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The problem, Dean thinks, with the end of the road, is that there’s nothing left to fight.
Life rolls past like a tumbleweed, except, even a tumbleweed tends to precede some sort of storm on the horizon. Spurs clicking, wind blowing, a fly on the brim of a tan hat. A gunshot and its smoke, a dusty plain with clouds expanding on the horizon, a steam locomotive is to blame.
It’s not like that now , his inner voice whispers to him as he exits the silence of the Impala. He drove her here quiet, like himself, like she’s in mourning too. He taps his fingers against her hood. He feels the waxy residue on his fingertips. There are bugs caught in her grill like a spiderweb. He steels himself, accepts where her wheels have brought him, and looks ahead.
Before him lies a small plot of land, one that he hasn’t revisited in years. He’s not sure why he’s here.
He rubs the back of his hand over his eyes and squints against the sun as he looks up to the wrought-iron sign.
Stull Cemetery
It creaks gently, a small gust of wind blowing past and then subsiding. It’s eerie.
Dean remembers the last time he was here– guns blazing, engine revving, Rock of Ages blasting in an attempt to hide the beat of his heart against his ribcage. This is not that. This is not the end of the world.
He almost wishes it was.
He walks into the plot and surveys the state of it. It seems out of place for this cemetery to rise out of the ground like a city in the middle of the great plains. There are headstones where the maw of the earth yawned wide and chewed Sam up. It feels wrong, it feels like there should be no ground left to bury a body in.
There are more graves than he remembers. It’s been a long time. He wonders if they rearranged the bodies to fit more. He wonders if, someday, when they bury him, they will bury Cas above him so that Dean can look up to the heavens and see him, so that he is always pressing into him, so that he is always near.
He shakes the thought away. He hasn’t slept well lately. ‘Lately’ has been a long time.
His phone rings. It’s Cas. Dean answers.
Dean answers because it’s Cas.
“Dean,” his voice comes through soft but Dean can hear the concern threatening to boil over.
Dean breathes out and looks to where his toes sink ever so slightly into the soft grass covering the ground here. He tries to form a sentence, a word, anything , but all that comes is his breath.
“Listen, I just need to know that you’re okay. We….we were worried.” Dean can hear the care in his voice and it makes him want to choke, to suffocate with it, to drown in it– he’d be grateful to.
He can’t answer but he can’t let Cas worry either. He takes the phone away from his ear for a moment and clicks on Castiel’s contact. He types a message:
I’m OK
He looks at his handiwork, the nothingness of it, and he feels like he’s failed. He lifts the phone back to his ear to catch anything else Cas might say.
He hears a sigh of relief, it's quiet, but not so much as where Dean is standing right now.
“I’m glad, Dean. I’m— glad.”
Dean can tell he wants to push, to talk more, but he restrains himself. Dean is grateful for the small mercy.
The phone stays at his ear, connected, and he listens to Cas breathing, to the distant sound of a door shutting down the hallway, to a muted conversation between what must be Jack and Sam.
Dean looks out at the bleak scene in front of him. The grass is dry and dying, the headstones are grime-covered and dark, the few trees still standing are down to their winter bones.
He shivers and closes his eyes. Castiel is still there, but he seems to have traveled to some room in the bunker to join in on the conversation that Dean heard in the background earlier.
It warms him to know he is likely in Castiel’s breast pocket, being carried reverently next to a receipt from a diner and a stone perfect for skipping and an ex-angel’s beating heart. He can hear Jack speaking enthusiastically about pasta night, how they found a recipe to make the perfect lasagna and can they please take the truck to the store to pick up a few ingredients.
Sam’s laughing and insisting that he add spinach to the sauce, unaware Dean can overhear him say ‘we gotta sneak that guy his vegetables anyway we can.’ He thinks he hears a tap on the phone, like Cas is poking Dean’s shoulder and ribbing him about the line.
He almost smiles.
Dean’s cheeks and nose are pink with the cold, the wind is picking up again and he feels his unkempt hair spiking up on one side with the blow. He keeps his eyes closed, keeps the phone clenched in his hand, whitening his knuckles with the grasp of it. He should be cold, his body should feel the bone-deep chill, but his mind refuses to feel it. Instead, it is comfortable, illuminated in warm light and dark wood. It is being wrapped inside the trenchcoat alongside Cas– Cas who is whole and here and alive .
He breathes, opens his eyes. The bright white of the world stills itself in front of him.
There is no saturation here in this cemetery.
The brightest colors here are the memories of blood dripping off his brow, of an angel’s grace flowing through him, of a molotov cocktail.
Enough.
He pulls the phone away from his ear and hangs up. Cas will understand, he needs to save battery for the drive home, and Dean can’t even be certain he meant to stay on the line (of course he did).
He nods, pays tribute to the ground where it once opened up and swallowed the ending, and heads back to Baby.
He turns on the radio for the first time all day. Jack apparently had it cranked to some indie station, and Dean leaves it. It feels warm to have this, to have a kid who drives his car and who turns on their own music and listens to it with the windows down. It feels good that they feel safe to do so. It feels like a crayon drawing pinned to a fridge door. Dean’s bones tremble with the goodness.
He pulls back from the entrance of the cemetery, a voice on the radio crackles through with “Here’s I Know The End by Phoebe Bridgers.”
Dean huffs to himself. It feels fitting. He also has a vague remembrance of Jack trying to get him to listen to her by saying ‘Phoebe Bridgers is great for being sad and gay!’ Dean had just shrugged them off at the time, but he listens now, lets the quiet of her voice surround him, lets the sadness sink in, lets himself feel it.
He pulls onto the dirt road, and he drives.
There is no western showdown awaiting him.
There is no storm.
He wonders why he’s mourning.
When Dean gets home, the dusk is covering the bunker with a blanket of grey. Cas’ truck is in its proper spot, so he knows Jack is back from his trip out to get ingredients for dinner. Dean doesn’t wait in the car like he usually does, he clicks the music off mid-song, something about being a forest fire, something he wasn’t listening to because he’s preoccupied with the knowledge that he is home and he’s going to walk into the kitchen and he’s going to see his family.
He doesn’t know what to say.
He hangs the keys to the Impala on the hook by the door and descends into the bunker.
Before, when Cas was gone, it felt like descending into a grave. The bunker felt like a tomb, closing its jaws around him and consuming him. There was no oxygen, no way to light a fire, no room to breathe.
Now, it feels like he’s walking into the warmth of something akin to a hobbit hole. He can smell the lasagna from the kitchen, hears the laughter traveling alongside it. He enters the room and stands at the threshold for a moment to bask in the feeling, to let the warmth pour over him.
If anyone notices he’s arrived, they don’t say anything, just let him watch. Castiel is forking a piece of the lasagna into his mouth and Jack has a string of cheese he can’t get to snap and Sam is crunching on a bit of lettuce that Cas undoubtedly harvested from the greenhouse earlier in the day.
He feels a bit like when he was a kid and he’d go out to forage for food at the local drugstores. He’d pass by all these houses on the way, and he couldn’t help but look in. He’d see families gathered ‘round the dinner table and their lives would play out like a silent movie in front of him. He would long to be on the other side of that glass.
Now, he is not on the street outside of a suburban house, he is inside the picket fence, he is inside the kitchen, he is watching as blue eyes meet his and warm at the sight of him. He can’t hold eye contact.
His eyes drop, and he scowls at himself. Just for a moment, he feels frustration boil up inside of him. Everything he wants is right here and he still– his fist clenches at his side– he still can’t let himself have it.
As if Castiel senses it, hell, he probably does sense it, he makes his way over from the table and places a gentle hand on Dean’s shoulder.
Dean can feel him gazing at the side of his face until his eyes, like a magnet, pull Dean’s up to look at him. He must know, must know Dean has nothing to say, because he just says, gentle and caring as ever, “Come. Eat. ”
Dean nods and swallows down the tears that threaten to crash against the shore.
Jack smiles up at him with cheeks stuffed full with food, and Sam picks back up a conversation with Castiel about the location of the garden and if there’s a possibility to expand it, and Castiel nods and listens and serves Dean a plate of food.
He does it like it’s this automatic thing, to speak and to serve and to care for Dean in a way that he has never–
Dean runs a hand through his hair and looks at the steam rising off his dinner. The dinner that Jack thought of and the recipe that Sam tweaked to include more vegetables and that Castiel served him–
He’s not going to cry over fucking pasta.
It hits Dean, suddenly and all at once, that this is not his last supper. It is a singular dinner on pasta night in a series of pasta nights that have preceded it. It will likely carry on for many more weeks. Perhaps forever. The Winchesters, if anything, are keepers of tradition. Dean’s not sure there are enough types of pasta to last forever. He’s not sure he minds.
He lifts his fork and he takes a bite, and he smiles so his dimples show, and he looks at his family. He listens to them and he watches them and he thinks, this is not a graveyard .
-
When he wakes in the morning, it’s without the cloud of a hangover. He didn’t drink last night. He hasn’t in a few. It’s something he’s trying on. He’s tired of wearing numbness to bed, tired of it running out in the morning.
After yesterday, he thinks he can tolerate it. Perhaps even become fond of it.
He drags himself to the kitchen and starts the coffee machine. For the first time in a long time, he doesn’t think about how the black looks a hell of a lot like the Empty.
He thinks of the care Castiel extended to him last night. He pours him a mug and adds a spoonful of honey. His own coffee can wait.
He walks it down the hallway and pushes gently into Cas’ room. He’s never done this, his heart is racing in his chest. Castiel is splayed out in his bed face first. His arms are wrapped tight around his favorite pillow, the one he insists on taking with him on long roadtrips, and one of his legs is poking out of the blankets. His hair is an unruly mess. Dean chuckles to himself. He approaches, sets the coffee on the sidetable.
He doesn’t know what he’s allowed, so he watches, for just a moment, and then he whispers, “Morning, Sunshine.” He passes a gentle hand through soft hair. Cas stirs. Dean leaves the room.
His hands shake as he pours his own cup of coffee and sips it black. He sits in the library at the end of the table next to the names he carved into the surface. He runs a finger over the wood.
He traces the C .
When Castiel died, Dean did too. His yolk poured onto the floor of the dungeon and he left it there. Dean doesn’t remember most of what happened in the days after. He doesn’t remember most of what happened in the months after. And then, as if it was this simple answer, Cas had sprung forth from the Earth with Jack in tow. Dean had felt relief, profound and indescribable, and his yolk had been returned to its rightful place at the core of himself.
And the days had passed, and Castiel was still there, and Jack was making new friends, and Sam was going out to visit Eileen at her new lake house, and Dean was watching as they rebuilt a family from the rubble.
He was watching and he had nothing to contribute. All Dean had ever known was to fight, that he had to keep fighting, that there was always a battle to be won, always the next monster to stop, always the next deal to make.
But they won. They won and, well, he sure as hell is looking a gift horse in the mouth with this one, but he misses having something to fight for.
He’s reached the L by the time Castiel comes stumbling into the room, bleary-eyed and gripping his mug like a lifeline.
He grunts something like a “‘Morning” and rag-dolls down into the seat next to him. Dean takes a sip of coffee to hide his smile. He looks at Cas as he stares down into his coffee, looking nearly angry at it. Dean feels warmth like sunlight burning through his chest. It might be heartburn, but he’s pretty sure it’s not.
Oh.
Cas must feel Dean’s eyes on him because then he’s turning his face to look Dean head on. His head is propped up by his hand and Dean can see where his pillow left a mark on his cheek. He wants–
He wants.
And suddenly, like high tide, it overwhelms him. It swells in his chest like a symphony.
This is it. This is what he’s been fighting for. This is what he has to protect.
For the first time in months, he lets himself look at Cas without breaking eye contact.
Cas must realize the change because suddenly his eyes start to blink rapidly into the land of the living.
“Dean?”
Dean’s voice is still struggling, still refusing to come out of its hibernation. He knows Cas understands. He saw it in his hands last night as they cut a square of lasagna out of the pan, as they made sure the piece was even and perfect and hearty. He sees it in everything Cas does. He saw it when Dean didn’t say–
He lets himself be quiet, lets his eyes crinkle up at the corners, and brings his hand up to sign, with his middle and ring finger pressing gently into his palm, “I love you.”
Dean watches Cas’ eyes, watches as they slide over to his hand and widen in understanding. Dean lets his hand fall between them on the table, an invitation.
Cas takes him up on it. Tentatively brings his hand to Dean’s and traces swirls into his palm before letting himself still to intertwine their fingers. The angle is awkward and imperfect, but Castiel is holding Dean’s hand and it feels sweet like a goddamn kiss because he said the words he most feared with it. Castiel’s fingers are like his lips, kissing him calm, reassuring him.
He breathes in. Closes his eyes. Listens as Sam returns from the run he went on long before Dean woke, listens as the sound of Cookie Crisps drop into a handmade ceramic bowl from when Cas took Jack to a pottery studio. He thinks there is nothing better than sitting here and just being with the man he loves. He lets the sun wash over him. He doesn’t mind if he burns.
With his hand still pressed to Castiel’s, he chooses.
He chooses to fight for Sunday mornings at the farmer’s market and flour on the kitchen floor and getting into spats with Cas and picking Jack up from their community pickleball league practice and telling Sam for the thousandth time that he needs to start cutting his hair and learning to sign with Eileen and he fights to watch the sunset with a special clarity he’s not sure he’s ever had before. He fights for the beauty in everyday life. And he fights, most of all, for warm arms wrapped around his waist and dark hair pressed into his cheek and the bit of drool that inevitably collects on his chest. For hugs after a homecooked dinner. For late night talks about the good old days. For his family.
For love.