders already climbing towards his ears as he hunches in on himself. Dean thinks it might be a habit he picked up from Sam. It catches him off-guard, sometimes, how Jack is a conglomeration of all their mannerisms.
Dean scrubs at his eyes. He’s tired. “You wanna tell me why the hell you’re dodging around the place like you’re breaking and entering?”
“I...” Jack says. At least he’s stopped trying to back out of the room. He moves a few steps closer and then just stops in the middle of the kitchen, his arms hanging awkwardly by his sides. “I didn’t want to bother you.”
Maybe Dean deserves that. “Look,” he says, “I know I—I know what I did before was shitty, Jack. I got so caught up in wanting Chuck dead, I didn’t care who else had to die to do it. That was wrong. I’m sorry, I am. Truly.”
Jack just looks at him with those huge puppy-dog eyes—chalk down another thing he seems to have inherited from Sam.
Dean sighs. “Listen. Like Sam said, you’re welcome here—we want you to be here, Jack. This is your home too, it always has been. I’m not going to kick you out just because I bump into you in the damn hallway.”
“I’m not worried you’ll kick me out,” says Jack softly. “I’m worried you’ll look at me.”
Dean feels his eyebrows shoot up. “Uh. You wanna elaborate?”
“I’m worried,” says Jack slowly, “that you’ll look at me, and all you’ll see is—”
“What, Amara?” Dean snorts. He takes a long draught of his beer. “Trust me, I don’t.”
Jack doesn’t seem soothed by this at all; on the contrary, he seems almost more distraught by the second, standing ramrod-stiff in the center of the room.
“Spit it out,” says Dean finally.
“I,” says Jack. He swallows. “I didn’t save the world.”
Dean stares at him for a moment. Then he says, gruffly, “The hell are you talking about? I was there, remember? You and Michael kicked Chuck straight into the afterlife.”
“But I didn’t do anything,” says Jack, and he looks miserable. He finally closes the distance, slides into the seat across from Dean. He rests his hands on the tabletop, palm up, and looks down at them like they don’t belong to him. “This—this power, it just landed on me, because I was the next best option. I didn’t work for it—I didn’t sacrifice anything. I was supposed to—I was supposed to die , so that you would—”
He cuts off.
“So that I what,” says Dean, flat. He knows, or thinks he does. But he waits for Jack to say it.
Jack slumps against the table. “So that you would forgive me,” he mumbles.
Dean looks away. He picks at the label on his beer. “Jack, I’m not angry. I was for a long time, but—I’m not anymore.” He’s trying, goddammit. It’s not the same as forgiveness, and they both know it, but he’s trying.
“You should be angry. I killed—” says Jack. A tear rolls down his cheek. Dean doesn’t want him to say it. "I killed Mary.”
“You didn’t have a soul,” says Dean tiredly. He isn’t sure if he’s reminding Jack of that so much as himself. He pushes up from the table, takes a step with no particular direction, and then just stands there, hip against the edge. Remembering the first time Jack had died, how the three of them—Sam, Dean, and Cas—had grieved and laughed and reminisced and blinked back tears, sitting around this table, mourning. He thinks of the moment after Sam had gone to bed, when Dean had turned to Cas, his tongue simultaneously too heavy and too free under the influence of too much whiskey, and had said, he reminded me so much of you. And Cas had just looked at him with dark blue eyes, too close, much too close and yet not nearly close enough, and said softly, he reminded me of you, too.
“But I still did it,” says Jack. “It was still me. It was still my powers.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” Dean tightens his hand around the bottle to keep his fingers from shaking. He misses his mom. Misses her like a dull knife in his ribs. There are so many people he misses, now. His chest is full of rusting iron. “I look at you and I see—I see—”
And he does look at Jack, then.
Jack, who tilts his head like Cas and leans too close to the laptop screen like Sam and dangled his arm out the window of the Impala for no reason other than that he watched Dean doing it. Jack, who burned off his soul for them. Who wanted to die for them. Who has angel and human and deity in him now, and still chose them—still chose to live here, padding around the Bunker hallways and withering Eileen’s house plants and forgetting to wash his dirty dishes and being afraid all the time of what Dean will see in him.
And Dean thinks of Cas, again, putting himself on the line for Jack. Cas dying so Jack could be born. Cas shielding Jack from Dean with his body. Cas, who had yielded to Dean on just about every damn thing. But not this. Not on this.
“I see our kid,” says Dean. And then, because Jack is still crying, and Dean can’t bear it any more than he could ever bear Sam crying, any more than he could bear Cas crying in that storeroom, Dean reaches out and cups his hand against the back of Jack’s head. Pulls Jack closer, until the kid stumbles up from his seat and presses into the hug. Buries his face in Dean’s shoulder, his narrow frame shaking with muted sobs.
God, Dean misses his mom. He misses Bobby. Misses Charlie. But he still has a family. Jack’s tears are wet and warm against the side of his jaw. Dean thinks of Cas again, probably because he can’t ever be around Jack and not be reminded of Cas. “S’alright,” he says, soft. He cards a hand through their son’s hair. “It’s alright, Jack.”
*
About a week after the talk with Jack, Dean finally wakes up and stumbles out of his room and it takes him all the way through showering and brushing his teeth and throwing on clothes to remember that Cas left. That Cas isn’t going to be reading in his bedroom or looking up a lore reference in the library or playing Yahtzee in the war room with Jack. And he thinks, maybe this is adjusting. Maybe it’ll get easier. He thinks, then, that maybe one day it won’t even hurt to remember, and the wrenching gut-punch of that thought is so urgent and vicious that he almost trips over the pain of it as he shuffles into the kitchen.
Where he pulls up short. Because Cas is...there. In the fucking kitchen like it’s any old pre-apocalypse day. Leaning against the counter in the same dark jeans and plain v-neck he’d worn the night he killed Chuck, sipping what smells like burnt coffee out of Dean’s favorite Star Wars mug.
Dean gapes at him. “What the hell are you doing here?
Cas looks at him over the rim of the mug. The black coat is missing, and so Dean can see the scythe holstered at Cas's side—smaller now, handgun-sized instead of the longarm he’d carried before. His hair is sticking almost straight up in places and if Dean weren’t so completely derailed by Cas’s actual presence he might have the mental capacity to be unreasonably annoyed by this, because what the hell is this job entailing such that Cas always looks like he’s just extricated himself from a hurricane-force gale.
“Drinking coffee,” Cas gravels out at last.
“Since when do you need coffee?”
“I like the taste.”
Dean refrains from pointing out that whatever Cas is drinking probably tastes like burnt tar, if the smell is anything to go by. “Thought you couldn’t taste things properly.”
“Yes, well...experiencing food as humans can seems to be a benefit granted by this...position.”
Belatedly, Dean remembers how much of a foodie the original Death was. Shit. “You been, uh, doing a worldwide food tour, then?”
“No, I just found out,” says Cas. “There’s a lot I still don’t know, about—all of this. It’s difficult.”
“Skipped the onboarding, did you?” says Dean.
“I told you,” says Cas, managing to sound somehow both infinitely patient and incredibly testy. “I rushed things.”
It makes Dean crack a shadow of a smile, the thought of Cas half-assing his way through whatever weird interdimensional training module someone has to go through in order to learn the ropes of being Death. He sobers almost immediately, though, because of course Cas rushed things because of them. Screwed himself over, because Dean needed someone to drag him out of the fire again.
“Well,” Dean says awkwardly. “Do you—uh, want an omelet?”
Cas sets the mug down. “I should go, actually,” he says. “I need to consult Jack about something.”
Right. Of course. Cas is here on...cosmic entity business. He isn’t here to see Dean. He isn’t here to eat Dean’s fucking cooking.
Dean turns around, hating himself for the way his eyes are smarting. He pretends to sweep imaginary dust off the counter—which is spotless, thank you very much—so that he doesn’t have to look at Cas any longer. He doesn’t think he can bear it. It’s like he got a glimpse through a door before it slammed shut again, and now the walls are claustrophobic, closing tight around him, taunting him with what he can’t have. The nearness of Cas, all the familiarity of him turned sharp and aching by the strangeness of him. The ring, the gun, even the fucking clothes, all reminders that Dean waited too long, that he ran out the fucking clock by being too much of a goddamn coward all those years.
It's only about twenty seconds, but it feels like an eternity. When he finally musters up the courage to glance back over his shoulder, Cas is gone. His half-empty mug sits on the counter, unattended.
Sam pokes his head in through the kitchen doorway. “Oh, there you are. I got a case for us, it’s not far. Wendigo, I think. Want to leave in fifteen?”
*
“You just missed Cas, by the way,” Dean says as they head west. For once, the info Sam was able to find online was actually pretty detailed. Couple of bodies found near a small forest reserve, couple hikers still missing. The postmortem photos Sam had been able to lift from local, and poorly secured, databases more or less confirmed a wendigo as the culprit.
“Yeah?” says Sam absently. He’s in the passenger seat skimming some kind of digital park brochure on his tablet. Eileen would normally be with them on this sort of thing, but she’s away for a few days, driving east to deliver some spell components to a shaman friend in New Orleans.
“Dude was just...in the kitchen. Drinking fucking coffee.” Dean ignores the way his chest flutters, thinking about Cas all lean and relaxed against the kitchen counter, one huge hand curled delicately through the mug’s handle.
“Right, he texted me, said he was dropping by to talk to Jack about something heaven-related.”
Dean just about swerves off the road. “Since when are you and Cas texting?”
Sam gives him a strange look. “Why wouldn’t we be texting? He still has a phone, you know.”
Dean opens his mouth. Closes it. He can’t really think of a reasonable argument against it, except that the concept of the literal embodiment of Death having a phone just—
Well, Dean thinks, it’s not really that much more absurd than an angel having a phone. Certainly not more absurd than the Darkness wandering around their house and leaving bowls of soggy cornflakes in the sink. Still. He thinks about Cas pulling a fucking smartphone out of that black leather coat. Sending...fucking emojis or whatever to Sam and Jack. A lump rises in his throat, and he doesn’t quite know why.
“Everything alright with you two?” says Sam, far too casually.
“Uh,” says Dean, inwardly cursing Sam’s ability to hone in on emotional distress like a goddamn bloodhound. “Yeah. I mean, haven’t really talked to him. Since.”
Sam is looking at him sideways. “Don’t you think you should?”
“I was planning on it,” Dean protests, lying out his ass. He’s not going to dive into fact that he’s pretty sure Cas has graduated from the tier of needing to associate with Dean Winchester and seems to be doing just fine with his new Death powers and cool outfit and complete inability to distinguish good coffee from shitty mud water. “There’s just a lot going on, okay? I’m still getting used to...all this. I mean, part of me is still half-expecting Chuck to...y’know, fucking pop up in in the rearview mirror or something.”
Sam half-laughs. “I know what you mean.” He takes a breath, a shaky, rueful sound. “I keep catching myself rehashing stuff, pulling up these memories of—people, just to make sure I still can. Just to make sure he’s not still out there somewhere, erasing us.”
“Fuck that guy, honestly,” says Dean, with feeling.
Sam nods, a muscle jumping in his jaw. “But I think...I mean, he wanted to isolate us, right? In the tessellation, even before we figured it out, when we thought we were happy—it was still just us. And it’s not like that now. Like you said before, in the weird motel dimension—I think as long as we...as long as we have the people around us, the people we love, the people we miss, it’s real.”
Dean looks away, out the window, so that Sam won’t be able to see his face. The people around us, the people we love.
I love you, Cas had told him, and it cracked everything about them wide open. What is Dean supposed to do? He can’t mope around the Bunker indefinitely, trying to bury himself in chores and liquor because missing Cas is like acid gnawing through his bones. But—he thinks of Cas in the kitchen, so close and so untouchable. I love you, Cas had told him, and it had dragged up all the want that Dean had tried so hard to bury, all those years. Knowing that Cas is Death now doesn’t help Dean to subsume that again, doesn’t give him a way to shove it back six feet under. Even if Cas decides to stick around, can Dean go back to the way things used to be? Can he live with all his armor flayed off, with all of his wanting exposed and raw on the surface of him?
It isn’t fair—it isn’t fair because Cas being alive should be enough. It should be enough just to know that Cas is alive, out there in the world, not rotting in a void dimension because he died to save Dean’s skin yet again. But god, Dean’s selfish. He doesn’t want to do this without Cas. Even if it cuts at him, he doesn’t want this hollow victory where freedom means he never sees Cas again. He’ll—when they get back, if Cas is still there, Dean'll apologize for being weird about it. Maybe, if he’s not weird, if he doesn't turn this into a thing, Cas will still stop by every now and then. Maybe—Dean can still see him, sometimes. If that’s all he gets, if that’s all he can have of Cas—he'd rather have it, than nothing at all of Cas.
“Alright, I think I found a likely spot for the lair,” says Sam. He taps at the screen to close out the park map. “Pretty straightforward.”
"Straightforward sounds fantastic,” says Dean. “Maybe we’ll be back in time for dinner.”
*
Dean sprints up the trail toward the highway, the muscles in his thighs burning. He can't go quite as fast as he’d like because he needs to watch his step; to his right the earth drops away into a low ravine that sports a dry creek bed and a handful of cedar saplings. It’s a good thirty or forty feet down the near-vertical slope—not enough to kill him as long as he doesn't split his head open on a boulder on the way down, but enough to be unpleasant and probably break a bone he needs for either walking or fighting.
Sam is half a mile back down the trail, trying to get the injured campers mobile again. With luck, Dean will be able to get the Impala down the miniscule service road they’d discovered and they can get the hell out of dodge. They hadn’t expected the wendigo to be hunting this close to the interstate—stupid, Dean thinks, stupid of him not to be prepared for it, for any possibility—and his senses are whirring on hyperalert as he nears the crest of the trail.
In the end, it doesn’t do him any good—he sees the wendigo as it lunges from the dense trees to his left, gets the flare gun up and fires off a shot that the thing dodges with blurring speed. It’s on him the next instant—the gun gets knocked out of his hand, and the breath punches out of him as he feels his back hit earth and tree roots.
Dean tries to roll away, put distance between himself and the creature so that he can scramble up. But the wendigo’s directly on top of him, its rancid breath puffing hot against his face; its weight pins him to the ground as he struggles to slither out from under it and protect his throat at the same time. And he feels, he feels its claws deep in his torso, shredding tissue and muscle and organ alike, opening up places that were never meant to be opened. He smells sulfur, feels hounds’ teeth in his belly, he’s back on the rack, back under the knife, oh god, and in a spasm of blind panic and agony he gets his feet planted and shoves at the wendigo, not so much pushing it back as pushing himself away.
He skids over the sandy earth and then—then he’s tumbling into empty space, and for a moment it feels just like when he stepped off that cliff with Sam, in Chuck’s fake timeline. He has the sudden wild thought that the surrounding forest is going to vanish in a flare of light. That he’s going to land in a creepy motel hallway or, worse yet, the Bunker.
That isn’t what happens. What happens is that he slams almost immediately into a jut of rock—there's a crack and a flare of shattering agony in the vicinity of his ribcage—and then he's rebounding off of it and careening head over heels down the slant of the cliff face.
“Sam—” he gasps on instinct, through a mouthful of blood, but there’s no Sam. There’s no anyone—it's just Dean, falling. He catches a whirling glimpse of trees and sky and the wendigo’s receding form before another boulder clips the side of his head and his vision flashes white, then crimson. He ricochets, free-falls the last few. yards, and lands hard on his shoulder, rolling to a stop a few feet from the pebbled creek bed.
“Fuck,” he wheezes out, the word slurring like syrup. He hopes—god, he hopes the cliff is treacherous enough that the wendigo can’t just clamber down after him, or it’ll drag him away to bleed out in some dark lair where his corpse probably won’t ever be found. One of his ribs is definitely broken, and his head feels like someone went at it with a poker. It pales in comparison to the wounds in his chest and stomach, which are—he tries to raise his head to look, can’t manage to judder it more than an inch off the ground. His skull feels like it’s splitting in half, and his vision isn’t quite right, but he doesn’t need to see. He can feel it, pain spilling like fire all down his torso, burrowing into him, the wounds are too deep, they cut too far, he’s losing too much blood—
He doesn’t want to die. Dean puts a shaking hand over his chest, where the blood is pumping hot and red and bright. He can’t bring himself to grope lower, risk bumping his fingers into his own spilling viscera. Please, he thinks, to no one in particular, and sucks in a shuddering breath, hears himself whimper involuntarily as it catches on the broken rib. With his other hand, he swats feebly at his pockets, but doesn’t feel the shape of his phone—it must have fallen out. Sam. He needs to get to Sam. The wendigo—if it follows his scent back up the trail, it’ll find Sam—it’ll kill Sam—
Distantly, he’s aware that he’s probably going into shock. He tries again to lift his head but the world is spinning hard and he can’t seem to move much. And everything hurts, it hurts, he can barely breathe it hurts so much. He’s going to die. After everything, he’s going to die on a stupid milk run hunt because he didn’t happen to look over his shoulder quick enough. He doesn’t want to, he doesn’t want to die but he doesn’t get to choose, does he? Chuck or no Chuck, it was always going to end like this for him.
A sob bubbles up in the back of his throat, hot and wet and coppery. He doesn’t want to be alone. He wants Sam. He wants Cas. He wants his mom. He doesn’t want to die alone in the craggy shale in the middle of these woods, where Sam will eventually find his decaying corpse and have to drag it back and burn it—oh god, Sammy, he's so sorry, he’s so sorry he’s going to do this to Sam. He doesn’t want to go—he wants to stay—
—and he's never going to see Cas again, he thinks amid the haze of agony, never—never—Cas, I was gonna—he was going to try to fix it, he wanted Cas to stay—
“Dean!”
There are hands on him, tugging his head to the side. Someone is ordering him to hold on. Hold on to what, he wonders. Something presses ruthlessly against the fiery burn of the wounds, until Dean cries out weakly and arches his back. Through blurry tears he sees a dark coat, a pair of frantic blue eyes. His vision swims and goes silvery-bright for an instant.
“Dean, it’s alright. I’ve got you.”
It takes him a moment to realize the pain is gone. Miraculously, magically gone. He gulps for air and blinks up at Cas, who’s crouched over him, one hand under the back of Dean’s head, the other still pressed against Dean’s chest. Dean can feel the warmth of Cas’s palm through the rents in his ruined shirt. Strange, he thinks inanely, that Cas still has body heat.
“Dean,” says Cas, for a third time. He doesn’t move his hands.
“Didn't know Death could heal people,” Dean croaks, finding his voice at last.
“I,” starts Cas. He closes his eyes for a moment, his face grey. “Neither did I.”
Dean opens his mouth, probably to make another stupid joke about why primordial entities shouldn’t skip onboarding, but his attention is caught by the dark shape swarming down the cliffside. Dry cedar scales crunch as the wendigo leaps the last few feet to the ground below. “Cas,” he rasps in warning. “Wendigo—”
Cas removes his hand from Dean’s chest, unholsters his scythe, aims over one shoulder, and fires. The wendigo goes up in a burst of scarlet flames, its howl petering into nothing as its body withers and burns away into thin air.
“Cas, Jesus—”
Cas turns his eyes back to Dean. His other hand is still cradling Dean’s head, holding it off the ground. Dean can feel the light pressure of Cas’s thumb against his temple, and he has to fight the urge to turn his face into it, lean into the pressure.
“Are you alright,” Cas asks him. His gaze tracks over Dean’s body and the tenderness in it pulls at Dean. He wants to say no. He wants to say, not since I lost you and never really got you back. He wants to say, how come I always have to be hurt for you to touch me.
“I’m fine,” he manages, embarrassment making his voice gruff. He struggles up into a sitting position. The pain might be gone, but he feels lightheaded with the nearness of it, like his brain is still trying to reconcile his healed body with the agony of one minute before. There’s still something like panic thrumming through his veins, making his breath uneven and shallow. Cas drops his other hand at last, and Dean misses the contact instantly. He can’t have this, he tries to reminds himself. Not now, not anymore.
“Good.” Cas eases the scythe back into the holster, makes to rise. “You should be safe now.”
“Wait,” says Dean. It cracks out of him, the word brittle and weak, but it’s there. “S-stay.”
Cas stares at him for a moment, unmoving, still down on one knee.
Fuck. Dean hadn’t meant to say it. Hadn’t meant to let it slip out. He swallows, tries to stammer through a recovery. “I—we need your help. Sam—there’s some hikers who got hurt, he's trying to get them to the road. Will you—will you help?” He fights to keep the note of pleading out of his voice. He doesn’t want Cas to go. God help him, he knows Cas was never his to begin with and certainly isn’t now, but he doesn’t want Cas to go.
Cas’s face smooths out. “Of course,” he says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
“There’s a campground, half a mile up the trail—”
“I’ll find them,” Cas assures him. A shaft of the afternoon sunlight glances over his ring, makes it flash like a dewdrop of white fire. Dean drops his eyes. Suddenly he can’t bear it—the thought that Cas will find Sam and heal the campers and then vanish off to Death’s—his—library, or whatever distant corner of the earth has been occupying his attention for the past two weeks, and Dean won’t see him again until the next time he shows up at the Bunker to talk to Jack.
“Might need a lift back to the trail,” he manages. “After you help Sam—”
Cas shoots him another startled look. “Yes, I’ll find you after.” For a moment Dean thinks Cas is going to squeeze his shoulder, or touch his face. He wants—god, he wants. His whole body aches for it. But Cas’s hand just hovers in the space between them for a moment, and then drops.
“Wait here for me,” Cas tells him, like Dean’s in any state to try to scale a thirty-foot cliff right now. Cas rises to his feet in a single fluid motion, and the next instant he’s gone, and Dean’s alone. Again.
Dean swallows. The ravine, in Cas’s absence, is dead silent, and despite the warm sunlight Dean shivers suddenly. He looks over at the corona of ash still settling slowly into the cedar needles, where Cas had burnt the wendigo into nothing, just a moment ago. The charred odor of it, even from a few yards away, is suddenly too much—Dean can smell smoke, smell sulfur, smell blood. He puts a hand on his chest, where the skin is whole and unbroken, and feels a phantom rasp of agony under the muscle. The hellhounds are ripping flesh off his ribs—Alastair has him writhing like an insect, pinned to a lattice of bone—
Dean barely manages to roll onto his side before he’s retching emptily, his lungs seizing up as his whole body contracts around the shudder in his chest.
He’s not in Hell, he thinks, desperate. He’s not. He’s not. Sulfur curdles in the back of his throat and he barely manages to avoid retching again. He curls in on himself and squeezes his eyes shut. Tries to focus on his breathing, tries to count inhales and exhales as he fights the surge of panic. Cas got him out. Cas is coming for him. Except no, that’s not right, there’s no one coming for him, because Sam—Sam has Eileen, and Dean’s happy for Sam, he is , Sam deserves more than this shitty lonely life, deserves more than a shitty lonely older brother who can’t—who doesn’t know how to do anything except hunt the things that go bump in the night—who can’t even do that much right, apparently.
And Cas—
Cas has the purpose he’s always wanted, has the kind of juice he hasn’t had in years, ever since he first fell from Heaven, ever since Dean ruined him—when Castiel first laid a hand on you, he was lost—
Cas doesn’t need Dean—
There’s a rustle of cloth, a footstep crunching on the leaves.
“I found Sam, he’s alright. He’s taking the campers—Dean?”
“I’m fine,” Dean grits, refusing to look at Cas. He slumps against the narrow trunk of the nearest sapling, wishing very badly for the earth to open and swallow him up. He shoves clumsily at Cas’s reaching hand. He’s suddenly so incredibly, painfully angry. “Don’t.”
“Dean. Tell me what’s wrong, I can fix it—”
“I said don’t!” Dean snarls, and finally whips his head up to glare at Cas, who has crouched down beside him, so close Dean could count his lashes if he wanted. Too close and not close enough, too close. Cas does pull back then, withdrawing his hand with a stricken expression, and this just makes Dean more furious. Cas doesn’t have the right—he doesn’t have the right to touch Dean so gently, look at Dean so tenderly, when it isn’t—when it doesn’t mean—when he’s just going to leave again.
“You just—left,” Dean chokes. It rips out of him before he can stop himself. You left me. You left me.
“You asked me to find Sam,” Cas protests, confusion and hurt warring on his face.
“Not now,” says Dean bitterly. “Then.”
There’s a beat of complete silence. Dean watches understanding bleed through Cas’s countenance.
“I thought,” says Cas finally, and his gaze is suddenly dark and distant, “I thought that I should try to keep some distance. That perhaps you would not want me around, as I am now.”
“As you—as you are now?” Dean sputters. The idea of him not wanting Cas around, in any possible iteration the universe could think of to spit forth, is so laughably absurd that it comes close to short-circuiting his brain altogether.
“You said it yourself, Dean,” says Cas, in a low monotone. “Horseman of the apocalypse, remember? And you were right. I came back, and I’m grateful that I did, grateful that I could help. But I didn't come back as someone who should—be around the living.”
Dean opens his mouth to protest, because that wasn’t what he’d meant—but Cas is already steamrolling on, his face set in a look of stubborn, resigned determination.
“You are—you have always been—so full of life,” Cas says. “And now I’m—well.” The corner of his mouth tugs up, a sad, bitter smile. “The antithesis of that. To wear this ring, to carry this weapon—it isn’t just a title, it’s a—a nature. It’s death. You can’t—you couldn’t possibly want to be around that. Around me.”
“Yeah?” says Dean. He tamps his anger down a little, but it’s still simmering under the surface, low and furious. “Fuck that.”
Cas arches his eyebrows with something like disbelief, and now he looks a little angry, too. Probably pissed that Dean isn’t taking his little speech more seriously, which, again, fuck that.
“You think I give a shit how you came back, Cas?” Dean spits. “You think I care whether you’re here as an angel or a human or a goddamn force of nature? I fucking care that you’re alive! And I—I want you around, of course I want you around, but you—you never stay, Cas, and why would you?” His heart hammers against his ribcage like he’s still mid-fight, all that adrenaline churning and churning under his skin with nowhere to go. “It's not like there’s anything for you at the Bunker, so why would you—”
“Why would I?” Cas repeats incredulously. “You don’t think I—you don’t think there's anything for me?”
“You don’t need me.” The words tear into him like the wendigo’s claws. “You don’t need anyone, Cas, with the power you’re running on, you’re not stuck with me, so why would you—”
“I told you,” says Cas, low. “I told you how I felt, Dean.”
“Yeah, and then you fucking died!” Dean sits up straighter so that he can lean into Cas’s space, and it all comes bubbling up, all that grief, all that sorrow, all that memory. I love you, Cas says, like it’s so easy. It’s something I know I can’t have, Cas says, like he fucking knows anything at all. Goodbye, Dean, says Cas, and the void swallows him up, and the wall is cold against Dean’s back. “Don’t just—say it like it’s that simple. It’s not that easy, Cas! You said it while Billie was fucking knocking down our door, you said it so that the Empty would take you, you died in front of me and now that you’re back you don’t need me, so you don’t have to pretend I’m all there is, alright? You don’t have to pretend there isn’t so much more you could have—you don’t have to pretend like—”
“You want me to say it again?” Cas's voice drops impossibly lower, almost a snarl. The sunlight turns his eyes a blazing crystalline color, like they might start snapping sparks at any minute. “I love you. I love you, Dean Winchester. It is that simple. It’s always been that simple, for me.”
Dean tries to ignore the lump in his throat, but he feels the warning prickle of oncoming tears, nevertheless. Because what is he supposed to do with that? It’s something I know I can’t have, Cas had said, but Dean had told him, Dean had told him he could have it, and Cas—Cas didn’t want it. “I told you,” he says, his heart quickening, “in the dream—I said, I told you that I—”
Surprise flashes over Cas’s face, wariness on its heels. “You remember.”
“I told you how I felt,” Dean whispers, an echo of Cas’s words a moment before. He blinks a tear loose from his lashes, feels it score down his cheek like a tiny liquid blade. “If you knew, then why didn’t you say anything.” Why did you leave, he thinks.
“Dean—I know you cared for me, before—that you considered me family, but—the way I feel about you, it’s something I know you don’t—” Cas stumbles, his words colliding with each other as he talks faster. “The way I—the way I want you, you have to know I would never demand reciprocation, I would never want you to be uncomfortable, I know it’s something I can’t have—”
“I don’t care what you know!” Dean yells. He feels a little unhinged. His hand flies up almost of its own accord, twists into the leather of Cas’s coat like he can anchor himself there, stay tied to the present moment, to the nearness of the thing he’s trying to pull free of its years-long silence. “I don’t give a fuck what you think you can’t have, Cas! You’re wrong!”
“Dean,” Cas breathes. His eyes are enormous, endless.
Dean isn’t done. He doesn’t think he could stop now if he tried. “Goddammit, I want you to stay, I want you with me, I’ve always wanted you with me, and you—fuck, I always mess it up, or you always leave, and we’ll never—”
Cas makes an aborted noise, low and unmoored in the back of his throat. “Please,” he rasps. His head drops low. His palms are pressed against the earth. “Please, Dean, if you only believe one thing, believe that I’ve always wanted to stay with you.”
Dean swallows a sound of his own, feels it stick in his chest, clog his lungs with its raw thrum. It’s like he’s falling again, strings cut; he’s falling through space and time, through Chuck’s folded narratives, out into the real world.
“I love you,” he chokes out, and folds forward, against Cas. His forehead lands on Cas’s shoulder, the leather somehow cool despite the sun. “You can always have me.”
This close to Cas, the two of them in each other’s space like this, Dean can feel everything. He can feel the way Cas’s body goes rigid for a moment and then trembles, a bone-deep tremor like a ship rocked on a wave. He can feel the way Cas’s shoulders move in a sharp, uneven inhale, can hear the sound of the ragged breath close beside his own ear. He can feel Cas’s hands when they come up to press against him, one against his back, between his shoulder blades, the other against the nape of his neck.
“How could I not love you?” Cas’s voice is a shaky whisper against his temple, but his palms are warm and steady and certain. Dean presses his face into the collar of Cas’s coat. “I told you, Dean. I know who you are. How could I know you and not love you?”
“Cas,” Dean says, and he hears his voice crack around the word. It comes out like a plea but he doesn’t know what he’s asking for, just that his whole heart, his whole body, is aching with a wordless, depthless yearning. He tightens his grip on Cas’s coat and uses it to drag himself closer, like he can bury himself in Cas. He wants, he wants, he wants.
Cas moves the hand on Dean’s neck, spans his fingers against Dean’s jaw. He lifts Dean’s head gently, stares at Dean the way he stared in that storeroom, his eyes reverent, like Dean is some—like Dean is some precious thing.
“You’re crying,” Cas murmurs, though Dean can see plainly that Cas is crying too. Cas traces his thumb over the bones in Dean’s face, smearing tears over the skin.
“It was you, you know,” Dean mumbles. “That was how we broke out of the tessellation. I couldn’t stop remembering you.”
Cas parts his lips, like he’s about to speak, but instead his mouth just trembles and his hand goes still on Dean’s face, so that he’s just cupping it against Dean’s cheek. His breath ghosts over Dean’s mouth. He smells like the air right before a storm. Dean shivers, though not from cold, and thinks about how they’re all finally free, and maybe this is the first moment he can actually do something with that.
“I don’t,” he tells Cas, and has to pause to take a breath, take hold of all the courage he has left, “I don’t want a story without you in it.”
He closes the gap between them.
His mouth meets Cas’s and—they’re kissing. He’s kissing Cas and oh, it’s fire and light and starshine and devotion and the scent of a cold pine wind and the sweet silk heat of Cas’s mouth and Cas’s hand running up the remainder of his spine to tangle in his hair and the soft hunger of the sound Cas is making against Dean’s lips and this, Dean thinks with strange and breathless elation, this is victory, this is freedom, this is a story worth living.
He doesn’t know how long it lasts, the two of them kissing on the warm earth, surrounded by the gold light and the scent of cedar. They break apart finally, just enough for air to wisp between their mouths.
“I love you,” Cas murmurs. He hasn’t stopped threading his fingers through Dean’s hair. “I love you, I love you.”
“I know,” Dean tells him, still feeling a little out of breath, like he's just run a marathon. "Me too, Cas—Cas, I’ve loved you for so goddamn long—”
He gets cut off as Cas pulls him into another kiss. Dean revels in it, the syrup-slow lightning of their mouths, the heat that lances down his spine when Cas’s tongue slides against his. Cas tips his head and kisses the corner of Dean’s mouth, then up along the edge of his jaw, and fuck, Dean would like very much to sit here and continue this for a lot longer. Unfortunately, he is also, as he reminds himself with tremendous mental effort, technically still on a hunt.
“We should go find Sam,” he sighs into the side of Cas’s face, where a hint of stubble is just barely discernible.
"Sam is a very capable hunter and is certainly managing just fine,” Cas grumbles, but he reluctantly moves his hands down to Dean’s elbows and stands, pulling Dean up with him. They rock against each other for a moment, toe to toe, close enough to put their arms around each other. Dean can hear birdsong from the trees at the top of the cliff. The sunlight limns the edges of Cas’s hair like a halo.
“I guess I should say thanks, too,” Dean murmurs. “You saved my life. Again.” He still has one hand curled in the fabric of Cas’s coat, and he moves it to Cas’s hair, holding him close. He never wants to stop holding Cas. God, how did he go so many years not holding Cas, allowing himself only the barest of touches, denying himself everything else?
Cas creases his eyebrows together. “I hope it’s a while before the next time. Seeing you so injured—not knowing yet whether I would be able to heal you—”
“But you did, so thank you,” says Dean firmly, because Cas looks haunted by the memory, and Dean wants to wipe that expression away. “How did you even know I needed help?” Help is probably an understatement, he thinks, wincing internally as he remembers the injuries Cas had healed.
It might be just the light, but it looks as though Cas is blushing a little. “I heard your prayer. I...seem to be able to hear some prayers, still.”
Now it’s Dean’s turn to frown. “I wasn’t praying.”
“You were, a little,” says Cas softly. “Not in words, so much. But you were.”
“Oh,” says Dean. He might have been embarrassed by it, once. Or tried to deflect it, frightened by the immensity of what it suggests. Now it just makes something warm unfurl in his chest. He cups his other hand against Cas’s wrist, rubs his thumb against the pulse point, traces along the lines of Cas’s palm. “I figured maybe my book said I died by wendigo or something, and you were keeping an eye out.”
Cas blinks. “Dean, I should tell you...the books in Death’s library, they don’t hold endings, anymore. I’ve checked them all. All of the fated endings—they vanished after Chuck was defeated.”
“What? You’re kidding."
"I am not kidding."
"So...they’re all blank now?”
“They’re not blank. But the books now only detail what has happened, once it has already come to pass, and not what will happen. I don’t know how you, or Sam, or anyone else living, will die.” Cas makes a slight face. “Which is perhaps for the better, as I don’t know that I’d be able to remain impartial.”
“Jesus,” says Dean. “We really ripped up the ending for good this time, huh?”
“It makes a certain kind of sense,” Cas says. “Chuck was, after all, the original writer of the universe, the one who was scripting out our lives. With him gone, there isn’t really a pre-written destiny for anyone, anymore. Only the one we each write for ourselves.”
“Good riddance,” says Dean. “Never liked destiny.” He pulls Cas in for another kiss.
Cas smiles into the kiss. “Neither did I.”
“So if we’re making it up as we go along,” says Dean, and he feels a little shy, because even if he’s felt this way for more years than he can keep track of, saying it is new. He cocks a brazen eyebrow at Cas. Thinks to himself that all his bravado is probably wasted since Cas can probably hear and feel his fluttering pulse. “You’ll stay for the ride? Write yourself into my book?”
“If you want me in there,” says Cas, but he doesn’t say it uncertainly—he says it with another smile, gentle and warm against the side of Dean’s jaw. Like he already knows the answer. But Dean will say it anyway. He’ll say it again and again.
“I do,” Dean says. He takes Cas’s hand, laces their fingers together. “I want everyone I love there.”