Chapter Text
It got better after a while.
Dean got a dog. Stopped drinking for real. Ate rabbit food.
Most of the time he drove with his eyes open – paying attention to the road and the environment around the road and all the things Cas would like dandelions, and birds, and sprawling wild fruit trees.
He talked more. To Sam (who still looked at him like Dean was gonna go and off himself out of nowhere). To Eileen (who was slowly but surely teaching him ASL). To Jack (who came to visit them every couple of weeks even though he said he wouldn’t because he was all grown up and independent, but Dean knew that the God in his kitchen liked a 50-50 mix of Frosted Flakes and Cinnamon Toast Crunch). And to Cas (who never spoke back and Dean wasn't even bothered by it).
He started looking for a job.
He was, tentatively, getting used to this new sort of grief. (A grieving widower, that's me – he'd once joked in the deepest darkest corner of his mind. He and Cas hadn't even been together. They hadn’t been married. Cas hadn't even known that Dean would have liked to have been married to him. Dean had never even said a word.
A coward – that's what he was – not a widower. He didn't deserve the title, really. For all the accepting he'd been doing lately, there was no accepting the fact that it was Dean who didn't save Cas in the end.
Guilt was nothing like grief. Guilt didn't mellow out with time – it hardened.)
But when all was set and done, good days and bad nights, things were improving. There was effort. There was progress.
And then.
The damned job. The fucking vampires. The skills that were just rusty enough.
The funny thing was it didn't even hurt. The funnier thing was that Dean was sort of angry – he was getting somewhere, he was accepting shit!
(Well, no better thing to accept than death, right?)