Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Prologue

Apocalypse neatly averted, Chuck surprises himself with his own desire to return.

He appreciates Castiel for having leapt so quickly to the defense of heaven’s infrastructure when a handful of his kin would seek to raze and remake it. Chuck relieves Castiel of the battlefield and begins to set things right. 

And Castiel is grateful to be relieved of fighting. He accepts the dismissal with humility and does not ask for anything further, does not do anything but continue to follow the word of the Lord in his heart.

Time passes after the war and Chuck is sort of surprised to see Castiel stay and toil. With two years of the Winchesters in his charge – and likewise, Chuck grants, with Castiel in theirs – Castiel took on a whole runny mess of humanity. It’s obvious to all who witness that it slops over his edges, and there is a place it belongs, and Castiel must go put it there. But for some reason he stays.

His shape stands out from the rest up here: buckled and bearing it all with concealed strain. For Chuck, that is fascinating. Castiel is an original force of universal creation. And what conquers him is, what, feelings? An identity crisis? Frankly Chuck never really got it.

Well. He certainly will not do Castiel’s work for him, but if he ever finds his way, Chuck will not interfere. Much.

01

Sweeps of crunchy oak leaves are bracketing the road. The top layer skims off on a breeze, pointed tips drifting with a soft scrape against the pavement until re-settling somewhere new.

When the Impala bursts around the bend, they explode into the air in a fright.

The sky is a vivid, cloudless blue and the air has crisp edge to it. The hills glow red with the turning of the trees. It makes Dean want to disappear into these forests for good.

Instead, he parks where the GPS tells him to park. He snags his backpack, two bottles of water, and the biggest machete he can find. He can’t ditch his date with the New Jersey devil but on the way out to the rendezvous he can fantasize about where he might next get himself lost where he can’t be found.

Mosquitos make a meal of him while sitting deep in the woods waiting for his mark. He’s soon covered in red welts and can’t stop itching. Add it to the list. His obliques are lined with messily stitched werewolf souvenirs. His knuckles are torn up from fighting and from smashing windows to get where he doesn’t belong and from scraping the pavement while spinning off the caps of valve stems to fill tires. His shoulder clicks and grinds painfully. The seam of his pocket is ripped from getting caught on a door handle in a particularly urgent escape. He’s been in better shape, but not lately.

Dean hasn’t been reachable in months. His primary cell is at the bottom of the Hudson River and he hasn’t bothered to set up another one. The rest, he let die in the glove box. The answering; the talking; about what? What’s there to say? He can’t listen to another word that isn’t what he wants to hear.  He can’t do one more thing other than what he decides he is able to put in front of him.

(And some nights, he doesn’t put anything in front of him but finger after finger of Maker’s Mark, sitting by a window, waiting to slip this snare of a life for a couple hours.)

He stopped by Bobby’s last week long enough to check in and pick up a couple books for traffic jams and bouts of insomnia. Bobby replaced The Acid House with American Primitive and said, You need this. Dean later skimmed the contents, picked “Fall Song,” read a moment, and then frisbeed the book into the backseat. Time’s measure painfully chafes, indeed. That was enough of that.

Bobby asked how he was; Dean obediently answered, Fine. What he thought was, who cares? Six months ago Bobby’s neck was as good as a bent spoon and his brother beat his face in before jumping into a literal hellhole with the hands of pure Evil elbow-deep in his soul. Then the ground had reformed into buffalo grass, lichen-encrusted tombstones and spring mud like none of it had happened. Like Sam had never even existed in the first place. Dean was left in the bone yard alone, an empty vessel poured forth of all its meaning.

Then Bobby had sat up, walked over to Dean, and offered him a hand up. They’d walked off the field together in a stupefied silence. Dean supposed they were meant to feel gratitude for what he assumed was divine intervention. He still hasn’t come around to it.

During the visit Bobby talked about leads, and past jobs, and new books, and then fell back on the weather when things started to run dry. Dean’s guts howled to talk about what happened, to dwell, to live in the past, to find answers. But in that, he was alone.

Bobby is only person alive who went through what Dean did and he said his piece a long time ago: he doesn’t know what happened or how, he ain’t lookin’ a gift horse in the mouth, and he’s gonna go about his business like Sam told him to do.

So that’s it. Case closed. It’s over.

Bobby told Dean, don’t go after that New Jersey devil alone. Call some folk. The lore ain’t all that clear. Dean nodded along, of course, of course, shaking his empty flask for a refill before he headed out. Bobby asked him to stay another day. He needed help with the transmission in his Bronco. They could order from Golden Bowl and watch the Canaries play the Explorers.

Dean’s heart broke to think about the old man shoveling egg fu young and watching baseball alone in that drafty pile of sticks, but he left.

Late afternoon in the forest is a slow, slow darkening. Eyes constantly adjusting, Dean isn’t feeling the loss of light. He’s feeling bug bites and broken parts of himself. He feels edgy from endless cortisol pumping out in waves with nowhere to expel it. He feels cold and sips on his flask to stay warm. He checks the edge of his blade and feels like he should have sharpened this machete.

His ear spends hours tuning to the differentiation of forest sounds: wind in the bare branches above. A woodpecker hammering for beetles. A chipmunk in the ground cover. A single small bird fluttering around in evergreen shrubs.

The crack of a dry limb behind him is not any of those. It’s a step, and then another. A stream of sparrows erupts from the boxwood. Wildlife scatters. Dean suddenly has the sensation of slipping from hunter to hunted. He wishes he’d grabbed something longer range than the reach of his arm. He’ll have to make do, as usual.

It comes from above faster than Dean can comprehend: he is suddenly being hauled upward with speed. He makes a great sweep with the machete and falls. He lands on his bad shoulder. His head rebounds off the ground, bell solidly rung. He rolls on top of the machete just as he feels a body the size of his body land on him.

He clamps arms protectively over his ears and neck, mind racing with how to get out of this position. The monster is raking him, tearing at his jacket, trying to gain purchase. He cries out as enormous talons sink into his sides, just at armpit level. It wants to feed on him, alive, somewhere high. Dean hears the wings beat, trying to get him off the ground.

There is just enough lift for Dean to get the machete out from under him. He swings it straight back overhead and hears a guttural cry. He screams as the talons rip out from his flesh. He slams back to the ground breathless.

He rolls over, belly up, machete gripped in two hands. He sees it now: an immense bird-like monster writhing in the air above him. He bares his teeth in disgust, in fear, in preparation. It plummets back down to him. Talons sink into his hips, ripping open the old stitches in his side. Pain explodes in a surge of white light. He has one full second of thinking, this is finally it.

But as with any fight for his life the pain just goes somewhere else. It slithers far back into the recesses of his consciousness where all other important things go to die. Instinct takes over. He raises the machete.   

Dean hacks the head off the New Jersey devil and leaves it festering on the forest floor. He lays there a minute, wondering at the irony that he is hardwired for survival when sometimes all he wants to do is die. The smell gets him up and moving again.

He doesn’t leave without scraping some wing into a Ziploc for Bobby’s pantry. He plucks his bag from the dead leaves and makes it back to the car in a dusk that is quickly being overtaken by nightfall.

He uses the water to rinse off freshly pulsing blood, and tightens a couple ripped tee-shirts around his waist and chest. He gets himself to an urgent care that’s about to close for the night, thinking the whole ride about how blood is seeping into the upholstery and how tedious of a job that is to get out.

He pays out of pocket for them to patch him up. He doesn’t answer one single solitary question – just lets them make up their own story in the questions they ask: Where were you? Were you out in the back country? Was it a bear? Were you alone? How did you get this burn on your shoulder, is this a hand? Do you know how you got this?

They send him to a late-night pharmacy for acetaminophen and ibuprofen and twelve precious, precious tabs of low-dose oxycodone. He also picks up gauze, athletic tape, rubbing alcohol, paper towels, sprayable hydrogen peroxide for the stains, and a couple replacement packs of Hanes crew necks. At the cold cooler there are a few sandwiches with red clearance stickers on them.

In the parking lot under buzzing fluorescent lights he sits on the bench of the Impala with the driver’s side door open, feet on the cracked pavement. He stares blankly down between his knees a while. Then he takes the acetaminophen, ibuprofen, and three of the oxys. He inhales two of the sandwiches and half a family bag of barbeque ripples. He puts a hand on the handprint, a keepsake from a job he doesn’t remember and when he tries to recall it, he ends up very frustrated and drunk.

He hucks the wrappers and his biohazard into the outdoor trash barrel. He gets himself across the street to a liquor store and pulls what he needs while the cashier is counting out his drawer.

Back on the road he feels particularly haunted by the empty passenger seat. At the motel, he backs into a spot so he can face the road and sits in the car a while. The night has gone gauzy with cloud cover and the moon is hidden.

He thinks about the time before. When he would have thoughts - fantasies, really - of how much easier it would be to just break off and go it alone again. How the frustration and let-down and heartbreak between he and Sam just felt like the worst things in the world.

There are worse things, it turns out. He knows this now.

He slides his 45 to one thigh and just lets it sit there a while, feeling the weight of it in his hand. He does go inside, eventually.

When he hands off the wing to Bobby and asks if the Canaries won, Bobby looks like he’s in physical pain. Dean leaves again.

02

It’s full daylight. Dean is near the Canadian border in the Northeast Kingdom, parked alongside a glacial lake in a wild gore surrounded by very small towns. Populations under a thousand, no civilization to speak of besides general stores that cover all bases. He has no particular reason to be up here; just kept on driving.

Tall stands of burnt orange and golden trees reflect pristinely in the glassy surface of the water. The bottom of the lake is visible with the naked eye. Ancient trees and branches melt away down there, disintegrating in slow motion between boulders and weeds. Fish break the surface tension to dine on pond skaters. Loons call forlornly from the grassy coves, looking for each other.

A dent in the rear passenger door has been eating at Dean for a hundred miles, so he’s pulled over for a full inspection. A wet sink plunger gets the job done.

The bumper, however, is at critical mass with a dry crust of dead bugs. He digs in the trunk for an armful of old towels and rags and heads for the lake. Dropping to his belly on an old empty boat dock, he dunks his linens. He walks back up to the car, holding the sopping pile out away from his boots. He hangs the wet material over the hood, grill, and side mirrors to try to loosen the bugs before going in with a cleaner.

One thing leads to another and within the hour he’s got his box of gear out and is elbow-deep in the Impala’s guts, hair on his arms slicked down with a variety of oils and greases.

Despite the cool air, the sun warms his back while he checks fluids, tightens caps, examines spark plugs, bangs out the air filter, sloshes in some wiper fluid, tosses a funnel over his shoulder into the dust. Brake pads look good. The belts will hold a bit longer. He wipes his face on a damp shirt sleeve and thinks, okay, enough.

The sun glints off the surface of the lake and catches him, gets him on a hook, reels him in. He drifts into a trance, staring out over the water, warmed through. He feels his heartbeat slow down to a gentle chug and sighs deeply. The air tastes and smells of spring water. He resigns himself to it: this is one of the good parts.

If absolutely every single thing were different he might feel divinity, up here in this wilderness with the sun on his face. If absolutely every single thing were different he might want to stay here and feel that water on his skin, and at sunset drop in a line to see what bites, and when the moon rises lie in the well of a canoe staring up at the dust of the Milky Way. Peace washes in for a moment, eroding the hardness of his edges.

Eventually he starts her up again. The clean rumble vibrates through him, a fine tremor under his fingertips as he grips the steering wheel. The car is tinkered, tuned, and purring. Ready and raring to go. Dean sits. After a spell he cuts the engine and re-pockets the keys.

An hour later he’s still out here, sitting on the cooler drinking a beer and checking the bandages he’s finally stopped bleeding through. His shirt is stiff with dried sweat. There’s a wad of toothpaste on the ground where he’d spat, diluted with mouthwash and the piss he took from behind the open door of the Impala. There’s also the soggy end of a sandwich he chucked under a tree and a pile of trash to pack up as soon as he can get himself to get moving again.

He stares out at the shimmering water, turning over and over the question in his mind of why he still does this, when everything has already been lost. He’s amazed that all this time waves have pounded incessantly over his small, dented life and here it remains, largely intact. He is the same brute force of nature he’s been his whole life. It just goes on and on, his desire to die never able to catalyze into will.

A Winchester through and through, he is cursed with putting one foot in front of the other, always moving in the direction of the next fight.

He stays on the road because he has nowhere else to go and nothing else to do. He did try. He did listen to Sam, like Bobby did. He had a go at a family life for a few months with Lisa and Ben. It stank of John Winchester: shards of something special encased within a bloodless, unyielding stone. He bailed quickly, without fanfare, and deleted her number.

So now he rolls around Peoria, or Fayetteville, or Northampton. He sniffs the air, squints at the glowing horizon, turns over rocks. Sometimes he stays in a town because he stumbles onto a job worth working on. Sometimes he stays because the only reason he can find to get out of bed in the morning is paying for the room another night.

But always the road is just behind him, under him, or just ahead, and nothing he’s found can shake him off it. His fate with Sam had always been the same as Dean’s is now; it just wasn’t as lonely. It didn’t feel as pointless. Him and Sam – that was mythic. A legend for the ages. Dean alone on the road? A parable of what not to become.

Dean suddenly sees someone standing in the gray blurry edge of his periphery, far off down the dirt road he’s on. He doesn’t look right away but adrenaline dumps into his system. He is far from civilization; no one should be here.  

What moves Dean, shoots him upright in a way that hurts all his aches and pains, is the sound of his name on the breeze, coming from some point on a timeline so far behind him he’s blocked it out. Sam is there, right there, like Dean had just conjured him with his mind.

He turns to lock on sight, turns away incredulous and terrified, turns back, feels his eyes go wet, stays where he is. Synapses fire but not in a way like making thoughts. They fire in a way like a flash grenade going off in his hand. His tongue presses behind his top teeth and a hiss of despair drags into him. Nothing else comes up. It just can’t be, but it is.

Sam approaches tentatively; says, “Hey.” Dean doesn’t say anything.

Sam asks, “No tests?”

Dean’s tears spill over.

Sam’s face breaks and he closes the distance with arms outstretched. The thud of hitting Sam’s chest shakes loose a sound from Dean that comes from the past. Solid arms close the sound off with a crushing squeeze, and Dean clings greedily to him.

Sam asks, “How do you know it’s me?”

“I don’t care anymore,” Dean says. He thinks, how am I supposed to carry on, when all that I’ve been living for is gone?

His voice is barely contained, still in Sam’s shoulder, when he continues. “Don’t you ever do that to me again. You hear me? I don’t care what it is. Don’t you ever make me promise that again. I go where you go. You get that? You go in a cage, I go in a cage.”

“I get it. I’m sorry, Dean.”

“Don’t apologize. You and me, we are always good. Just - do this for me, okay. I only know one thing and it’s taking care of you. If something happens to you I just need to be able to get to where you are.”

Eventually they break apart to arm’s length, still sort of shaking each other in disbelief, like, holy shit we did it again. Dean looks long and heartily on his brother, a smile stuck in the corner of his mouth even as the tears of relief roll freely. Sam is clean and neat and well-dressed and sort of glowing; he’s radiant. He looks freshly rested and lively. Alive.

In return, Sam casts a long, speculative eye on Dean. Says, “Man, do you look like shit.”

Dean snorts a laugh, ducking his head in tacit agreement. Dean tells him how long it’s been, and Sam winces. Sam asks where they are. Dean tells him, Vermont. Sam gives the scene a once-over, nodding in approval, taking in the season, smiling at the lake, and the car. Then he rolls his eyes, spotting the towels hung out. “Oh good. Back just in time for bug duty.”

03

In the end, they assume Chuck returned Sam, just as he had returned Dean, back to that passenger seat where the good Lord always intended him to be. And into that holy right seat Sam slid, quickly becoming surrounded again by his usual road gear: journal, newspapers, atlas, half-empty Gatorade, flashlight rolling between his feet, Taurus in the glove box, backpack just behind him in the back foot well. Materials at the ready to work while he falls asleep with his face to the breeze, hair knotting into an irretrievable mess.

Sometimes when he’s out like that Dean just stares at him, unable to believe he’s real; that he’s back like nothing happened. Unrelentingly, questions bubble up from the magma of Dean’s mind. They go unanswered, blurring into heavy smog just as he tries to get a hand around them.

The wheel in the sky goes back to turning. Hunting keeps them busy all winter and into the spring. They bounce in and out of Sioux Falls like they’ve been doing since John passed, circling out in ever-widening arcs as they get their feet back under them. Bobby is happy to suit and boot them; he fills the backseat with compendiums, collared shirts, and Costco runs.

Sam charges all the phones and replaces Dean’s cell. He goes about the task of responding to everyone Dean’s bailed on and lines up whatever jobs are left that are still active. He watches a couple YouTube videos and tapes Dean’s shoulder so it doesn’t click anymore. He stitches up Dean’s coat pocket. These were the things Sam always did. Dean does what he’s always done: he swaps the serpentine belt, cleans the stockpile in the trunk, keeps the gas tank full, keeps beer on ice in the cooler.

Dean clocks at some point that he is a year out from the worst day of his life. With Bobby and now Sam returned to him, he waits for the darkness in him to finally recede: the loneliness, the emptiness, the desire to slide off this planet into cold mist.

They stay in practice. They load up on ammo at Walmart and clock hours in shooting ranges talking to retired service personnel, right-wing militia types, survivalists, and doomsday preppers. They spar. They limber up and throw knives and axes at painted targets on trees, deep in the brush where no one can find them (Sam remembers the bug spray). They read up on spells, sigils, and incantations. They keep their own little pantry of graveyard dirt, hen feathers, herbs, and dead man’s blood.

They get the job done, but they also live. They stop at demolition derbies and diners. They go to movies, see bands play, visit tourist attractions. They crack baseballs into mountain sides at batting cages where a sunny spring day glints off the aluminum bats. These are the things they’ve been doing since they were old enough for John to start dumping them places: mall food courts, public swimming pools, parking lot carnivals, and one memorable day at a university orientation spree.

(That night John didn’t come back. Sam got blackout drunk in a sorority house and Dean ventured brashly into some sexual experimentation with a charming footballer who had quads like tree trunks that Dean had found himself perfectly happy to sit on. He and Sam stumbled out to the car that next morning, silent, both of them changed.)  

Late spring, they pick a temporary home base hiding out in a campground off route 61 close to the Mississippi River because Dean likes the blues and Sam likes Mark Twain. They are low on cash and the cabins are cheap. This was another place John liked to pop them: a single square room, no bathroom, a couple of raised platforms to sleep on, and windows and doors that don’t fully close.

They dump their stuff on the floor, claim their sleeping areas, and then Sam gets to building a thoughtful and well-constructed fire that will burn logs all night. Dean salts the place and sets out the beers and pizza they brought in.

“You’d think two guys with hell tours under their belt, they’d never want to see a fire again,” Dean muses, watching Sam work.

Sam pauses; points a look at him.

“Ah come on, I didn’t mean it like that. We need to burn some protection anyway.” He’s working on fanning out all the greatest hits: rosemary, sage, nettles, St John’s Wort. There’s also some sunburn aloe gel squirted in a ring around the cabin because they’ve found a little 20th century innovation can go a long way.  

Once the blaze is self-sustaining, they settle into the benches of a weathered picnic table to eat and kill a six pack. Nights are getting a little warmer but the fire does help.

Sam asks how the scarring is on the marks left by the New Jersey devil. It’s the last time Dean’s been wounded like that since Sam came back. He knows why Sam is asking, the way an old married couple always detects the innocent comment that gets right to the thread they want to pull.

“Sam, they’re fine. They healed up good and they’re fading.”

“Tell me again how you ended up doing that job alone?”

“Dude, can we not?”

“I’m just saying – pulling shit like that, it’s pretty lucky you survived long enough for me to get back topside. Woulda been Shakespearean as hell for me to get out of the pit only to find out you got ripped apart for being a dumbass. Then I’m the one out here on my own.”

Dean lets that comment resonate in the silence. It pendulums back and forth between them: Sam is guilty for saying it and Dean is guilty for having done it.

They eventually move past it to other things, like whether the Godfather films would ever survive a remake (no), or if they absolutely had to drive something else, what it would be (a 1970 Challenger R/T Magnum V8 with a 426 hemi.) Dean toes his shoes off and sets his feet up on the rocks of the fire circle, letting the heat curl up his legs. He tries to think, this is one of the good parts.

Later, Dean lays awake in his sleeping bag, restless until dawn. He tries and fails to read Bobby’s dumb nature poetry by flashlight. All night he is conscious of space: around him, separating him, isolating him from everything else. He reels in it, lost and woozy.

By degrees, an ambient morning glow creeps in through dirty glass panes. Like a knob being turned, it slowly saturates and warms the small room. As pink light slips gently up his body and over the back of his head, Dean finally feels his mind go quiet. He sleeps for part of the morning while Sam starts their day.

In honor of the storied Mr. Twain, they visit Hannibal, Missouri to put to rest the ghost of Dr. Joseph McDowell. It ends up a two-fer, as the thing that was holding him here was the ghost of his daughter, who’d long ago decided she was ready to rest but remained trapped there in the loop of her father’s grief.

Sam and Dean both hit drywall and sub-floor trying to find the thing that holds these spirits. She helps them to a locket of her father’s, with her hair in it, and her solemn eyes reflect the burning flame that Dean sets upon it. They’re both sent to the great beyond, and Sam lays back on the floor with a weak thumbs up.

Afterward they take turns taping each other’s ribs. Sam spends an hour in Mark Twain’s boyhood home and comes back googly-eyed and full of factoids. They get lunch off a sausage cart and walk down to the water to watch a river boat trundle by. Ribs and all, the routine of this is a balm to Dean’s sorry excuse for a soul.

Their last night in town they go trolling for cash. They get drunk enough to let out the cocky assholes they hide down deep, a product of years of invincibility and winning. They don’t con or hustle; no more games, no more acts. Just, I’m Dean, this is my brother Sam, and we’re better than you. We aren’t from around here, and anyone who steps up to this pool table, we’ll beat your ass.

When you’re honest, people don’t believe you or don’t want to. Happily, it becomes their own fault that they go broke at the end of the Winchesters’ clean breaks and blue fingers. They lose their gas money, and the money that was supposed to go to new front brakes, and the money that was supposed to go to taking out Lucy or Sally or Maggie or whomever. Now that money is in the pockets of two jerks who’ll be gone by daybreak.

They’re up three hundred bucks by the end of the night and buy a round for the six guys left in the bar as it closes. Dean tells stories about John, the vets reveal themselves and salute him, and the guys ask what the family business is that the boys have taken over.

“Cleaning out pool halls,” Sam says to belly laughs, and Dean feels a rush of pride whenever Sam can bust up a room like that.

On the ride back to the campground Sam is glowing with joy, red-faced, singing “Turn Me Loose” out the window. It makes Dean smile, but there is an unavoidable pang of dread that has come to mark the ends of all his nights like a waxen seal. He fights to keep his spirits up and sings along, happy his brother is alive and above ground.

04

Sam wants to get on the road early so they shower at night and are up and in the car by 6. They hit a drive-thru for coffee and sandwiches. Dean asks for extra ketchup. Sam ties a bandana around his head to keep the hair out of his eyes. They both finish their coffee within the hour and stop for a second.

Dean pauses to rifle through a box of mixtapes they made off Bobby’s tape deck during the long jobs John disappeared on when they were young. He selects one labeled “Long Time” in black sharpie, the rest of the insert left blank, and Sam whoops in approval. He nods along while thumbing endlessly at what Dean is certain is a Twitter account, no matter how many times Sam denies it. During the solo they air guitar in unison.

The electricity of the music eventually wears off and the morning starts to drag; they’re both exhausted. Sam calls 511 and steers them around commuter traffic. They retire to back roads, passing post offices and storage facilities, nail spas and used car dealerships. They pass signs for free wood pallets and dancers wanted, graffitied train cars and technology parks. The four million miles of road lacing the states together can be painfully mundane.

Sam hooks up his iPod and plays four songs in a row Dean’s never heard before. Dean ejects the cassette adapter, agitated, and feeds in Elvis Presley. Dean has a mean Elvis (or so he’d like you to think.)  Sam rolls his eyes and shoves the iPod into his backpack. They’ll both be singing “Suspicious Minds” for weeks now. We’re caught in a trap.

It doesn’t take long to realize the day will be unseasonably warm. By ten, it’s getting up over 80 degrees. The road steams in front of them, morning dew evaporating into mist. Dean’s crew neck sticks to the small of his back. He feels the sweat trickling down his temples.

When he looks at Sam, Dean can see the sweat soaking into his bandana and the flush across his cheeks. He absently pats him on the shoulder, saying they’ll stop soon. Sam barely looks away from the relief of the open window, giving a tight nod.

Baking in the sunlight trapped under the windshield, Dean starts to feel like he wants to come out of his skin. He thinks, everything is right. He thinks it in the way of trying to convince himself. It starts as a statement, then turns into a question – everything is right, right? - and then it all just sort of falls apart. He tries to put it back together, and when it doesn’t go, he starts to feel a little frenetic so he just packs it all away and forgets about it.

By one, they’re close to Memphis and they call it. Sam had wanted to eat up all of 55 South today. Ambitious, but they’ve done plenty of 12-hour drives in their time and Dean had been on board until the temps started climbing. They stop for lunch at a barbeque joint with a neon sign inviting them to “put some south in your mouth.” Afterward he’s happy to check into a Motel 6 and doze in the air conditioning while Sam takes the first shower.

In sleep, white sparks shower in the endless black. They heat the air. They fizz and spit and singe the fabric of his jacket. Wisps of burned cotton and flesh fill his senses. Popping sounds echo out overhead; it’s the sound of paper-thin glass exploding. Dean covers his head and ducks. A dim ringing takes up in his ears, crescendoing without notice until he has to desperately clap hands over them. He is deaf to all other sound. A white-hot sensation plants tight over Dean’s shoulder; it smells like burning but feels ice-cold and goes numb. His whole body starts to tingle with a warm glow.

Dean flails up into the cold dimness of the motel room, breath heaving, hand going to the Colt in his waistband. His head whips around in that feeling of where-am-I until his brain can fire enough information off to answer the question. He squints to remember what he was dreaming but it’s already sliding away into the ether.

Awoken now is an inch of reoccurring memory he can’t place. It sometimes surges up when the sun hits his face, or glints off the surface of unbroken snow, or if a spray of red ember cracks loose from a campfire, or if a diner booth feels particularly warmed by the morning light as he slides into the side that faces the door. It’s not a memory of anything tangible; just a feeling. It’s a fragment of something he once felt and can’t find again.

There’s something inside him, something vital, something he needs like oxygen that is locked away and out of his reach. It’s the same way the handprint on his shoulder has a story that is maddeningly unknowable to him.

He presses a hand to it, lining up fingers his with those fingers. Dean doesn’t rule out that there had been periods of those endless months alone on the road completely rinsed away by 100-proof whiskey, but even that feels like stretching the boundaries of reality. Would he really forget being marked like this?

When Sam asked about it, Dean had come up completely empty; Sam had just said Hey man, you don’t have to talk about anything you don’t want to talk about.

And if only it were that simple, Dean thinks, maybe he would be able to sleep at night.

05

They finally make it to New Orleans. What they needed was a restock on goofer dust from the real-deal hoodoo purveyors. Clea is a contact of Bobby’s via Rufus, and as promised she responds favorably to a high-end bottle of French absinthe in trade.

She chooses Dean to hand the dust to, and when she turns up his palm to place it, he feels a pulse of energy blast through him. Eyes snapping to her, he finds her narrowed gaze a fiery gold and burning into him. She yanks him right up to her nose, grip tightening on his hand. She says, You ain’t lookin’ hard enough, you lazy sonofabitch. The lights are on, baby, but apparently you ain’t at home. When she releases him he stumbles back a little, and doesn’t hesitate to scramble out the door.

Over the roof of the car Sam asks, “What the hell was that?”

“I freakin’ hate witches, man,” is all Dean says, ducking in and slamming the door.

Returning north, Dean picks the music and Sam picks the work. They stake some vamps; burn some bones; snag some more crucifixes; dodge a few counties’ worth of law enforcement. Dean plucks out the mixtape labeled “Fernando” which has “House of the Rising Sun” on the B-side (it’s cut off at the end by a snippet of an ad for term life insurance, which Sam mumbles along with as the tape transitions into “Whipping Post.” Good Lord, I feel like I’m dyin’.)

In Chicago for the blues festival, they think they’re taking a break only to run into an angel named Balthazar who is deep into creating servants of the Lord by starting a sex cult. The Winchesters set about breaking the spell he has on dozens of those he has deemed “eights and up only.” Balthazar asks Dean if, as a perfect ten, he’d like to take their place, but corrects himself that Dean is spoken for and Balthazar would never. Dean assumes he means Sam and throws what is up there with one of his top ten most satisfying punches.

Once Balthazar is gone, they look at each other. “Angels,” Sam says, brow creased, shaking his head. He looks like Dean feels: spooked that they missed something. “I guess I didn’t know they were still hanging around. Sorta thought they would all fly away home after the big rumble.”

“Huh,” is all Dean says, shrugging.

They find Grant Park and weave their bodies into the rest of the festival bodies to disappear for a while. Sam is an open door, letting the music flood in and take him to another plane of existence. His eyes close and he is gone. Earthly pleasures continue to bring him back to himself.

Dean feels the bass in his chest, absorbs the band and the white lights against the setting sun but realizes he isn’t hearing anything. His mind is racing over and over everything he’s ever known about angels.

After a while Sam shoves him into a panel on Robert Johnson and the Mississippi blues trail, which does clear the haunted look from Dean’s eyes for a short time. They buy $12 beers and eat whatever crosses into their path with gusto: hot dogs, brisket burgers, mac and cheese, fried Oreos, deep dish pizza. On the way back to the room Dean puts on a Muddy Waters tape and Sam fast forwards to “I Feel So Good.”  

In the room, Dean sits up at the desk with a couple sheets of motel paper in front of him. He writes for a while, then pulls the Colt out of his waistband to lean back in the chair. He leaves the pistol on the table, a hand braced over it, lost in thought. Sam sets a beer in front of Dean and looks over his shoulder at the chicken scratches. “Whatcha doin?” He asks, going for casual and landing on suspicious.

“Just trying to remember something,” Dean murmurs, eyes unfocused. He sort of moves to cover the paper from his brother’s eyes.  

“Remember what?”

“Something about angels.”

“Like why they’d still be here?”

“No. I mean, maybe. Like why we forgot about them. Doesn’t something just feel – off? To you?”

“Dean, I’m back from hell. Everything feels off.”

“Forget it.”

Sam sighs, lost in thought, searching the floor with troubled eyes. He says, “No, you’re right. I’ve been telling myself it’s just being topside again but now I’m hearing you say it, and it’s making the antenna go up. I’ve just been having this weird feeling. Kinda like nostalgia, or déjà vu or something, but I don’t know for what. I wasn’t sure it was anything, but maybe it is.”

“Exactly. I thought it was that you were gone – but all this time you’ve been back and it hasn’t gone away. Dude. Did we get mojoed? What are we missing?”

“I don’t know, and I wouldn’t even know where to start with that. Except,” he reaches forward to take the Colt out of Dean’s hand; ejects the clip and live round; and hands it back to him. “I’m gonna need you to cool it with that thing, D’Onofrio. We haven’t been back at it long enough, and you haven’t said enough about your time alone, for me to trust that you might not blow out both our brains in this dump.”

“Hilarious.” 

“Dean, I think your baseline on any given day is 50/50 and you don’t need live rounds for the spread.”

“Dude I’m at least 70/30 right now, you got nothing to worry about.”

“I’m keeping these,” Sam says, holding up the clip and putting it under his pillow. He stuffs the stray bullet into his back pocket.

“As if the trunk isn’t stacked.”

“It’s symbolic, Dean, for don’t even fucking think about it, alright?”

The silence extends and Dean thinks about just letting it take over. But he says: “Listen. It’s a lifesaver to have you back. I never thought we could get a break like that. I’m thankful every single day you’re here and we’re back doing this. But man – after that day in the cemetery? Something just went, in me. Something is just gone, dead, and I can’t get it back. I don’t know if it’s mojo or just how shitty life got, but I think I broke.”

Sam sighs. “I think we both need to figure out how to live again. We gotta go back to square one, like we’ve been doing.  Figure out what life even is anymore, what this job is. The work is good but maybe we just need to slow way the hell down.”

Dean contemplates. “Like retracing our steps?”

“No, Dean, like focusing on finding the good days, on making them, on trying to find a way to have fun again. Trying to remind ourselves why we’re alive. Frankly, I’d like to leave our steps untraced. Leave all that shit nice and buried in the past.”

Late that night Sam sleeps on his back like the dead: peaceful, deep, uninterrupted. He’s catching up on a lifetimes’ worth, lost to nightmares and visions and the cage.

Dean lies awake on one hip, facing the dark window. He understands where Sam is coming from. He’s not wrong about them needing to plug back into the world; life on the road can get dismal. But he is wrong about this. If there’s something supernatural going on with them, Dean’s pretty sure the fog ain’t gonna clear without a few of Marley’s ghosts appearing.

As the night drags on, Dean lies silently and gets to digging in all his old dark parts. He floats in the trance of early sleep that makes him permeable to anything the night holds. What seeps in is a loneliness that doesn’t make sense for a guy who has everything he needs right here, in this exact room.

His heart starts to pound and urgency floods him, for what, he doesn’t know. He wakes fully to feel hitching in his chest, like he can’t get a full breath. He stumbles outside to take gulps of hot night air. He thinks, breathe – breathe in the air. Eventually his heartbeat slows down, the whole thing leaving him dizzy and disoriented. He goes back inside.

In the morning they lock the room, turn in the keys, and are gone. The sheets are left on the desk, forgotten. Among the scratches is a list: Balthazar, Lucifer, Michael, Anna, Uriel, Zach, Cas.

06

Dean has developed an odd sixth sense that comes from months of hallucinating on the edges of sleep. They’re hunting djinn outside Chicago on their way back out to 90 West. Dean is filled with foreboding and says they shouldn’t go in. That they should wait. Sam asks why, studying Dean quizzically. Dean says he had a bad dream that starts like this. It isn’t true but Dean doesn’t know how else to describe what he feels. Sam says, We trade brains or something? and hands him a silver blade. They dip their knives into a bloody jar and cheers them before heading in.

Dean is right. The djinn are many, and have trained for running into Winchesters. Sam and Dean are separated immediately and locked into dark cells. Dean is hung up by his wrists like in a butcher shop, toes drifting against the concrete floor. He is left for a long, long time. The pull on his joints is unbearable. The pain leaves him faint and coasting along the edge of consciousness.

Hours later, he is come upon again, this time to be set up for good. The djinn is handsome, with messy dark hair, and drags an open mouth up the side of Dean’s face while he does his thing. He says Dean is going to be all his. Iridescent blue light refracts at eye level and Dean’s pupils go to pinpoints, whites widening with fear.

He feels that the final moment is here yet again and about to go right past him. He doesn’t feel Sam’s presence anywhere at all; he could be at the other end of the building, above or below him, in another state or dead and Dean can’t get to him.

In a moment of desperation, Dean says a prayer he didn’t know he knew, to a name he doesn’t recognize, except for the fact that it comes out practiced. The djinn’s eyes flicker to his, alarmed.

He goes under the djinn’s spell for a split second. Resplendent green meadows dotted with white clover roll out before him. He feels grass, still cool from night air, under his bare feet. It’s full summer and wildflowers perfume the air: bee balm, thistle, milkweed, black-eyed Susans. The sky is golden, with a growing luminescence. Day is breaking in all its glory. Warmth radiates off the horizon and fills Dean’s lungs, spreads through his chest, rolls out to his fingers and toes. An unbridled joy wells up inside him and it makes him laugh. Tears of happiness gather and catch in his eyelashes.

This is the memory; the one he can’t find. This is the place he can’t get to, the place he is lonely for. It’s grace, and surrender, and an outstretched hand at his side, slipping into his without hesitation. Dean laces their fingers together in the morning light and looks over, smiling.

It all comes flooding back at first sight in a stinking dark basement: a man standing before him, like he’s always been there, like he never left.  Castiel, angel of the Lord, warrior of heaven, personal savior of Dean Winchester’s banged up soul.

Dean feels a heated palm over his shirt as Cas first checks on that very thing. Inside him there’s a swooping sensation, like his soul bucks up inside him to meet the touch. He thinks crazily, there were moments of gold and there were flashes of light –

There’s a bloody IV hanging loose, dripping dark spots onto his shirt. Fingertips take Dean’s neck and run up under his jaw, tilting his face this way and that, checking every inch. Cas’s hand goes to the back of Dean’s head; there’s a squelching sound and Dean grits out a groan of pain.

Dean tries to keep his eyes open, tries desperately to focus on that face, but things are blurry, and sway in an unhelpful rhythm. He suddenly drops his head between them and throws up on their shoes.

Cas moves in to bear the weight of Dean’s body. He guides Dean’s forehead to rest on his shoulder while he reaches up to cut the bindings. Dean inhales the brown fabric under his nose: charred cedar, wet autumn leaves, and a sharp tang of heated copper that floods his mouth with saliva.

Face in that coat, memories explode out through the blunt pounding in his head. Castiel’s name across his caller ID. The metallic glint of his blade splitting the air. His shrewd, squinting eyes nodding in affirmation to Dean. Feeling his weight at the end of a motel bed as Dean blinks awake in the night. The electrified air that fizzes when their hands hang too close. His face in this very jacket, body quaking with uncertainty, with gentle fingers raking up his neck and into his hair.

The way Dean only has to ask the sky for him, and he comes.

Dean’s bloodless wrists are finally freed and he drops, born again, onto Castiel’s sturdy frame. “We need to find your brother,” Cas says, and Dean nods, trying to find his feet. He appreciates that Cas wouldn’t ask him to stay behind. But he feels the way he can’t stand up, and says, “You go, Cas, go get him. I need to,” A high ringing swells in his ears, his vision tunnels to black, and he is unconscious.

When he comes to, it’s from the floor. His eyes open on the djinn there next to him, eyes burned out and still steaming. Angling upward to look around he sees Cas with Sam’s arm draped around his neck, feet loose, chin to his chest. Dean falls back, nodding up and down at the ceiling, repeating, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

07

Dean wakes in an upstairs bedroom of Bobby’s. Morning light streams in and the air is close, heavy, and hot. He shoves a leg out from under the sheet for a momentary respite from his own body heat. He lays there, drifting toward consciousness, trying to put together what’s happened.

Suddenly he darts up and across the hall. The other bed is mussed and empty. His bare feet slip on the stairs in his hurry and he grabs at the railing on the way down. Sam and Bobby are there in the kitchen, drinking coffee. Sam looks gray as dishwater, but he smiles when he sees Dean on the stairs.

“Sleeping beauty,” Bobby greets, tipping his mug to Dean.

“Nice,” Dean says, but his jaw is already set in firm disapproval. “Now where’s the other one?”

“Gone,” Sam says. “Just back and gone again. Did you –”

“Like hell he is,” Dean says and slams outside, screen door sounding off like a gunshot. He yells at the sky. “Now just where in the hell do you think you’re going? You really think you can do all that and just –”

“I knew you’d be mad.”

Dean winces a grim smile and turns around. His toes twist in the cold grass. “Mad? Mad doesn’t even begin to cover it, Cas.”

Cas stands very far away, and his eyes are carefully muted. His hands are tense by his sides, curling into the hems of his coat. He spends a moment looking lost for words. Looks to the sky for them, then back to the dirt. Finally offers, “At the time I thought it would be easier if maybe you just - didn’t remember me.”

“At what time? Easier for who, exactly? Easier alone, you mean? Without Sam, without you, just spinning out, for months? Everyone just going where I can’t get to them? You just magicked us out of your life? Well, hey, messaged received. I hope you got what you needed, being rid of some dumb clingy earth guy out here living at the end of his rope every goddamn day and night.” In the tense silence he summarizes, arms thrown out: “What the hell?”

Cas has the decency to have some color drain from his face. To fish stupidly for words and come up empty, over and over again. He has the decency to be sweating in the morning sun, and uncomfortable, and thoroughly admonished. Dean feels breathless in the square-off and his fingertips flicker at his sides, emotion finding a place to hide for the moment.

“Dean,” Cas tries with a dry swallow. “I didn’t – I didn’t plan on surviving the war I was fighting. I thought it was easier for you to forget I ever existed than know I was up there fighting and dying for something you couldn’t help me with. When it ended, I … I figured my time here had passed.”

“Oh, sure – leaving. Cas’s big move. Sonofabitch, the amount of times I thought - and then you were just out of there, no word of explanation, nada, just gone. And then you pull this? And I knew it, the whole time. Even when Sam came back, I knew something was still wrong.”

“I’d hoped bringing Sam back would help you move on.”

Dean feels his throat constrict. “Was that you? That was you? That was you.”

It somehow makes him angrier. He remembers now that he’d forgotten about the handprint; he’d forgotten his own salvation. What’s going on inside him is reeling out of control and everything Cas says makes it worse.

“I wish I’d had the courage to do it sooner. It wasn’t an order; I feared retaliation. But I had to. Knowing Sam was being tortured, that you were here alone, that it all had to end, it was - excruciating. It made my work very hard.”

“Well poor freakin’ you!” Dean explodes. “Newsflash, Cas, your plan sucked ass. You survived your stupid war or whatever, and you left us all down here Eternal Sunshine’d! You straight up ghosted me, man! People who – who, who, care about each other don’t do that to each other.”

“I’m not people. And you never would have let me go.”

“You’re goddamn right I wouldn’t have.”

Cas doesn’t say anything, just shifts his weight with a rustle of coat, looking plaintive and awkward while Dean makes his point for him.

“So are you just gonna,” Dean gestures flippantly to the sky. “Take off again?”

“Well, Chuck has returned to end the in-fighting and heaven is finally …”

“Heavenly?”

“I could do without the tone, but yes. For the time being.”

Dean blows out a breath, rubbing both hands down his face. He throws another gesture at the house, meaning to say something, but a pit lodges in his throat. There’s nowhere – unless you’re there. He feels hoarse and panicked, heart racing. He tries again. Has to force it out.

“So come in.”

“Dean,” Cas hedges. He resists. He wants to fly; Dean can see it.  

“Now you listen to me good, because it’s my turn,” Dean grits out, finding his feet in the anger that rushes up. “I have built my entire life around never needing anything from anyone. So you better hear me when I tell you that what I need, is for you to get in that goddamn house, or so help me.” 

Cas looks at Dean for a very long time and it feels like Dean is only now seeing him, only now allowing himself to look. Cas is drawn and exhausted with pale lips and indigo shadows under his eyes. But there is a gentle, warm regard in his features that Cas always radiates for him. When their eyes meet Dean feels raw under that plain stare; something inside him constricts helplessly.

Whatever Cas sees in Dean, it cracks his tactic of stillness. He comes to Dean and puts hands on his shoulders, slides them to his neck. He steps in, rests their foreheads together. Dean closes his eyes as a hot rush crackles through him. He lets the knot in his chest loosen.

Cas puts his mouth to Dean’s temple and says quietly, “I’m sorry I hurt you. I left you alone. I didn’t ask you what you wanted. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

Dean nods along. He gets arms around Cas and capitulates fully into the embrace. Dean’s forgiveness is a silent ocean and Cas sags into it. Dean can feel a long shaky sigh brush into his hair. They stay there like that for several minutes, silently rebalancing the world. Cas comes inside.

Sam hugs Cas the way he hugs Dean, like he’s trying to convey the whole of himself in the press of cell against cell. Cas hugs him back, and healthy color returns to Sam’s face. From Cas’s shoulder an easy, peaceful smile comes over Sam that is so enviable it makes Dean feel something like heartache.

Sam holds Cas by the shoulders and won’t let him go. He stares into Cas’s face with that broken-open gratitude only Sam is brave enough to show. He says, “Thank you. For getting me out. I know it was for Dean as much as it was for me and honestly, I’m grateful. I owe you, Cas.”

“With what you did, Sam? You didn’t belong there. Your suffering was not to be borne. Pulling you out was one of the great triumphs of my life.” Cas shoots what feels like an involuntary look to Dean and Dean receives it like a kick to the sternum.

“And Bobby? Him too?”

“Yes, of course,” Cas says.  

“Well whoopty doo for me. Thanks Cas. Really. Now, breakfast is on for three banged-up idjits and a disappearing angel.”

Bobby passes plates and forks down the line Sam and Cas make at the stove. Bobby tips the pan to scrape ham, eggs and potatoes onto their plates. Cas says he doesn’t remember the last time he ate; Sam asks if he ever gets hungry. Cas says, not really, but I’ve come to understand the ritual of breaking bread, and I enjoy it. Bobby hands back a gallon of OJ.

Dean can’t watch this. With his elbow on the table he holds his forehead on his fingertips and rubs circles, trying to dissipate the rage that’s stubbornly rebuilding just behind his eyes. It breaks.

“And why exactly did you disappear again? Oh right, your freakin’ angel war, stupid heaven calling, because you’re a stupid freakin’ angel of the lord who just has to go fix heaven, stupid Chuck just leaving everyone in the freakin’ lurch, you couldn’t be having to answer to a bunch of stupid dumb mortal yokels in the middle of all that, could you, had to drop us all like stinking hot garbage, didn’t you.”

“Dude,” Sam says, using a single clipped syllable to convey John Winchester levels of disapproval.

“Boy, you got a real way of twisting things to keep yourself hurting,” Bobby says. “Why don’t you give it up for once.”

“No you’re right. You guys are right. I need to stop.” Dean says. He thumps back in the chair and crosses his arms, staring out the window.

Cas sits at the table with his plate and scoots his chair next to Dean. Dean tips his face to the ceiling and laughs bitterly, shaking his head. “I said I was sorry,” Cas says.

“Yeah, well,” Dean says, and looks back down at the table. “I guess I’m gonna need to hear it again.”

“Dean. I am deeply sorry I hurt you.”

The kitchen goes heavy and thick, waiting, the rhetorical question hanging: is that enough? Dean tries to make himself speak, where all his internal programming screams at him, shut up, it doesn’t matter, who cares. He needs to know. He deserves to know. It matters. He cares.

“Why did you really leave?” He says, dragging himself to meet Cas’s eyes and feeling like he knocks himself on the ass in the process, for the intensity he finds there. “Why did you leave and make it so you couldn’t come back?"

A wash of pain moves through Cas’s expression, his number called. He waits a long time before he answers, and Dean watches him trying to decide how much to share. In the interim he cuts a silent, broken look to Dean that makes Dean’s pulse throb wildly in his throat.

“It was extremely selfish,” Cas finally says. “And prideful. And manipulative. I needed to feel - in control again. When I’m here I don’t think straight; I don’t do things I’m supposed to do. I feel more than I can honestly tolerate feeling.”

(And here, Dean’s gaze drops like a boulder back to the wood laminate of the table, heat clawing its way up his neck. I can’t fight this feeling anymore – I’ve forgotten what I started fighting for.)

“I’m not – I’m not built for that. It’s extremely uncomfortable. I started to feel like I was losing myself. But the truth is,” Cas pauses thoughtfully. “I wasn’t anybody – I didn’t have a self to lose – until I met you all. I thought I needed to go back to heaven to feel right again but it turned out I didn’t belong there either. All it did was remind me how different I’ve become. So when I heard my friends calling, I came. But I’m still … figuring it out.”

Dean’s jaw is clamped and he can’t speak.

Sam moves forward to drop a hand on Cas’s shoulder. He laughs a little. “Honestly? That sounds so human, man. You know we never meant to screw things up for you but I’m sorta glad we maybe helped? With something? Because I gotta say, sometimes the ass-saving starts to feel pretty one-sided. But you know us, Cas. You take all the time you need. Whatever you need to figure out, if you need a place, we’ll be here.”

Cas claps a hand over Sam’s in gratitude. Then he faces Dean, his expression so open and direct that Dean leans back from it, wary. Cas forces the matter: he takes Dean’s hand under the table and pulls it into his lap, cradling it in both hands.  “I took advantage of you all. I went into your minds, changed them, made you do my will without your consent. I left you. If you can’t forgive me, I understand. But it will never happen again.”

Dean feels himself trying to resist the apology; trying to stay angry. He sits silently, jaw firm, trying to push it all away, push it out of him.

He thinks of the betrayal, and the violation of having his mind altered. The loneliness and solitude he was cast into. The loss and grief he carried for months. Days where he didn’t say one word to another soul, because there was no one else. Nights awake, pistol on his knee or panic attacks out under the stars. Jobs he’d hoped would be the last job.

Cas squeezes his hand, thumb brushing over the panicky pulse point in Dean’s wrist, and a feeling of relief wells up from a clean spring deep inside him. He shamelessly seizes it with his whole soul. He nods, chin in his palm, elbow digging into the table. All at once Dean has to jam a hand tight over his mouth to keep from sobbing. Tears drip down his wrist and onto the table. He squeezes Cas’s hand back.

Sam parks a plate in the middle of Dean’s tears and claps his shoulder, making Dean look at him. He questions with his eyes: You good?

“I’m good, I’m done, I promise.”

“Atta boy,” Sam says, patting him on the back, then Cas too.

Bobby’s got a load of garage work lined up to keep the boys busy. Let it be known that they earn their keep. The old man does his part in keeping their meal plates full and running down to AutoZone for parts, but that’s about it.

Dean delegates the easier stuff to Sam, and Sam in turn starts to show Cas how to fix cars, the way Dean once showed him. Dean can’t think of anything more useless – an honest to god angel learning how to do an oil change – but the combination of Sam’s gesture and Cas’s rapt attention is sort of heartwarming.

Dean quickly becomes buried in transmissions and clutches, entering a flow state where time is lost and all problems are solved under the innate knowledge of his hands inside a car. After a few hours Cas has come over to watch him work, and Dean feels the back of his neck heat under the attention.

A memory surfaces from the time before; after a bar closing, him and Cas on a cold empty road, getting to the Impala – no. Dean shakes it away. If you start me up I’ll never stop, never stop, never never never – He turns to dig into Bobby’s tool drawers. Cas doesn’t ask any questions of Dean’s work, content to observe, so Dean doesn’t feel the need to explain. They make quiet company for the rest of the afternoon.

At sunset Bobby sets crooked lawn chairs out on the front yard. He puts a radio in the window and turns to The Beatles on an Oldies station line-up. It’s the same music that’s been playing Dean’s whole life; wherever and whenever they are, music like this just puts him right.

Green grasses unfold down the hill to a tree line separating them from the main road. Above the trees the late summer sun intensifies as it sinks lower in the sky, prismatic with pinks and orange. Behind them, the indigo of night-time outlines the house. They sit all four in a line and pass a bottle of small-batch bourbon up and down, Dean snug between Sam and Cas.

Dean sings to “Here Comes the Sun.” Bobby muses almost to himself, lost in the past: “God I remember when you boys were young enough to be rolling around out here all night, getting eaten alive.” Cas asks, By what? to snorts of laughter.

Dean remembers; nights like this, John dumping them off on this very lawn. They’d be red with welts and rolling downhill to the trees, laughing like hyenas. Dean salutes the memory with the bottle, which he sips and passes to Sam who does the same. Dean sings, I feel that ice is slowly melting.

08

Late in the evening, Dean hears footsteps on the stairs. A moment later, Cas comes in and around to the open side of the bed. He toes off his shoes, lays his coat and jacket on a chair, and pulls his tie loose. For a breath he just sits on the edge of the bed, hovering. Dean turns over, switching hips to face Cas’s back. Finally Cas lays down, ankles crossing, with one hand on his stomach and the other behind his head. Silver moonlight from the window edges him in a natural glow. Dean watches him stare at the ceiling in contemplation.

“I haven’t asked how you’re doing,” Dean says. “It seems like a lot, even for an angel.”

“I’m fine.”

“Oh buddy, don’t I know that line all too well.”

Cas looks at him calmly, unwilling to elaborate. His eyes are a volatile gray-blue, surging, despite the stillness of his face. Those eyes are speaking clearly, loudly, urgently, of the thing that always sits between them. The thing they don’t acknowledge or voice aloud. The thing, Dean thinks, Cas tried to flee from. The thing he tried to vaporize out of existence.

Dean feels pulled to say what’s been on the tip of his tongue since the warehouse. “Cas,” he ventures, and stalls for a moment as his mouth goes dry and his ears go hot. He thinks for a second that maybe all he wanted was to say Cas’s name. But he figures out how to continue: “What was that place I went to, anyway? In the dream, or whatever.”

“I don’t know. I didn’t recognize it. But I think – I think that’s where you keep us, in your mind. It’s the place that creates the uh, feeling, of, um – ” he clears his throat.

“Alright,” Dean snaps hurriedly, closing off whatever might have come of that. Us is more than either of them has ever said, and Dean feels caught between wanting to finally have it out and wanting it to remain unsaid forever.

They lapse into silence. Cas lies there, perfectly content, human-like in his repose. But he’s not that. He is, of course, biblical. He’s a winged, fearsome champion of heaven; old as the world, jamming demons back into bodies to smite them, avenging with holy white light blasting out of him, his pure goodness vanquishing evil.

Dean marvels that with all that time and all Cas has seen, he has chosen to be the guardian of the Winchesters, whether God wills it or not. He’s one of very few left still willing to put themselves between the Winchesters and the monsters, even when the monsters are Cas’s own brothers and sisters. He’s the deliverer of Dean’s soul and of that which Dean loves most: Sam.

With all the power of heaven at his command he chooses again and again to sit in the Impala, to join them on jobs, to show up at Bobby’s house to make amends. He chooses to visit Dean alone, when the world is asleep, to bestow upon Dean that private smile that is all-knowing, all-seeing. He chooses to linger, to stand close, to take Dean’s hand.

“So it worked,” Cas says, vaporizing Dean’s train of thought. Intentionally, Dean thinks. “You all forgot everything about me.”

“Kind of. I mean, yes. But I just could feel - something. Something I couldn’t get to. That place, I guess. Sam could feel something too. It wasn’t exactly you. More like remembering a feeling of you, and how it was gone now.”  

Cas hums, thoughtful. “The way the mind writes memories, and feelings - so deeply. It’s all so interconnected and complex. I guess I was a fool to think I could get it all. It was - a desperate act.” Again, he carefully chooses not to expound on that.

“But you remembered me? Us?”

“Yes. In the end I couldn’t - I couldn’t do it to myself. I needed to know you were there, and at least relatively safe. At first I felt I could manage. But the longer it went on the more,” Cas sighs. “The more I looked in on you. Tried to somehow be there without being there. Tried to provide you comfort, from so far away. Yearned for comfort myself.” He hesitates, searching the ceiling. “Whatever this was, it didn’t go away like I thought it would. It just – got harder and harder.”

“Cas,” he croaks, heart squeezed, unable to continue. It’s slowly, slowly pouring in, warm and gooey, filling him up hot from toes to ears and he feels overrun, spilling with it, and there’s not a word on his tongue to capture it.

Cas turns to his hip to face Dean. Takes Dean’s hand and pulls it to his own chest, holds it over his heart and presses it there. He searches Dean’s face for long moments, a growing question creasing his forehead. It takes all of Dean’s discipline not to fidget and duck away. Cas’s bright gaze shifts through softness, wonderment, awe. He shakes his against the pillow, as if unable to comprehend Dean. Finally, a tiny smile of incredulity tips the corner of his mouth.

“You got through,” he breathes. “Dean. You’re … incredible. How? How did you find me? How did you know to look?”

“I don’t know,” Dean whispers, hoarse. The heat is rising in his throat that he can’t swallow it down. “I was just – a complete fucking wreck without you.”

“Hearing your prayer – Dean, I don’t have words for what I felt when I heard it. There is nothing in heaven or anywhere that could compel me to leave, if what you really want is for me to stay. If you still have faith in me, after all of this, then that is what I serve. No more leaving.”

The room falls silent and all Dean can hear is his own heart pounding in his ears. He lets his palm be pressed to Cas’s chest and feels grace flood him, warm and welcoming, a steady reassurance. It beckons Dean to surrender.

“Cas, man,” he says, voice uneven. “I hope it goes without saying, what I want. Who I was without you - I can’t ever go back there.”

“Then you won’t.”

As Dean allows the moment to extend, relaxing by degrees, the warmth under his hand takes on a buoyancy, a jubilance. It radiates off Cas, whose vessel is so still, so quiet, yet entirely unable to fully contain him. Dean receives all that spills over Cas’s edges and lets himself be filled – with Cas’s fealty, his admiration, his delight.

Dean is acutely aware that he is touching something precious. It’s something angels don’t give; certainly not to humans, and certainly not Cas, who has determined his own fate, follows his own will, and in doing so wields more celestial power than the whole of the heavenly host. Dean is wise to the gift being given, and struggles with his own worth to let it in. In response, Cas laces their fingers and puts Dean’s knuckles to his mouth.

Cas’s grace flooding his chest and his mouth on Dean’s skin is an inflection point. An answering tenderness inside him rushes up to all the thinnest membranes of his body. Insatiable, unwieldy attraction roars to life, incandescent and crackling to finally be heard.

And now that Dean has felt this, the world will have to peel Dean’s cold, rotted fingers from around Castiel’s body if it wants to try to part them.

Dean’s eyes are glistening again. He feels the way devotion ripples through him; it raises the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck. His scalp and ears tingle. He leans up to skim fingers into Cas’s hair and around to the back of his head. He grips there a moment, soothed by the familiarity that rushes back to him. Cas watches him intently and their eyes meet. It’s simple, declarative, blatant. By degrees it slides into something burning and fierce.

Dean struggles to feel like he has anything comparable to give but accepts that if this is truly what Cas wants, he can do this.

If Cas’s breath goes short under his fingertips, Dean can hold him steady, ground him. If Cas’s face breaks a little in surrender, Dean can smile. If Cas turns his mouth into Dean’s wrist and makes an uncontrollable sound of want in the back of his throat, Dean can lay hands on him in a way that causes that placid demeanor to whip into something charged and oceanic.

All of my love – all of my love – oh, all of my love, to you

When Dean leans in and pushes Cas’s mouth open into a kiss he is received with Cas’s whole body, pulling him in.

Epilogue

Chuck leans back, impressed and a little speechless. There are some things he reluctantly concedes he shouldn’t look in on, though admittedly he’s curious.

If he’s really honest with himself, he’s a little jealous that Castiel could let in so much humanity, could feel that close to what it feels to be human. To love the way a human loves. Chuck has tried, in his own ways, and couldn’t ever seem to get there.

Castiel is certainly a rare one. And if heaven is to lose its best and brightest, it might as well be lost to protecting the Winchesters. This is actually a shrewd asset reallocation.

Now those boys, Chuck muses in a self-satisfied way. He yields to their desires more than he’d like to admit. Because those are the ones. They broke the mold. Definitely the favorite of all his creations, if only because he wasn’t sure he still had the goods after all this time. I mean, maybe it’s recency bias, but who can really help themselves? Not me.

Now, you can stay there, Castiel. Do the human thing, get it out of your system. But if I ever need you, buddy - I’m going to call.