Make Known

You spend enough time with someone, spend enough time talking to them, fighting with them, fighting next to them, saving and being saved by them -- you stop an apocalypse with someone and you get to thinking you know them.

Notes:

well i wrote season 5 fic in 2014 so season 7 fic in 2017? why not! i saw this gifset and a sentence popped into my head and demanded a fic be written around it, so here we are.
kora beta read this sad nonsense and i'm incredibly grateful for her input and insight, which not only made this a better fic but also provided me the motivation i needed to like...actually finish it. any mistakes that remain are guaranteed to be a result of me failing to take her advice.

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

Dean should have known better than to think he knew a damn thing about Castiel.

He’s gotten complacent over the years, he sees now. You spend enough time with someone, spend enough time talking to them, fighting with them, fighting next to them, saving and being saved by them -- you stop an apocalypse with someone and you get to thinking you know them.

Dean keeps forgetting, is all. Castiel looks so much like a friend, so much like family, that Dean just keeps forgetting what he really is.

Castiel is the closest thing to God that Dean has ever seen, and that should have tipped him off, really, that should have clued him in. Dean has always looked around at the world and wondered what kind of God would let the universe get to the state it’s in, who would create something so vast and incredible and then simply leave it to rot. He’s cowed by that holy apathy, terrified of that divine callousness. God works in mysterious ways, Dean has always been told, but if there’s some divine plan being served by all the suffering Dean has seen in his lifetime, he sure as hell doesn’t want to hear about it.

When he sees Castiel’s face lit from beneath by holy fire, Dean finally remembers what he really is. He’s not Dean’s friend. He’s not Dean’s family. Castiel is one of the first creations of an unknowable God, and he is himself unknowable.

Dean turns and runs. He runs from that face, that form, that non-person he thought he knew, and all he can think is that he should have known better. He should have known.

There are spare bedrooms in Bobby’s house, but Dean sleeps in the living room. He’s trying to come up with a reason for it that doesn’t have anything to do with the hastily applied warding, the symbols painted across Bobby’s windows in his own blood and the blood of his two remaining family members. He’s trying to come up with an excuse that doesn’t have anything to do with Castiel.

The truth, he thinks, is that he’s waiting for something. For Cas to show up on the doorstep, maybe, begging for him to scratch a line from one of the symbols, to let him in. For Cas to slip through the warding, somehow, to look him in the eyes and ask for help, for advice, for forgiveness. He’s hoping, he thinks, for a sign.

He thinks it is one, for a moment, when Castiel appears in front of him. That maybe it means something that Bobby got the warding wrong, that maybe there was a reason.

There’s a part of him that thinks the fact that Castiel is here, that he came back, means that he’s going to stop. A part that still hopes, against all odds, for things to turn around. That thinks maybe this time will be different, maybe this time talking to him will be like talking to the Cas he knew. Cas has confided in Dean before. He knows that Cas has doubts. Why else would he be here now, if not because of that? If not because he’s hoping for Dean to convince him? Dean looks at Castiel and he thinks, stubbornly, Good things do happen.

He asks for it one more time, for the thing Castiel gave him before even though he never felt like he deserved it. He asks Cas to have faith in him, and Castiel says no.

Dean stands in the empty room after Castiel disappears, and he thinks, The Cas I knew would have stopped. The Cas I knew would have listened to me, would have trusted me. He would have looked me in the eye and meant it when he apologized.

But then he remembers who Castiel really is. He remembers that the version of Cas he’s built up in his mind isn’t the same thing as the reality of Castiel. He remembers he doesn’t really know Castiel at all.

Dean should have known that things would go from bad to worse. He should have known the universe would come back to rub salt in his wounds. He should have known things would go all to hell, should have expected that instead of Castiel being there to help him, he would be the one causing it. Castiel pulled Dean from hell before, and he’s making good on his threat, now, to throw Dean back in.

He gets it now, what Castiel’s help is worth, and he doesn’t want it. He doesn’t want Castiel’s help, not now that he knows what it means. Castiel saves him, anyway, and then Castiel tells him everything he wants to hear, Castiel dares him to make a counterargument he must know Dean doesn’t have. Castiel asks him for faith, that simple little thing Dean has always struggled to give and to receive, and he can’t do it. He just can’t. Castiel saved him, Castiel vows to save Ben and Lisa, and all he can think is that this must serve Castiel’s ends, somehow, because it can’t be something he’s doing just for Dean’s sake.

Even when Castiel heals Lisa, even when he wipes Lisa and Ben’s memories just so Dean won’t have to live with the thought that they hate him, too, he knows Castiel can’t have done any of that just for him. Castiel says that he’s sorry, he says that he means it, and he sounds like he means it, too, but Dean knows he doesn’t. Castiel has already proven that ten times over. Dean thanks him, but he knows better than to think it means anything. It doesn’t change anything at all, and they both know it.

It doesn’t matter, those things Castiel did along the way that seemed like help on the surface. All that matters is what he does in the end. He brings down Sam’s wall. He tricks Crowley. He kills Raphael. He does whatever it takes.

Castiel was always going to keep going down this road, Dean realizes, and there was never anything Dean could have said or done to stop him. He sees that now -- that this is always what Castiel was going to do. This is always the path he was going to follow, and Dean couldn’t possibly have known.

“Who are you?” Dean asks, and doesn’t like the answer.

Dean has spent his life digging into lore, into local history, into every flavor of myth and legend, in order to hunt every manner of monster. He’s supposed to be applying those skills somewhere else, now. He’s supposed to be researching how to hunt the thing that used to be his best friend.

Dean is supposed to be researching how to stop Castiel, but instead, he’s spending too much time reading about flashbulb memories and trying not to despair. He reads, with rapt attention, about the vivid detail burned into a person’s brain during a traumatic event. He reads the entire Wikipedia article and half the links in the body, then starts on the links in the See also section. He reads until his vision blurs and he has to shut the laptop and shove it away.

He can picture that night perfectly: the way the light coming up from below had made Castiel’s features stand out, made him look exactly as otherworldly as he is. He remembers the smell of the oil burning, the way it had stung the back of his throat. He remembers clenching his hands so tightly into fists that he had angry crescent-shaped marks on his palms as he drove away. He remembers driving and thinking how upset Castiel had looked. How full of regret. He remembers driving and wondering if he had made the right choice, if he had done the right thing. He’s been replaying those moments in his mind over and over and over again.

Errors that are rehearsed through retelling and reliving can become a part of the memory, Wikipedia reads.

“The night we found out,” Dean says, knowing he won’t have to elaborate, “what did he look like? What do you remember?”

“Dean…” Sam says. There’s sadness there, in his hesitation, but there’s also a little exasperation.

“Humor me,” Dean says.

“I--” Sam starts. He stops, sighs. “He looked...guilty, I guess. Ashamed. I dunno.”

“You think he meant it?”

“In the moment? Yeah, sure. But, Dean, after--”

“I know what happened after,” Dean snaps. Sam raises his hands, palms out, in a placating gesture. Dean immediately feels like shit about it. He presses his fingers to his temples, presses the heels of his palms against his eyes. “Sorry,” he says. “Sorry. I--”

“Yeah,” Sam says, too quiet, too understanding. “Yeah, Dean. Me, too.”

The days Dean spends watching Castiel on the news feel like the longest of his life. Everywhere he goes, everywhere he turns, every time he looks at the TV -- they never mention him by name, but he’s all they’re talking about. Dean watches the reports about him and he thinks, Maybe if I see enough, I’ll figure him out. I don’t know him, but maybe knowing what kind of God he is will be the next best thing.

They interview parishioners on the news, have everyday citizens talk about the acts of God they witnessed. They show people in awe over miracles both small and large -- injuries healed, diseases eradicated, prayers answered. Dean listens to these stories and he thinks, This is a version of Castiel I recognize. He thinks of the feel of Cas’ fingers on his forehead, grace pouring through him, stitching his flesh back together, and he thinks, This is the Castiel I remember.

But there are also the stories of the killings, the body count that rises by the day, at first, and later by the hour. Dean listens to those stories and thinks of other things, of things he would rather have forgotten, and he realizes this is the Castiel he remembers, too. He just thought things had changed, is all, he thought knowing Dean and Sam had changed Castiel for the better. He just can’t figure out where the split happened, can’t pinpoint the exact moment when his friend disappeared and Castiel’s factory settings took over.

Dean turns on the TV and watches the news, he looks at this shape he recognizes, this body he swears used to contain his best friend, and tries to figure it out. Dean tries to fill in what must have happened during that year he was out of the game to make Castiel into whatever he is now that is not the Cas who Dean knew. He listens to the reports and tries to reconcile them with his memories, tries to make all the pieces fit together in some way that makes any kind of sense at all.

He thinks of what it’s like, living this life, thinks of what happens, sometimes, when they hunt. Sometimes he sees dead cattle and he thinks demons, but it turns out it’s just a chupacabra. Sometimes a simple salt and burn is actually a wraith. Sometimes a person is raised from the dead and you think someone else must have made a deal, but really it’s something else entirely. Sometimes he gets it wrong.

Dean looks at Castiel on TV and tries to treat it like he’s working a case. He takes all of his evidence and lays it out on the table and asks himself, did I make a misstep somewhere? Am I misreading the evidence? Did I get something wrong?

Dean pulls up his memories one by one and asks himself, did this really happen? Did this happen or am I remembering wrong? Did I dream it? He recalls all of the things he remembers about Castiel, and he wonders, did I just imagine who Castiel was, did I imagine who he was to us?

Dean tries to reconcile the things Castiel has done for humanity with the things Castiel has done to humanity. He tries to reconcile the things Cas has done for him with the things Cas has done to him. He looks at the face on TV and tries to find something he recognizes.

Dean dreams he’s standing on the side of a road. He reaches out and places his hand on Castiel’s shoulder. He says, “Don’t ever change,” and Castiel looks at him and it’s all wrong. His expression is off, his mouth a flat line, his eyes lifeless. “Don’t ever change,” Dean says, and Cas’ skin starts to crack, boils spreading their way across his face. There’s blood on his coat, under Dean’s hand. Dean says, “Don’t--”

Dean wakes up in a dark room and he stares at the ceiling and he tries to remember that moment, the texture of Cas’ coat under his hand, the way Cas had looked at him. He remembers how it felt -- how Cas had smiled and relief had spread through him, comforting like hot coffee on a cold day, like a warm shower after a hard night. He tries to picture it now, the curve of his mouth, the look in his eyes, but all he can think of is the Castiel they’re showing on TV.

It’s wrong, Dean thinks, it’s all wrong, but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what good things Castiel did in the past, he tells himself, it doesn’t matter who Castiel used to be. It doesn’t matter why Castiel made the choices he did, just like it doesn’t matter how he became this person Dean keeps seeing on the news. It doesn’t matter whether Dean’s memories are accurate or not, because there’s only one way this is going to end.

Dean has figured it out and now he’s done. There will be no second chances, there will never be anything more between them than there was when they stood across from each other and said their goodbyes. Cas is gone and Dean has made his peace with that. He’s done being played, done being used and lied to. He’s done hoping Castiel will ever stop being whatever it is he’s become now. He’s done. There are a lot of things in the world that Dean wants and needs, and false hope isn’t one of them.

There’s one clip, in particular, that they keep showing over and over, though, as if to torment him. It’s this footage of a massacre at a campaign center, a clip from after the security cameras come back on. Castiel is standing there, covered in the blood of the people he’s murdered. He’s facing away from the camera at first, watching the blood drip off his hands, off his coat. His face is obscured until the very end, when finally he looks up. In that moment where his eyes meet the camera -- where that trick of technology makes it look like Castiel is looking through the TV and directly at Dean -- he looks horrified. He looks scared. He looks like he regrets.

Sam latches onto it, onto that single, terrible moment. He says, “Look, Dean, he’s still in there, I know it. He knows this is wrong. He can be saved, he just needs--”

Dean doesn’t even bother trying to silence him. Instead, he turns off the TV, gets up, and walks out the door, slamming it on Sam’s frustrated sigh.

He knows better than that. He knows better than to hope Castiel can be saved. He knows better than to waste his time on anything other than reminding himself of all the things Castiel has done, of all the reasons he has to be angry.

It gets easier, after a while, as time drags on and the news stops showing that moment where this new, terrifying God still looks like Castiel. They switch to only showing the seconds before the bloodshed, the ones where Castiel is smiling wide, the ones where he looks less human than Dean has ever seen him. They show a version of Castiel who looks like he is utterly indifferent to arbitrary human constructs like good and evil, right and wrong. They show Castiel looking like he’s going to enjoy the slaughter, and Dean can’t tear his eyes away.

They stop showing Castiel looking like he’s human and hurting. It doesn’t fit the narrative they’re constructing around him.

Sam figures it out, the magic string of words Dean had tried and failed to find that night when Castiel stood across from him in Bobby’s living room, when he had slipped in between the cracks in the warding. Sam knows what to say to get Castiel to come back to them. He always was the smart one, the one with more practice when it comes to prayer, more of an affinity when it comes to faith.

It turns out Dean was wrong. Castiel wasn’t unknowable. Dean just didn’t know him, is all. Dean thought they shared something special, something extra, believed it when Castiel said they shared a profound bond. But really, it was Sam who knew him all along.

Castiel isn’t a God after all. He’s just the guy who used to be Dean’s best friend pretending to be one. He’s not a God, because if he were, Dean wouldn’t have spent so much time watching him fall apart in real time. Dean wouldn’t have had to watch him die slowly on national television. Castiel wouldn’t be covered in blood, some of which is probably his own. There wouldn’t be sores spreading across his forehead, under his eyes, across the backs of his hands. He wouldn’t be dying, and Dean wouldn’t be watching it happen.

Cas apologizes again, but he looks Dean in the eye, this time. Cas is dying and he spends his last breaths telling Dean how sorry he is. Cas looks right at him and he means it. Dean may not know him, but he knows that much.

Cas apologizes and it doesn’t change anything, but it’s nice to imagine it might. There’s a fantasy constructing itself in Dean’s mind, even though he doesn’t want it. Dean finds himself thinking that they just have to do this, they just have to send all the souls back to purgatory and maybe Cas will live. Maybe Cas will live through his own goddamn stupid mistakes and then they’ll finally get a break, then Dean will get a chance to ask Cas all the questions threatening to burst out of him at any moment. He’ll be able to ask him what he was thinking, why he did what he did, how he really feels. They just have to get through this and then they can work everything else out.

Cas falls to the ground and pulls something in Dean’s chest down along with him.

He can still feel it pulling at him when Cas starts breathing again. He can feel it when he helps Cas stand, keeps him steady with a hand on his elbow. He can feel it when Cas’ face shifts to something that is not him, to something that isn’t even Jimmy, to something Dean doesn’t recognize at all. He can feel it when Cas fists his hands in the front of his shirt, when Cas throws him against the wall.

When Cas leaves, something in Dean’s chest gets up and follows him right out the door.

Well, Dean thinks grimly, through the haze of pain and fear and rising panic. That’s new.

For a second after Cas had started breathing again, after the blood and the boils had faded from his skin and he’d opened his eyes, Dean had felt like he’d just witnessed a miracle. He’d been unable to tear his eyes from Cas’ face as he helped him up, awed that after everything that happened, he was now looking at the Cas he knew, the Cas he recognized. He was talking, once again, to his best friend. Cas was alive and Dean had felt like it wasn’t real, like it couldn’t possibly actually be happening.

It wasn’t a miracle, Dean should have known that. It was just another tragedy in disguise, another disappointment dressing up like hope. Cas was gone almost as soon as he woke up, gone before his vessel ever walked down into that reservoir and took that piece of Dean with him. Cas always did suck at goodbyes.

Dean fishes up Cas’ trench coat from the water, after. He isn’t quite sure why he does it. It’s not that he’s hoping Cas will come back. He knows better, he reminds himself, than to believe in miracles.

They show clips of Castiel on the news even after he’s gone. Dean knows there’s no new information they can provide, knows there’s no point or purpose to watching the reports, but he’s trapped on Rufus’ couch with his leg in a cast and it provides a convenient excuse, some explanation he can give. It is easier than to think he’s clinging to it because this is all he has left besides the stained, waterlogged trench coat mouldering away in the trunk of his car.

It’s been days since the last known event, they report, and there’s no new footage, so they show the same clips over and over -- the same shitty security camera footage with some grainy cell phone videos thrown in for good measure. There have been no more murders, the news is saying, but no more miracles, either. The authorities think he’s in hiding now that they caught him on camera. They’re still looking. Call this number if you know anything.

Dean should be thinking about what’s going to happen with the leviathans, now that they’re out in the world. He should be worrying about what their plans are, figuring out what they’re capable of, thinking of all the people they could hurt. He should, if nothing else, be worrying solely about Sam.

Instead, he watches the same tired reports about Castiel, about his friend who was not God, after all, because if he was, he wouldn’t be dead. He thinks about what the leviathans have done to Cas and he doesn’t understand why it matters to him. He doesn’t get why, after so much time spent feeling angry and betrayed, Cas’ absence hurts worse than his broken leg.

Dean tries to remember how he felt, back before all of this happened. He thinks back on how he felt when he watched Cas coughing up blood as his power failed him, how he felt when Chuck told him Cas had died, how he felt when Cas had disappeared for weeks and resurfaced with a call from a hospital. He remembers the worry, the fear, the way his heart had raced. He had been familiar with those feelings, because he’s felt them for friends and family, but what he’s feeling now? This feeling like when they left the reservoir some part of him stayed behind, somewhere deep down below the surface of the water? He doesn’t know what to make of it.

Sam doesn’t know what Dean is feeling, either, he can tell. He can see it in the way Sam looks at him when he hands him another beer, the way he tiptoes around saying Castiel’s name, the way he watches Dean when he hobbles around the cabin. He wonders if Sam thinks he’s going to do something stupid, if he’s going to slip away one of these nights to do something crazy like try to make a deal.

Even if he could -- even if Sam didn’t know him too well to let him actually go through with it, even if Sam wasn’t always there, on high alert, ready to intervene -- he wouldn’t try it. He wouldn’t do it, even if Sam stopped watching. Cas went through hell pulling Dean out of there, and Dean knows he can’t put himself back for Cas’ sake.

Cas always wanted Dean to be better than he was, always looked so disappointed when he failed to reach the bar Cas had set for him. It isn’t anything new, really. Dean has always done things he thought he couldn’t -- kept smiling, kept fighting, kept living -- to avoid disappointing people he loves: Sam, his dad, the memory of his mom. He just isn’t sure when Cas became part of the equation.

The leviathans are the ones doing the killings, now, but the news still talks about Castiel. They wonder, is this the same person? Does this follow a pattern? Are these copycat killers or is this something else entirely?

There’s no point to it, Dean knows, there isn’t anything the news can tell them that they haven’t discovered for themselves already. There’s nothing there that will change what’s happening, that will make his leg heal faster so he can get up and try to stop it himself. But he watches anyway, day after day, wakes up and goes to sleep in the same spot on the couch and watches the news for every hour in between.

Sam is at the table, doing research he’s pretending isn’t equally pointless. He slams his book shut, huffing an annoyed sigh. “C’mon, man,” he says. “Can’t we watch something else?”

“No,” Dean says.

Sam manages to sit in silence for another twenty minutes, foot tapping out an annoyed rhythm, before he pushes his chair back from the table. Sam pulls on his jacket, grabs the keys. “I’m going for a grocery run,” he says, instead of I need to get away from this.

Dean looks down at his leg, Dean thinks of the coat in the trunk and the empty space in his life and thinks, Believe me, I wish I could, too.

He’s still there when Sam returns a couple hours later. He’s still watching the same reports. He’s flicked back and forth between the different channels more times than he can count.

“Okay, enough,” Sam says. He pulls the remote from Dean’s hand, ignoring his protests, and turns off the TV.

It takes a few hours before having no distraction but his own thoughts becomes motivation enough to drag himself up to retrieve the remote from across the room. Sam doesn’t watch him, but he can feel him tensing, waiting to see what Dean will do. But Dean doesn’t have the strength to argue, not about this. He settles back on the couch and turns the TV back on and switches it to something else, some procedural cop drama he’ll never be invested in. He can feel Sam relax in his seat at the table.

He watches anything but the news after that. He watches thrillers and sitcoms and telenovelas. He watches dozens of awful, sappy made-for-TV movies and resents every single happy ending.

The problem with those, Dean thinks, is they keep giving him ideas. Dean watches all these feel-good films and he keeps thinking maybe Cas isn’t really dead. Maybe he made it out, somehow, maybe he’ll come back. Maybe Dean will find him one day wandering along the side of the road, will wake up to find Cas has been watching him sleep, will receive a phone call from an unknown number and answer to find Cas’ voice on the other end of the line. Maybe Cas is lying in some hospital somewhere, doctors hovering over him, waiting for him to wake up. Maybe he’s like Eowyn, on the edge of death but not quite there, just waiting for the right thing to revive him, something small and inconsequential that everyone always overlooks.

Dean has never put much stock in prayer, so he figures that’s a good place to start. He waits for Sam to go to bed and then he sits up, bows his head, laces his fingers together. He sits in the dark and he tries to think of the words to say, the plea to send out to a God he doesn’t believe in, the magic combination that will be his kingsfoil, will be the thing that brings Cas back to life.

He takes a deep breath. The words are right there on the tip of his tongue, but before they can make their way out into the world, Dean realizes what he’s doing. He realizes how pathetic and desperate this is, this thing that’s not genuine faith, this thing that’s nothing more than selfish hope.

“Stop it,” he tells himself. He unlaces his fingers. He lies down on the couch, pressing his face to the cushion, curling into himself.

He can still hear Cas saying it, all these years later: This is your problem, Dean. You have no faith.

Dean waits for the other shoe to drop. He’s always waiting for that, he thinks, has been waiting for that his entire life.

“Sam’s brain is healing, just like your leg,” Bobby tells him, but Dean knows better than to believe it. His leg hurts less and less every day, but he knows it’s not the same as Sam’s injuries, knows there’s a difference between physical and mental damage. He knows better than to hope that things get better in the way Bobby is talking about. He thinks of Cas and every time it hurts just as much as it did the day before.

He wants Bobby to be right, but he isn’t. Dean cuts off his cast and gets back into the game, and he wants it to feel good, he wants things to be simple even though they aren’t. He kills Amy, he’s horrified to realize, because he wants to, because he’s exhausted trying to see things in shades of gray. He tells her people are who they are as he does it and he desperately wants it to be true. He wants to feel good about it, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t feel good about much of anything any more.

He feels even worse as soon as their next case gets complicated, once it becomes about people being punished for past mistakes. He knows Sam can see it, has to keep avoiding the sympathetic looks he keeps shooting Dean’s way.

Dean is put on trial -- because he hasn’t paid enough for his mistakes, already, he knows he hasn’t, not given the magnitude of them. He sits in front of Osiris and he hopes and he fears he’s going to call Cas. He’s wondering, if he did, whether or not Cas would show up. He’s afraid what either possibility would mean.

He can imagine it so easily, Cas sitting there as Osiris questions him, as Osiris asks Cas to explain all the ways in which Dean ruined his life. He can picture Cas, flickering and otherworldly, brash and defiant even in death, indignant at being summoned, refusing to answer a single one of Osiris’ questions. It wouldn’t matter. Dean already knows the answers.

Dean makes it out alive, in the end, but he knows he’ll be punished for it. He always is.

He dreams of it that night. He’s alone this time, the chair next to him empty, Sam not there to offer the defense Dean is unable and unwilling to come up with for himself. Castiel is sitting on the stand, black ooze dripping down his face, covering one of his eyes, soaking into his collar, and Osiris is questioning him, Osiris is asking, “Isn’t it true he hunted you? Isn’t it true he researched how to stop you like you were just another monster? Like you weren’t someone he had called his friend, his family? Isn’t it true he tried to kill you for making the choices he taught you to make?”

In the space between the questions and Castiel’s impending answers, Dean sees it all. He sees their whole relationship play out in front of him, all these bits and pieces, the years they knew each other summarized in staccato bursts. He sees Cas for the first time, hears him say, I’m the one who gripped you tight and raised you from perdition; sees himself with his arm around Cas, laughing; sees Cas pass out as he and Sam do their best to hold him up, keep him from falling; sees Cas saying, For what it’s worth, I would give anything not to have you do this; sees Cas saying, I’m hunted, I rebelled, and I did it, all of it, for you.

Dean sees it all and he can’t say anything, not that he would know what to say, anyway. He can’t fight for himself. He just can’t.

Cas opens his mouth and Dean wakes up gasping.

He doesn’t know how Sam does it, he really doesn’t. He doesn’t understand how you can have Lucifer haunting you and still keep it together, not when he’s having nightmares about some up-jumped angel and feels like he’s falling apart. He tries, for Sam’s sake, though. He tries to put in at least a token effort, because Dean should be the one on an even keel, here. He tries, he really does.

He’s tired. They all are, Dean knows, they’ve all been doing this so long and they’re exhausted, they’re too tired to give each other the benefit of the doubt. He doesn’t deserve it, he knows, but he thinks maybe Cas did, thinks maybe he should have tried harder to understand.

He thinks maybe he’s been going about it all wrong. He’s been looking at the Cas he thought he knew and trying to figure out what happened, where things went wrong. He’s been looking at the Cas who called himself God and trying to find a trace of the Cas who pulled him from hell, who confided in him, who chose him and Sam over the rest of heaven again and again, who broke every rule in the book to help them, who fought in spite of waning strength and ruined faith, who told Dean so many times that he was worth something that he’d almost started to believe it.

They taught him that, Dean knows. They taught Cas free will, they taught him how to make his own choices, and can he really be faulted for making the wrong ones? Dean had called him a child, and that’s what he is, really, isn’t it? Millions of years of existence without freedom of choice, without free will, and now suddenly he’s had it for the blink of an eye. Of course he was going to fuck it up.

Dean watches the reports of the leviathans on the news, the indiscriminate killing, the deaths that serve no apparent end other than that they’re fun or food for the leviathans, and he thinks, Cas had those inside him. Cas had all that darkness inside him, those terrors that even God was afraid of.

“It’s actually sort of impressive, isn’t it,” he asks Sam, “that Cas could at least direct it at people who maybe kind of deserved it, that he still maintained some kind of moral compass? Is it really that much worse than anything we’ve done? He screwed up, there towards the end, but see, it was the leviathans, it was the leviathans all along--”

Sam gives him this look, soft and sad and patient, and he says, “Dean.” He pauses, as though choosing his next words carefully, as though Dean needs to be soft handled. He says, “Denying the darkness in people doesn’t do anyone any good.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Dean asks, bristling.

“I know you want to believe it wasn’t really Cas,” Sam says. “I get it, I do. But Cas’ choices got him there. Cas did that, Cas did all of it.” He turns on the news, where they’re still showing clips of Cas in that campaign office. He says, “Look, Dean, Cas--”

“That’s not Cas,” Dean says.

Sam sighs. He says, “Dean, c’mon, before he even took on the souls--”

“Whose side are you even on?” Dean snaps.

Sam sighs again. He turns off the TV. He stops arguing with Dean about it, stops pleading with him. He stops saying Cas’ name at all, which suits Dean just fine.

Dean dreams of his choices and where they’ve led the people in his life. He has nightmares where he watches Cas walking into the water over and over again, where he watches Sam crack and crumble to pieces, where he stabs Amy in the stomach and says you are what you are what you are.

This is what Dean is: someone who wakes up choking on his own mistakes, picks up a bottle, picks up right where he left off. Someone who looks for a case, for anything to distract him from his own ghosts, for a hunt with the promise of death at the end, the only kind of conclusion he knows.

Sam sits across the table from him as he reads. Sam looks at him in that way he has, sad and sympathetic, that way that doesn’t do Dean any good, that doesn’t distract him at all. He looks down at his research but he can see Sam in his peripheral vision, looking calm and collected, and he tries not to resent him for that, for the fact that he can look so goddamn normal in spite of everything that’s happened, everything that’s still happening. He doesn’t know why he can’t just pull himself together. He doesn’t know what’s wrong with himself.

The case turns out to be its own kind of nightmare. The monsters, it turns out, love each other, even though they’re both more than a little terrible. They don’t even get to kill anything at the end of the day. In the end, it isn’t any kind of distraction at all.

“Something is always eating at me,” Dean tells Sam when he asks, and it’s the truth, because he is who he is who he is.

The leviathans are on TV, they’re killing people wearing Sam’s and Dean’s bodies, they’re carrying out massacres with their faces and hands, and they’re smiling while they do it. Dean watches them on the news and he thinks, I can’t remember the last time I smiled like that. Anyone who knew me would know, watching this, that it has to be someone else. It’s so obvious, they would have to know.

It will be harder for them now. It will be harder to move without being noticed, to do simple things like get gas, get food, get a good night’s rest. It will be harder to distract himself with an evening spent in a bar and a night spent in someone else’s bed. Everything is already so difficult, and now everything is about to get even harder. Dean thinks of all of these things, and then he thinks, At least now maybe I won’t have to hear about Cas on the news.

Then there’s a leviathan in their basement and things get harder still. There’s a leviathan strapped into a chair who says he knows every last thing about them that Castiel knew. He says, I know all of your aliases, just like Castiel did. I know every single one of your secrets.

Dean thinks, for a moment, What else does he know? What else could he tell me about what Cas knew, about what Cas felt? There’s a moment where he pictures himself with a knife in his hand, where he thinks about pulling up the skills he knows are still buried somewhere, where he thinks of trying things he knows Bobby hasn’t, of experimenting until he finds out what it is that makes a leviathan hurt. If hell taught him anything, it’s that nothing is so powerful it can’t feel pain. For years upon years, that was the only truth he knew. He hasn’t forgotten.

He can feel it, for a minute, can feel the blade in his hand, can picture this creature’s skin parting, can imagine the exact pitch of his scream.

But there’s leviathans on the news, and Dean reminds himself he’s in the business of killing monsters, not of getting what he wants. There’s a job to do, so he leaves the leviathan in the basement behind.

He leaves his car behind, too, because that’s what’s required of him. That’s the price he has to pay to go on living, giving up yet another piece of himself.

“I’ll help move our stuff,” Sam says.

Dean says, “No. Let me do it.” Sam doesn’t argue.

Dean picks through the trunk of his car and chooses the things that are the most important, because the piece of shit they have to drive now doesn’t have nearly the same space, not when they have to hide it there in the back, down in the place where the spare tire should be. He picks out the essentials, the salt, the lighter fluid, the silver bullets. He picks up their most reliable guns and their sharpest blades and he leaves everything else behind.

He stares at the coat for a long time, as though he’s trying to decide how important it is to him. As though he doesn’t already know that he’s going to bring it with him, shove it down into the hidden space in this unfamiliar car, let it take up precious space that could be filled instead with things that may save their lives or the lives of others, things that are actually useful.

It winds up sitting there in the back along with the rest of the pieces of his life, minus a few items, minus his car. Maybe it’s for the best they had to leave her behind, he thinks. It gives him a convenient excuse to be angry.

That’s not quite right, though, he thinks, when he catches sight of himself in the rear-view mirror. He doesn’t look angry, really, just grim and tired. Unhappy. It’s fine, though. At least it’s a face he recognizes.

It should feel like a victory, killing those leviathans that were wearing their faces, but it doesn’t. Dean doesn’t get victories any more, he should have remembered that. They kill the leviathans and it’s all over the news, but the price Dean pays for this is that Sam finds out about Amy, and Sam leaves him, too. He can’t even be angry about it. This is just him losing another person he cares about because of the choices he made. It’s just the logical consequence, the thing anyone could have seen coming.

Sam leaves and Dean realizes, within hours, that he had forgotten how it felt to be alone. He checks his phone over and over and finds no new text messages, no missed calls, and he remembers, now, how lonely it is, how desperate it makes you feel, how much you crave any kind of acknowledgement, no matter how negative. Sam is angry, he gets that, but he would take any amount of shouting, any number of cold stares and charged silences rather than deal with another day, with even another hour, of this.

There are no cases. No Sam. Nothing on TV. Dean sits by himself in his silent motel room and he starts thinking of how Cas must have felt, fighting that war alone.

Not just a war, he thinks. A war with his own family. It hadn’t even seemed like that big of a deal, Dean thinks, when he first figured out what was going on. He had heard that story before, after all. He supposes after you stop one apocalypse, maybe the next doesn’t seem like as big a deal. But he thinks maybe it was a big deal to Cas.

Realizing, after several millennia, that your family isn’t on your side after all is probably a pretty big deal. Realizing that even after defying them and winning, after stopping the literal biblical apocalypse, the war still isn’t over must have been one hell of a disappointment.

It’s just that Dean has been fighting with his family from day one. He was just bad enough at being obedient that it angered John and just good enough at it that it angered Sam. He was always fighting with one or the other of them and sometimes with both of them. He’s just so used to fighting with his family that it didn’t occur to him how much that would hurt, to think everything was okay for so long and realize it never has been. To save the world and realize, in spite of everything, your family still isn’t on your side.

He thinks maybe he’s starting to realize the true implications of Cas’ words after Lucifer was thrown into the cage. No paradise. No hell. Just more of the same. He hadn’t gotten it at first, hadn’t understood what Cas had meant. The end of the apocalypse returned Earth to the status quo, but it hadn’t gotten Dean more of the same. It had given him, instead, a taste of what he could have. It bought Dean the most peaceful year he’s ever had in spite of everything.

He thinks maybe he’s starting to realize what it bought Castiel.

Dean tries to understand. He may not have known Castiel before, but he tries now. He looks at all of Castiel’s choices, at his actions, and tries to make sense of them through his hurt and betrayal.

He looks back at the past year and pieces things together, tries to see Castiel’s actions in a new light, with additional context, now that he has the benefit of hindsight. He’s resented Castiel since the last apocalypse ended, he thinks, has never quite forgiven him for the way things went, after, for seeming like he didn’t care, for leaving Dean alone after he had just lost his brother. But he thinks, now, that Castiel had to have cared, didn’t he? He tried his best to get Sam back out of that cage, he braved hell a second time even though no one ordered him to, even though that’s not something Dean would have asked of him. He fucked it up, but he tried. That’s got to count for something, right?

Maybe that was what he was trying to do all along, Dean thinks. Maybe Castiel was always trying to make the right choice and do the right thing, even if he fucked it up colossally along the way. He looks at everything Castiel did, good and bad, great and terrible, and he realizes he was wrong before. It wasn’t the leviathans at all. All of it, every single good intention gone wrong -- all of that was Castiel.

He thinks that maybe Castiel did all of it, took on all those souls, because he cared. It was a huge risk, doing that, and Castiel must have known. He must have known what might happen, must have known there was the possibility it would be exactly the death sentence that it ultimately was.

Dean thinks, Maybe it hurt Castiel to do what he did. Maybe it hurt him even more than it hurt me.

It may not have been the leviathans making those choices after all, but Dean thinks maybe he understands how it could mess someone up, having so many souls crammed inside of them. He has just the one soul and he hurts all the time.

The one thing Dean doesn’t get, though, the one thing he can’t understand, is why Castiel didn’t come to them. Dean is alone now, Dean can’t go to Sam because Sam is angry, but why couldn’t Cas come to them? Dean wasn’t angry with him, none of them were, not at the start. Why not ask for their help?

He’s not doing anything special when it clicks. He’s sitting there in the middle of the day and he doesn’t know precisely what it is -- maybe it’s the way the light is filtering in through the threadbare curtains, maybe it’s the exact rattle of the AC or the taste of his warm beer or maybe it’s just the way he feels, the exact blend of loneliness and fear and desperation -- but all of a sudden he’s twenty-six again and his dad is gone and he’s sitting in a room so like this one and mentally calculating how far it is to California, how long it would take him to drive to the address he keeps scribbled on the back of one of his few precious photographs, whether he has enough gas in his tank and cash in his pocket to make it there.

He had gone, had driven all the way to Sam’s apartment and sat outside for a long time, looking at that quiet place in that college town, at the normalcy of it, like something on TV, like something out of a dream. He had sat there and thought about it -- really thought about it -- for the first time. He had thought about Sam going to school, working some shitty food service job to buy his books, coming home and studying his ass off. Sam actually having a home to come back to at the end of the day. Sam going to the movies and the skating rink and the arcade, Sam making friends and going on dates and for the first time in his life not just playing at normal but actually living it. He had thought of the kid he basically raised, how practically since the time he could talk, this is what he was dreaming of. All of this in its mundane glory. And there Dean was, ready to rip him out of it.

He had promised himself it would be simple, this one thing, and Sam would be back in a few days and back to this life he’d built. But he had known, not even that deep down, that he was lying to himself. There had been a voice in his head telling him, If you really loved him, you would leave him alone. You would keep him out of this. But Dean had gotten out of his car, anyway, got up and pulled out his lockpick and broken his way into Sam’s happy little life and ruined it forever.

Dean thinks, I wonder if Cas did that. I wonder if he looked at me with Lisa and Ben, with a normal house in a normal neighborhood, in a normal life. I wonder if he looked at me doing that mundane shit and he did what I couldn’t do for Sam.

He tries to work it out, what Castiel must have been thinking to make him do that, to go it alone just so Dean wouldn’t have to get involved. He tries to imagine the depth of feeling that would drive Castiel to make a mistake of that magnitude. He tries to figure it out, Cas’ motivation, that thing that made him decide to make his own life harder in some fool’s attempt to make Dean’s easier. He’s trying to figure out why.

It scares him, trying to work out the answer to that one.

The news has changed again, has moved on like Dean can’t, has switched to talking about the death of some famous psychic. He watches the reports and tries to care and then he sees him, there in the background, sees the long limbs and floppy hair he knows belong to his brother. Because he has never been able to leave well enough alone, he checks out of his room and packs up his few belongings and the coat into the trunk of the car that is not his and he goes.

He tries not to be delusional on the drive over. He tries not to think that maybe Sam will forgive him for the shit he pulled, tries not to let himself believe that forgiveness is something he deserves.

Dean finds Sam working the case, just like he knew he would. He tries to earn Sam’s forgiveness, but he keeps messing it up, keeps translating his desperation into rudeness and sarcasm. He can tell Sam is mad, but he can’t seem to make himself stop. Sam is furious with him, but he wants him to come back, anyway, wants Sam to want to work with him, anyway, to be brothers, anyway, even though Dean is terrible and they both know it. He doesn’t know what, exactly, he’s trying to prove.

It would be easier, he thinks, if he would just be honest, if he would suck it up and tell Sam what he wants, if he would shut up for one goddamn second and work out a decent apology. He isn’t sure he trusts himself to do that, though, doesn’t quite know what words would come out if he tried to be sincere. He doesn’t trust anyone any more, least of all himself.

Sam says he forgives him, at the end of the day, but Dean doesn’t trust that, either. He knows better than to read too much into it, to think it means much of anything.

They’ve always lived off the grid, always been separate, to some extent, from the people they’re trying to protect, but now they separate themselves even further. They live with cold showers and cold food, but Dean still makes sure he finds the money to have cold beer, makes time to hustle enough pool to make it happen.

As the days drag on, it becomes harder and harder to remember why he’s even bothering. Saving the world has always been Dean’s job, but he just can’t seem to find any good reason to keep on trying when the world clearly doesn’t want to be saved. Bobby is telling him to find one, a reason to keep on keeping on, but if he hasn’t been able to figure that out over the past thirty-odd years, he sure as hell isn’t going to be able to figure it out now.

He doesn’t even regret it when he eats that goo sandwich. It’s better than any amount of alcohol, better than anything he’s felt in a long time. He feels great, actually. He’s been searching for a reason to keep on fighting the good fight for months now, and for the first time, he doesn’t care that he doesn’t have an answer. He has that brief amount of time where he doesn’t care, and so of course the cost this time is even higher.

The fucked up silver lining, Dean thinks, if there is one, is that it gives him the reason Bobby was pushing him to find. He looks at Bobby on his deathbed and thinks, if Cas were here, Bobby would still be alive. If Cas were here, the leviathans wouldn’t be. It all comes back to that, he thinks -- to them. The leviathans have taken enough from him and he’s had enough. That’s going to be his reason, he thinks. He promises it to himself, spits the words in Dick Roman’s face.

It is, of course, easier said than done. The days already felt so long, but after Bobby’s death, they feel even longer. The high point, if there is one, is that the news has completely forgotten about Castiel, now, has moved on even from the leviathans that murdered so many innocent people wearing Sam and Dean’s faces. Dean says a silent prayer of thanks for the media’s short attention span, because all they seem able to talk about nowadays is Dick Roman.

It’s the only thing that keeps him going during those long weeks where they’re trying to figure out the significance of the numbers Bobby fought so hard to get them, that were literally his last act on Earth. They watch as things get worse with the leviathans, always worse. Dean watches them on TV, Dean turns Bobby’s flask over and over in his hands, Dean moves Cas’ coat to another trunk in another car. The people he’s lost keep him up at night, but he figures it doesn’t matter as long as they’re also the thing that gets him out of bed in the morning.

Decide to be fine ‘til the end of the week, Frank tells him, because it turns out he knows that look on Dean’s face, the dark circles under his eyes. Make yourself smile because you’re alive and that’s your job. And then do it again the next week.

Dean wakes up every day and he repeats Frank’s words to himself like a mantra. He tells himself this is his job: deciding he’s fine until Dick Roman is dead, until he gets his revenge. The lofty goal of saving a world he’s lost interest in living in doesn’t have the same draw it used to, but this he can do, this he can care about.

He has to practice it, looking in the mirror and smiling. It feels unnatural, it pulls at his face in an unfamiliar way. His reflection isn’t a person he recognizes at all.

Dean smiles at himself in the mirror and he thinks of Dick Roman’s head on a pike. He’s going to make it happen, going to work towards that singular goal. And as for what he’s going to do after, what will keep him going once that’s done? He doesn’t know or care. As far as he’s concerned, it doesn’t really matter.

Dean dreams he’s standing by the edge of the reservoir. He’s watching, helpless, as Castiel walks down into the water. He’s taking Cas’ coat in his hands, he’s frozen in place as the stains on it grow and spread, as black oozes over the fabric and onto his arms, seeps across his skin, into his pores, crawls up his neck and into his mouth and down his throat and--

He wakes up gasping.

“You okay?” Sam asks.

“I’m fine,” Dean says.

He gets up and goes about his day as best he can, pretending like that’s true even when he opens his trunk and sees it sitting there, tucked beside the salt rounds and holy water.

Jody has talked about finding pieces of Bobby’s life all over the place. Cas wasn’t a person, though, didn’t have a home or a car, didn’t have any trinkets cluttering up his life, didn’t even have any photographs. Besides all of his unanswered questions, this coat is all Dean has been left with.

There is, if Dean is being honest, a small, foolish part of himself that wants to think he’s keeping it because he thinks Cas will come back. The other part, the bigger part, the part that’s been doing this job for two decades and change, knows the real reason he keeps moving the coat from one car trunk to another. He’s keeping it, he knows, because he can’t bear the thought that Cas will stop haunting him.

It’s not much, Dean knows. It’s worse than having nothing, in some ways. But he just can’t let it go. Not yet. Maybe, he’s beginning to suspect, not ever.

Dean doesn’t dream during the night he spends with Lydia, and he counts it as a blessing right up until the nightmare unfolds over the following days.

He sees himself in Emma, in her fear that she’ll become like the people who raised her, in her desire for something else, for something better she’s pretty sure she can’t have, for the childhood that was stolen from her. He sees himself in her and he hates himself for it, because he knows better than to trust her.

She’s right about one thing, though. She doesn’t have a choice. She wouldn’t have been there if not for Dean, if not for his choices.

It feels like a sign from the universe that Emma tries to kill him, that even his own kid wants him dead before she even knows him. There’s something about it that feels right, that feels inevitable, because this is always where his choices seem to lead.

He doesn’t trust her. He doesn’t even know her. He hates that it still hurts, watching her die before he even got a chance to learn to love her.

Cas would have liked her, too, he thinks, would have loved her with all her sharp edges, all her fierce anger, all her inhumanness. Cas would have understood her, maybe could have even protected her. He lies awake that night imagining it, what it would have been like introducing Cas to his daughter.

He wakes to find them sitting next to each other on the other bed. Cas is talking to Emma in a low voice, showing her the exact flick of his wrist he uses to slip his blade from his sleeve. Emma is watching with wide eyes like she’s just seen a magic trick.

“Good morning,” Cas says, and when Dean looks up at him, he’s smiling.

“This isn’t real,” Dean says. He closes his eyes.

He wakes in a dark hotel room, Sam asleep on the other bed. “You okay?” Sam asks blearily as Dean sits up.

“Just peachy,” Dean says. He lies back down, turning away and pulling the covers around himself.

They’re out working a case, tramping their way through the woods in search of a vamp nest, when he smells it. It’s this exact blend of new growth over old decay that he recognizes, and suddenly he’s back there, in that version of 2014 Zachariah concocted for him. He remembers it so vividly that it throws him off, leaves him with whiplash, has Sam pausing to ask, Dean?

He dreams of it that night, after they’ve finished the hunt and cleaned up and the smell still lingers, trapped somewhere under his fingernails, in the fabric of the clothes he hasn’t yet had a chance to wash. He dozes off in their shitty motel and finds himself waking somewhere else entirely, in a room with sunlight filtering in through a dirty window, the high, sweet song of a bird who cares nothing about humanity’s demise making its way in between the cracks in the cabin wall.

“Morning, sunshine,” Cas says from the other side of the bed. His lopsided smile doesn’t reach his eyes. Dean knows those eyes, now, has seen them on TV more times than he cares to count.

“I’m dreaming,” Dean says.

Cas laughs, a low chuckle in the back of his throat. “Oh? How do you figure?”

“Because you’re here,” Dean says.

“Hmm,” Cas says, propping himself up on his elbow. His smile turns sharper, more mischievous. “Is this going to be a good dream?”

Cas is looking at him expectantly. “I dunno,” Dean murmurs.

Dean reaches out, hesitates with his hand hovering in front of Cas’ face for a moment before he reaches the rest of the way and brushes Cas’ hair from his forehead. He touches his fingertips to Cas’ cheek, runs a thumb across Cas’ bottom lip, grazes over Cas’ stubble, his ear, curls his fingers in the hair at the back of Cas’ neck. He slides his hand over Cas’ shoulder, his back, curls his arm around Cas’ waist and pulls him close, holds Cas so his face is pressed against Dean’s neck, so his arm is thrown lazily over Dean’s side.

He thinks maybe if he tries hard enough, he just might remember this when he wakes up.

“This is tame, even for you,” Cas says, breath warm against Dean’s skin. He says it in a tone Dean knows -- the same one people have used his whole life to tell him he is, in one way or another, a disappointment.

“Shut up,” Dean says, but Cas simply laughs like he knows the command is just as meaningless as the rest of this.

He replays it in his mind when he wakes up, sits with his head in his hands and tries to commit the dream to memory. He thinks maybe if he tries hard enough -- if he cobbles together the dream with all the times they’ve touched, when they’ve held each other up so they didn’t fall, when they’ve had their hands on one another’s shoulders -- if he pieces these all together, maybe he can figure out what it would be like, wrapping Cas up in a hug, twisting his fingers in that stupid coat, pressing his cheek to the side of Cas’ head.

He tries, but as the minutes tick by he can feel the details slipping away -- the smell of Cas’ skin, the comforting warmth of him, the feel of him under Dean’s fingers. The feeling fades and fades until it’s little more than the ghost of a sensation, floating somewhere just beyond the reach of Dean’s fingertips. It fades until all he’s left with is the feeling the dream had generated in him, the slow, aching sense of loss with which he’s become so familiar.

He’s still sitting there when Sam wakes. “Dean?” he asks. “You okay?”

Dean doesn’t say anything. He gets up and heads to the bathroom, slamming the door behind himself. He gets in the shower and scrubs the rest of the dream from his skin.

Dean dreams he’s back by the lake. He’s sitting on the end of the dock, and Cas is standing there, next to him, looking out over the water.

“This isn’t you, is it,” Dean says. “You’re not visiting my dreams. You’re just something my mind has conjured up.”

Cas makes a thoughtful noise in the back of his throat. He says, “How would you know?”

Dean shrugs. He says, “I just would.”

He takes a deep breath and listens to the sound that permeates this place, the one that is the susurrus of the water and the swish of Cas’ coat as he walks and the rustle of his wings as he disappears. That sound will haunt him when he wakes, but while he’s here, it’s calming. Familiar.

“I think maybe I love you,” Dean says, because this is the only place where he can say it. “And I think maybe you loved me, too. I think maybe that’s the only way any of this makes sense.”

This Cas is only an echo. He hmms in the back of his throat again. He repeats, “How would you know?”

Dean wakes with Cas’ voice echoing in his ears. He thinks of the way Cas had looked at him when he said, I’m gonna find some way to redeem myself to you. He thinks of the coat folded up in his trunk. He thinks of everything he dredged up and examined, piece by piece, trying to make it all fit into a narrative he could understand.

He thinks, still half asleep, I know.

He was expecting to feel different, somehow, he thinks. He was expecting to feel a little more at peace, maybe, to feel like one of his greatest questions had finally been answered. He was hoping to feel like he’d figured something out, like maybe he could finally put something to rest, finally let something go. He figured maybe he’d finally hurt a little less.

Instead, he still has the same ache in his chest, still feels just as tired and desperate as always. He doesn’t feel any different than he did yesterday, or the day before that, or any day since…

He tries to pinpoint an exact date, tries to finish that thought, but in the end, all he can come up with is since Cas.

Maybe he loved Cas, and maybe Cas loved him, too, but the realization isn’t life-changing, it isn’t magic. Cas is still dead. Dean is still the same sad fuckup he’s always been. It doesn’t change anything at all.

“Dean?” Sam says. “Are you--”

Dean pulls the lamp from the nightstand and flings it across the wall. It doesn’t even have the decency to shatter. Instead, it makes a sad whump and falls to the floor, the plastic cracked and the shade bent.

After that, Sam doesn’t ask again.

There’s no break at all for them, not from any of it. There’s always another case, and there’s always the leviathans on TV, their reach always growing. There’s no reprieve, no escape for Dean anywhere, not when leviathans could be anywhere, could be anyone. They can’t take anyone at face value, can’t trust anyone at all, least of all themselves.

Dean can’t even trust his own senses any more. Dean hears it all the time, in the water pumping through the pipes embedded in too-thin walls as Sam showers, in the sound of his own limbs shifting against cheap motel sheets as he drags himself up out of bed. He hears it in the wind rushing past his open window as they drive and in the flutter of feathers as birds flit from one branch to another when they stop for gas. He’s haunted by that sound, just like he thought he would be, that one that keeps telling him Cas is about to appear.

He hears it everywhere, keeps pausing in the middle of conversations to turn his head. Sam notices. He keeps giving Dean these sympathetic looks, keeps leaving openings where he could bring it up if he wanted. He can’t put that on Sam, though, not now, not when Sam is going through enough as it is.

Dean hears Cas everywhere. He wonders what Sam is seeing.

He notices Sam looking off to the side, sometimes, notices him missing bits of conversation, flinching at nothing. Sam goes out of his way to be kind, anyway, to speak gently to the people who have lost loved ones, to bring Dean that stupid slinky, to keep Dean from losing it completely. It makes him feel like shit, that Sam can be dealing with all of this crap and still be a good person on top of it. Dean, meanwhile, feels like he’s choking on it every time he has to tell another person Sorry for your loss.

They keep acting like everything is normal, keep working cases like every day is just another day on the job. Dean tries not to think of Cas, tries not to think of the leviathans they’re powerless to stop, tries not to notice that Sam isn’t sleeping, that even his seemingly infinite patience is wearing thin. He tries to focus on his job because there’s nothing else he can do.

Then Sam disappears and that simplifies things. That becomes the only thing that matters.

They can never catch a damn break.

It’s bad. Dean knows exactly how bad it is because Sam, of all people, has lost hope. Sam tries to talk him out of bothering to look for help. Sam reminds him that Cas warned him this was coming, that this would happen if he put Sam’s soul back. It’s great, Dean thinks, it’s just perfect. This is just another thing that’s happening because of the choices he made.

He’s terrified of losing Sam on top of everything and everyone else that he’s lost. He doesn’t know what he’ll be left with if that happens, doesn’t know if his desire for revenge will be enough to keep him going, so he puts on a brave face and does his best to find a cure. He doesn’t know what else to do.

When he hears about Emmanuel, it sounds too good to be true. He feels like he’s desperately grasping at straws, but he gets in his car and drives, anyway. He doesn’t really have faith that this is going to be anything, but he tries.

He has a long time to think on the drive over. He prepares himself for every possibility -- that Bobby’s friend messed up one of the tests and he’ll have to gank this guy, that he’s just some fake and the supposedly healed vision was just some fluke, that it will be another situation like with the reaper that’ll leave him with the shitty choice of trading someone’s life for Sam’s even though he knows that isn’t what Sam would want.

He reminds himself that no matter what this is, it isn’t going to be a miracle. Fixes like this don’t come cheap and never come free. There’s always a cost to these things, something precious you have to give up to get what you want.

He thinks, if it really is something like the reaper situation, that’s a cost he might pay. It’s not what Sam would want, and it’s horrible and selfish, but Dean isn’t the hero who saved the world. He isn’t that person any more. Maybe he never was that person. He’s just some guy who wants his brother back, who’s tired of losing all the people he loves. He’s tired and selfish and hurting and he thinks that Sam has done so much for the world that if all Dean has to do is trade the life of some random person, some stranger he’ll never meet -- if all he has to do is condemn them to the fate that is currently Sam’s, he’s probably going to do it.

Instead, what he gets is the last thing he expected, the thing he spent months trying not to hope for.

Emmanuel looks so much like the Cas that Dean remembers, but he’s softer around the edges, somehow, human in a way Dean has never seen him. He’s patient and humble and kind; he’s gentle with this woman he’s calling his wife. It’s as though everything the leviathans are, as though everything in Cas that they catered to, has been burnt away and left in its place someone else entirely. The leviathans are gone, and what remains is a person who is only part of who Cas was.

Dean wants him back. He wants him desperately, even all the awful, terrible parts. He wants Cas back so bad it aches, but he forces himself to shake Emmanuel’s hand like it’s nothing, like he can’t count the number of times he had touched Cas on the fingers of one hand.

For a few minutes he thinks Cas must be fucking with him, must be pretending not to know him to get revenge, maybe, to punish Dean for not looking for him. It starts to sink in, though, starts to become clear that Cas really doesn’t remember him at all.

That’s worse, somehow, Dean thinks, as Emmanuel looks at him, earnest and serious in a way Dean almost recognizes, and asks, “What’s your issue?”

For a few long moments, Dean can’t think of anything to say. He can feel his face doing things without his permission, twisting into some expression he can’t identify before he manages to pull himself together enough to give half an answer.

“My brother,” Dean says.

The person who is not Castiel sits in the passenger seat of Dean’s car. Dean tries not to look at him out of the corner of his eye, because seeing him that way, not quite in focus, not quite head-on, Emmanuel almost looks like Castiel. Looking at him like that, keeping him in his periphery, he looks just like Dean’s friend, like Dean’s family, he looks like someone Dean loves, but he isn’t. He’s someone else entirely.

From the driver’s seat, Dean can feel Emmanuel’s eyes on the side of his face, can feel the weight of his calm gaze, the one that doesn’t contain even the smallest shred of angelic fury. Dean knows those eyes, but he doesn’t know that look, just like he doesn’t recognize that neatly-combed hair or that suburban dad sweater.

He thought he would be elated, finding out Cas is alive. In some ways, he is. He’s relieved. He’s grateful. He feels like he’s been given a gift he doesn’t deserve. In some ways, this is going exactly how he had imagined, but he’s starting to think that the ways in which it isn’t just might kill him.

He thinks it should start hurting less the longer they drive. He should be getting used to this, he thinks, should acclimate, but he doesn’t. He keeps trying not to glance over at Cas and failing.

He asks questions to fill the silence, asks the only questions he can, none of which are the questions he really wants to ask, none of which are the ones he needs answers to, and he hates every second of it. It’s a long drive back, and he has too much time to think about it, to puzzle over how they wound up in this bizarre fucking situation. He imagines Daphne finding Cas and taking him in, and all can think is that maybe if he would have waited, if he would have looked harder, if he had had Frank look for something other than the leviathans, maybe he would have been the one to find Cas. If he had done something else, made better choices, maybe these past few months would have been so different. Maybe he wouldn’t have had so much to drink or lost so much sleep. Maybe Bobby would still be alive and Sam wouldn’t be in such bad shape. Maybe the Cas he knew would be sitting next to him instead of this stranger.

Dean tries not to think that maybe they could figure this out, this thing between them, if the universe would just give them a fucking break for once, if it would just give them enough time to get on the same page, if it would just give him enough time to explain. He thinks maybe that’s all it would take. But the second chance they were given didn’t work out, and Dean’s not nearly stupid enough to hold out hope for a third.

He would undo it, though, if he could, would turn back the clock on Cas’ fucked up baptism, would screw up his clean slate. He wants to find something, wants to find the magic words to trigger Cas’ memory, because he never could leave well enough alone.

He thought Cas was dead but he was here, living this mostly normal life. This version of Cas doesn’t feel like a bad person, doesn’t deserve the shit Dean would inevitably drag him into, but Dean would put that on him, anyway. Dean would tear him out of it if he could. He’s so goddamn selfish that he’d give Cas back the weight of all his memories, make him remember everything he did, everything that happened, even if it meant Cas had to live with the pain of all of it. Dean would ruin this good life Cas has made for himself if it meant he got to have him back.

Meg offers to jog Cas’ memory, and for a moment, Dean is tempted. He’s tempted right up until he realizes he doesn’t know what version of Cas he’d get back. He doesn’t know, and he’s too scared to take the chance.

Dean gets it anyway, the chance he wanted but didn’t ask for.

Cas smites the demons and god, Dean recognizes him. Dean knows him, and he responds to his name, he says “I remember you” in the voice Dean knows.

For a moment, Dean feels something dangerously like hope.

And then Cas tries to take all the blame, tries to leave just like Dean feared he would.

“I shouldn’t be here,” Cas says. Dean knows he isn’t just talking about being here, at this hospital, because Dean has been feeling that for months, knows exactly what he means. Cas tries to leave, and this time, Dean does something different. He goes after him.

“If you remember,” Dean says, “you know you did the best that you could at the time.”

“Don’t defend me,” Cas says, as though Dean could bring himself to do anything else. “Do you have any idea the death toll in heaven? On Earth?” Dean does have an idea, has a pretty damn good idea, actually, and yet he can’t seem to find it in himself to think of that as a reason to stop.

Cas turns to face him. He says, “We didn’t part friends, Dean.”

No, Dean thinks, we didn’t, and I still couldn’t find it in me to hate you, and I think I’m just starting to understand why.

He pulls the trench coat from the trunk. He’s lost track of how many different cars it’s been in, lost track of how many times he’s moved it from one trunk to another. He thinks he gets it, now, why he kept it all this time. It was a reminder to himself. It was a promise to himself that he knew Cas after all.

He holds it out to Cas like he has something to prove. Like the fact he fished it up from the water will show Cas that even then, even after everything terrible Cas did, Dean didn’t hate him. That Dean wasn’t ready to let go, that Dean believed Cas when he said he was sorry and wanted to redeem himself. He gives it to Cas as if to say, I’m pretty sure you loved me. Can’t you see I loved you, too?

Dean shoves the coat at Cas like an accusation and a plea and a prayer. Dean asks Cas to trust him again and this time, Cas does.

I should tell him, Dean thinks as Cas takes the coat from him and slips it on. Cas came back, Cas remembered, Cas is looking at him in that way he has, the one that Dean thinks he finally understands, and Dean chickens out. He’s brave enough to go through hell and come out swinging, to face down the devil and the leviathans and whatever other monsters the universe wants to throw at him, but he’s not brave enough for this.

Cas promises Dean he’ll be fine, but he isn’t.

Cas takes on Sam’s hallucinations. He takes Sam’s fate and makes it into his own.

There are no miracles, Dean reminds himself. Everything comes with a cost. He’s always known that.

They just can’t catch a fucking break.

There’s nothing of Cas for Dean to carry around, now. He calls Meg instead, calls her over and over, but the news is always the same.

He reads about comas in what they’re calling downtime but what’s really the space between one dead end and another. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for, if he wants to learn how to help or just to see, written in black and white, that he may as well just give up hope now, not drag this out any longer than he has to.

It turns out to be a bigger mistake than he was imagining. He’s grateful, at least, that Cas is probably still angel enough that they don’t have to worry about all the shitty complications, the sores and the breathing problems and the malnutrition. He’s less grateful for the rest. The Wikipedia article informs him, in no uncertain terms, that people don’t just wake up like in the movies. He learns that people often regain consciousness in a state of profound confusion. That often they never fully recover. He reads about post-traumatic amnesia and he wonders what Cas will remember if he comes back this time.

Time is the best general predictor of a chance of recovery, the article reads. Dean tries to pretend like he hasn’t already been counting the days.

He skips over the section on Emotional challenges even though it’s only three lines long.

He gets to the end of the article and then he opens up a new search. He reads about talking to people in comas, how hearing a familiar voice can help someone recover. He reads personal accounts from people who were trapped, seemingly in vegetative states, but could hear every word, could feel every touch. Dean can’t sit by Cas’ bed, can’t hold his hand or talk to him, but he thinks maybe he can do something.

“Do you think he can hear us if we pray?” he asks Sam. “I mean, it’s worth a shot, right?”

Sam stops what he’s doing. He looks at Dean for a long moment while he works out what to say. He settles on, “It couldn’t hurt.”

So Dean prays. He prays to Cas and tries not to be selfish, tries not to ask him for anything else, because look where Dean asking for things has gotten them. He prays to Cas about what’s happening as he sleeps, tells him how he was right, Bobby is haunting them. He tells him how guilty he feels that Bobby couldn’t move on because of them, how afraid he is that they’re gonna have to hunt Bobby sooner or later. He tells him how tired he is of losing his family members.

He prays to him about the leviathans’ plans, about the horror of it, how they’re knocking humans off the top of the food chain, how they’re turning them into the perfect prey. He tells him it’s comforting, in a way, because at least now they know. At least now it feels like he knows what they’re really fighting against, that they know what’s at stake.

He prays to Cas about Charlie, tells him how dangerous it feels, that he cares about her already even though he barely knows her. He tells him how glad he is that she made it out all right. I think you’d like her, he prays.

He prays while he’s driving, while he’s fighting, while he’s stopping for gas and a snack in the middle of nowhere. He describes everything he’s seeing and experiencing, keeping up a constant mantra, a stream of consciousness prayer that he hopes will pull Cas back from wherever he’s gone. He prays as the hours turn into days turn into weeks.

Sometimes, during the quiet moments where he lies awake in the middle of the night, he prays, I miss you. Sometimes he breaks his own promise to himself and he prays, I wish you were here.

He tries not to let it bother him that he never gets any answers.

It turns out Sam was wrong. It hurts every time.

When Meg calls, Dean knows better than to hope for good news. He’s learned his lesson on that front, has been telling himself for weeks not to make that mistake again.

She warns him Cas is different. He thinks about everything he read and he wonders how much is left of the Cas he knew. He wonders what version of Cas he’s going to meet this time.

He’s wearing the coat again by the time they arrive. It’s clean now, no sign of blood or black ooze, but Dean knows better than to think it’s a good sign. Cas turns around at the sound of his name. He knows who Dean is. He knows who Sam is, too. He should know better, but for a few moments, Dean is so excited to see Cas up and about that he makes the mistake of thinking he’s all right, that he got his movie magic after all.

He learns, very quickly, that no magic has happened here. This version of Cas doesn’t like conflict, apparently. This version of Cas doesn’t look at him in quite the same way, doesn’t have quite the same earnest sincerity when he speaks. “I love you guys,” Cas says as he hugs them, but it’s wrong, it’s all wrong.

Dean sits across from Cas in the dayroom with the boardgame spread out between them, and that’s all wrong, too. Dean is furious with him, suddenly, even though he knows it isn’t fair, that this has only happened because of what Cas did for Sam. But Dean knows, too, knows better than anyone, that you don’t just get a clean slate. You don’t get to ignore the things you did or the things that happened to you. There is no reset button, no fresh start. There’s always a world that needs saving, and there’s no giving up, even if you’re exhausted from carrying the weight of your past with you. Dean can’t give up, no matter how tired he is. He doesn’t have the luxury.

He has to keep fighting. He knows it’s selfish, but all he’s ever wanted was to not have to do it alone.

He doesn’t want this, doesn’t want to play at this. He knows what Cas looks like when he’s actually sorry and this isn’t it. He doesn’t want Cas to tell him he’s sorry, anyway. He wants Cas to do something else, to do anything else but just give up.

Dean doesn’t want to be angry with Cas again, but he is. He should have known better than to hope to get him back, should have known better than to expect anything from him. Cas had become a big part of Dean’s reason to keep fighting, and he had made the mistake of thinking he might be part of Cas’. He just made a mistake, that’s all. He doesn’t know why he keeps forgetting.

Dean banishes Cas along with the other angels. He figures that if Cas is going to disappear anyway, Dean may as well make sure it’s on his terms.

He doesn’t deserve to ask Cas for anything, he knows that. He wants to stop caring, wants to stop wanting Cas to care, but he can’t. He wants Cas to care, even though Dean knows it breaks him apart. Dean always wanted him to care more than he did. That’s what got them into this mess in the first place.

“You have fallen in every way imaginable,” Hester tells Cas, and that hurts, too. Hester looks at Dean and says, “The very touch of you corrupts. When Castiel first laid a hand on you in hell, he was lost.” It hurts, Dean thinks, because it’s true. He’s used to being told he’s a disappointment, after all. This is just another confirmation.

He isn’t doing Cas any favors, he realizes, trying to defend him to these angels, trying to protect him, not when Dean is the reason this is all happening in the first place. It’s all on him, Dean knows that. He can see it, the angels can see it, and Cas must be able to see it, too. He wouldn’t be surprised if Cas hated him for it, really, for making everything so complicated.

Cas steps between Dean and Hester, and for a second, he thinks it’s because Cas cares. But then he sees it, the way Hester is about to kill Cas and he’s just letting it happen. Dean sees his face, after Meg saves him, sees how troubled he looks, how confused. Cas doesn’t care, Dean knows, because if he did, he wouldn’t want to die. Dean has never been good enough at getting Cas to care, and he doesn’t see why it would be any different now.

He can see it, that Hester’s death is going to weigh on Cas, that he’s going to think it’s his fault. He can tell that this is just going to take Cas farther away, and he’s right. Cas gives his blood -- the blood of a fallen angel -- for the weapon that’ll be able to kill Dick Roman, and if that isn’t proof that what Hester said is true, Dean doesn’t know what is.

Cas gives them his blood and then he disappears, just like Dean knew he would.

Dean doesn’t pray to Cas any more. He doesn’t pray to Cas when the leviathans get Kevin and the tablet, doesn’t pray to him when they go after the alpha vamp, doesn’t pray to him when Bobby goes off the rails. He doesn’t pray to him when he’s hurting or scared or lying awake at night wishing that things were different. He doesn’t let himself ask Cas for anything at all.

He takes his comforts anywhere else, anywhere he can get them. Dean can’t drive the Impala anywhere, but he finds time to sneak away and sit with her, just to feel like something is normal, just to feel like anything at all fits into place. He can’t have what he wants, but he can have this. He sits on her hood with the sunlight filtering down through the gaps in the barn roof and he thinks, I wish you’d come back, Cas.

He didn’t mean for it to be a prayer, but Cas appears next to him, anyway, he shows up naked and covered in bees. He says, “Hello, Dean.” His voice is the only thing Dean recognizes.

Dean sighs. He says, “Hey, Cas.”

“I came,” Cas says, sounding pleased and proud of himself, “just like you asked.”

Dean makes himself smile. This Cas hates to see him upset -- it makes Cas upset, too, and being upset makes him leave even faster, and it doesn’t do either of them any good. Not that Cas staying does them any good, but Dean likes to pretend it does. He thinks maybe he loves this version of Cas, too, after all, and that isn’t doing them any good, either.

“Yeah, buddy,” Dean says, “you did. Thanks.”

“What do you need?” Cas asks, seriously. The hum of the bees is so loud it almost threatens to drown out the sound of his voice.

“Nothing,” Dean says, and finds that it’s the truth. There’s nothing this Cas can give him, not now. Maybe not ever. “Just, uh. Wanted to check in, I guess.”

“Oh,” Cas says. “I’ve made some friends,” he adds.

“I can see that,” Dean says. He’s still smiling. He can feel the corner of his mouth beginning to twitch with the effort.

“If you don’t mind,” Cas says, “we have some important business to attend to.” He leans in, whispering conspiratorially. “A mission from the queen herself.”

“Yeah, okay,” Dean says. He thinks this whole thing could be a funny story if it didn’t hurt so goddamn much. “Good luck.”

“Thank you,” Cas says. “Goodbye.”

Cas disappears before Dean can respond. It doesn’t matter, anyway. Dean has said too many goodbyes to Cas already. He couldn’t possibly stomach another.

Some of the bees linger when Cas vanishes. They’re buzzing around aimlessly now that Cas has gone, as though he was the flower to which they were drawn and his absence has left them lost and confused. He waves them away with a flick of his wrist.

Cas never stays for long when he shows up. Dean should be getting used to it, but he isn’t. He doesn’t understand why Cas keeps coming back if all he’s ever going to do is leave again.

He tries to figure it out. He watches Cas’ face when he speaks to them, he looks at his eyes even when Cas is avoiding his. He listens to the way his voice catches, sometimes, he watches the way Cas shifts from one foot to another. He catalogues everything they say, picks out the exact things that prompt Cas to appear, that make him run away. He tries to understand.

He’s scared, Dean gets that. Dean knows a thing or two about being afraid. He’s lived that way for most of his life. He knows exactly what he’s capable of and it terrifies him. He knows exactly how hard it can be to do the right thing.

He’s starting to suspect that maybe Cas knows, too. That maybe as scared as he is, there’s a reason he keeps coming back. He thinks maybe it’s the sign he’s been waiting for.

They’re getting a do-over, Dean realizes. Cas is giving Dean the chance to do what he couldn’t before. He’s waiting for Dean to convince him to do the right thing.

Dean figures it out this time, all on his own. He doesn’t have any magic words to convince Cas to come back. All he has is the truth.

Cas smiles at him, after, in that small, soft, private way he has. “I’ll go with you,” he says, even though Dean didn’t ask. He looks so much like himself that it aches.

Neither of them are good luck. They’re both cursed in more ways than one. They’ve both done great and terrible things, both for each other and to each other. Dean is still a fuckup and Cas has fallen in every way imaginable. Dean wants him anyway, just like he is.

They’re probably not going to make it out of this alive. But if they go down, at least they’ll go down swinging. At least they’ll do it together.

There are worse ways to die.

Things go a little blurry after they kill Dick. Dean isn’t quite sure what happens, but he remembers enough to know something is off. He kills Dick in the bright fluorescent lights of an office building and wakes up in the dark with trees towering over him, rocks digging into his back, leaves crunching under his fingers. Cas tells Dean they’re in purgatory, and he barely has time to process Cas’s words before he disappears.

He knows Cas is still out there, somewhere, though. He can feel it. He thinks maybe all he has to do is follow the call of the piece of himself that’s been missing for a while now, the one that’s left a persistent ache in his chest. He thinks maybe all he has to do is let it tug him along like it’s been trying to do and it will lead him right where he wants to go.

He follows it for days, for weeks, for months. He kills more monsters than he can count and he reminds himself, over and over, that Cas doesn’t do things without a reason. There was a reason he didn’t pull Dean into that war with him. There was a reason he stepped between Dean and Hester, between Dean and Dick Roman. There has to have been a reason for this, too, a reason why Cas left him behind.

Dean is beginning to think maybe all of those reasons are the same. He thinks he knows what it is, the thing that drives all of Cas’ decisions, and he’s going to keep looking for him as long as it takes, he’s going to keep following the part of himself that Cas carries with him until he can find out if maybe he isn’t carrying some piece of Cas with him, too.

He prays to him as he goes, night after night, the same thing over and over and over: I’m not leaving here without you.

Dean finds him by a river, kneeling at its edge, washing his hands. He finds him covered in the grime of this place, in dirt and sweat and monster blood and god knows what else. He’s filthy and exhausted and unshaven, he’s painted the same shade of gray as everything else here, he’s practically blending into the landscape, and Dean’s heart lurches in his chest when he sees him.

He’s absolutely, unmistakably Cas.

Dean would know him anywhere.

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