Chapter Text
“I need you to tell me… tell me it’s okay.”
“Dean… it’s okay. You can go now.”
“Goodbye, Sam. Goodbye.”
Dean looks at himself from the outside. Sees his body slumped against the wooden beam. Do I really have that many wrinkles now?
Sam is holding Dean’s face in his hands and crying into his hair. But Sam isn’t crying. Teardrops are suspended on his cheeks, his chest is half-risen towards a sob. He’s as still as a photograph, a single frame of film.
The whole barn is frozen. Sam has stopped crying, the weeds around the foundation have stopped growing, the slats in the roof have stopped decaying. The air hangs in place, waiting.
Dean turns around.
If there was breathable air, and if Dean had physical lungs, all the breath would have been knocked from his body by the sight of the one who apparently hit the pause button on the whole show. The new Death wears a black coat and a white ring, and carries a large sickle, as the others had. But he’s familiar for another reason.
“Hello Dean.”
“Cas…” Dean moves towards him, trance-like, taking in the angel’s new look. “How'd all this happen?”
“There was a job opening. I took it,” Cas answers simply.
Dean can’t help but smile at that. Typical Cas. “I'm guessing you woulda come to see me sooner but…”
“I couldn't. I'm sorry.”
Dean is standing before Cas now, close enough to touch. Cas stands stoically, the only hint of warmth evident in the relaxed angle of his brow. It’s enough for Dean to notice.
“Well. You’re here now.”
Dean collapses into Cas, his arms gripping him tight enough to bruise. Cas hugs him back just as fiercely, one-armed, as the other holds fast to the sickle.
Time has stopped, so it’s impossible to say how long they hold each other.
Dean doesn’t want to let go. He knows what comes next. But he asks anyways, “Will I remember this? After I've moved on?”
“No,” Cas says, voice rough in Dean’s ear.
Then I’m gonna have to make this count.
Dean sets his jaw, and draws back.
Cas’ eyes are shining with tears and cresting power.
Before Dean can say anything, Cas tells him, “But you're not dying. Not today.”
“Dean! Dean!”
Dean woke up on the floor of the barn. His head throbbed where it had apparently hit the ground, and there was a dull, quickly fading pain in his back, but besides that, he was… fine.
Sam was leaning over him, eyes gleaming with a manic energy, hands hauling Dean up into a sitting position.
“What happened?” Dean asked, dazed.
“I-I don't know! I just passed out, and now… you're okay!” Sam laughed with relief. “Man, you're really okay!”
“Yeah. How?” Dean asked with a frown and a creased brow.
“Maybe… Jack?” Sam shrugged.
“But he was gonna be hands off, right?”
“Do we have to question it Dean?”
“I…” Dean paused as he looked at Sam. His brother was so happy, and so tired. Dean didn’t have the heart to lay all his worries on Sam’s shoulders. The suspicion that just when Dean thought he was free, something had decided to start messing with them again.
“We can talk about it later,” Sam said, climbing to his feet. He reached out to help Dean up. “Let's just get out of here.”
Dean sat in the impala while Sam went back to burn the bodies. The two boys they had saved had fallen asleep in the back seat. Dean watched them in the rear-view mirror and smiled.
The thing was, since Chuck had been defeated, Dean was trying to live. He hadn’t fallen into his old self-destructive habits. He was actively reaching out for any bit of happiness he could grasp -- spending time with Miracle; applying to work as a mechanic; hell, even going to the pie festival -- and he held on to those bits of happiness as hard as he could. Hard enough to strangle them, maybe. Because they were never enough to overwhelm the seething emptiness at the back of Dean’s mind, the hollowness in his spine, the weight in his stomach.
When Dean was dying, he had been relieved that he wouldn’t have to make the effort to hold on anymore.
And as he sat in the car, he felt exhausted at the prospect of having to keep grasping for another day.
Sam stood silhouetted in the light of the bonfire. It’s heat didn’t reach Dean. When the fire finally burned out, and Sam walked back to the car, Dean pretended to be asleep.
Typically, Dean would have a beer or three before bed, just to relax. He hadn’t gone so far as to drink himself to sleep for months. The night after they got back from Ohio, he opened a bottle of scotch and didn't stop drinking until he passed out.
Dean woke up to dog slobber and hot breath, and Miracle’s fur tickling his nose.
“Alright buddy, alright,” Dean murmured and pushed the dog off his bed. Pain split through his head and he winced as he sat up. But Miracle was there, panting and wagging his tail. Dean took a deep breath, got out of bed, and got ready to take him for a walk.
In the empty field next to the bunker, Dean let Miracle off-leash, and watched him bolt towards the copse of trees that separated the field from the next property. It was late morning and the summer sun was high in the sky; cicadas buzzed in the trees, and the field was scattered with bright flowers. It was warm enough to make Dean feel lazy, but not enough for him to break a sweat as he ambled towards the spot at the tree line where Miracle was wrestling with a fallen branch. Everything about the day was perfect, and Dean let himself soak it up.
“You wanna play, buddy? Huh? You wanna play?” Dean teased Miracle.
He grabbed the other end of the branch in Miracle’s mouth. There was a brief tug-o-war that Dean won; he hurled the branch into the field and smiled as Miracle chased after it.
There was a stinging in his right palm; not acute enough to be painful, but irritating. Dean looked at his hand. There were scrapes where the bark of the branch had chafed against his skin; redness fading into small beads of blood, bits of dirt and moss lodged under peeling skin.
Dean cursed under his breath and brushed his palm against his jeans, but that just irritated it more. He suddenly felt guilty that he couldn’t do something as simple as enjoy a nice day. But he still had to try. Otherwise it was all for nothing.
Miracle ran back to Dean with the stick in his mouth, and dropped it at his feet. Dean picked it up and threw it with his left hand.
Sam wanted to wait before going on another hunt. Dean insisted that he was fine, that it was as if he had never been impaled at all. Sam insisted back that Dean seemed distracted, “off his game”.
So instead, Dean researched. With angels ordered off the playing field by Jack, Hell under the benevolent dictatorship of Rowena, and Billie dead, there wasn’t much else that could have pulled Dean back from the brink like that.
“How do you even know it’s a bad thing, Dean?” Sam asked one day in the library.
“‘Cause it’s manipulating my life,” Dean answered without looking up from his book. “And I want it to stop.”
“Hasn’t it stopped?” Sam argued. “Has anything else happened since then that tells you it’s interfering?”
“It brought me back from the dead, isn’t that enough?” Dean answered with a glare.
Sam met his glare with a steady look. “Don’t you want to be alive?”
Dean’s gaze dropped back to his book, but he wasn’t reading anymore. “‘Course I do,” he grumbled. “I just don’t like being jerked around, is all.”
It wasn’t long after that Sam found them a case.
The case was a haunting in an abandoned convent. A nun who offed herself after a priest got her pregnant. There wasn’t much to point towards the haunting, just some random kids getting spooked off the property every couple of years, but no deaths. Sam jumped on the case as something to keep Dean busy; and Dean, well, he felt bad for the sister. Didn’t mind the thought of helping her move on.
He didn’t tell Sam that it reminded him of that first solo case John had ever sent him on: those nuns who were in love with each other and killed themselves. Or that it made him think things about the futility of love. Like how it never seemed to match up right on all sides, like a puzzle whose pieces had been swapped out.
Sam and Dean had dug up the nun’s grave, salted and burned her bones, then had gone back into the convent to check for anything else that the ghost might be attached to. They were in a second-floor bedroom in a rotting wing of the building when Sam picked up a rosary, and the ghost appeared, wailing in heartbreak and flying at Sam.
It was stupid. Dean didn’t even have his crowbar out when he rushed the ghost to distract it from Sam. So of course all it did was stop Dean in his tracks and fling him across the room.
Dean hit the floor on his back, the floorboards collapsed, and he kept falling.