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This is how the world ends.
Not with a bang, or a whimper.
But a softly spoken
“I love you.”
and
“Goodbye, Dean.”
The cold concrete bites into his skin and bones as he desperately presses himself against the wall, trying to feel anything other than the numb terror of watching his heart, his whole fucking reason for living, get sucked away in a writhing tangle of black goo.
Dimly, Dean registers the vibration of his phone. Sammy.
Unable to articulate his fresh despair, Dean declines the call and curls into himself, sobbing into his hands as darkness descends on his world.
*****
This is how the world ends.
Letting God beat the shit out of him for the last time.
Watching his son, the last link he has to Cas, take all the power in the universe into himself.
And then standing by as he disappears, not into a narrowing pool of dark nothingness, but expanding into a white starburst of - everything.
He’s gone and already Dean misses him like a limb.
And the world continues to turn, with everyone on it as if nothing had ever happened.
Except there are two missing, now.
*****
This is how the world ends.
Bleary-eyed and drooling, Dean lifts his head off the bottle that was his pillow. Sam prods him again with the toe of his boot, and Dean realizes he’s been speaking this whole time.
Waving off his admonishments, Dean staggers to his feet, stiff after a night on the cold floor of the war room, and shuffles off to his bed, where he knows there’s another bottle under his pillow.
He lets the alcohol slide down his throat, no longer searing against tissue long since dulled to its effect.
He empties the bottle, lets it slip through numb fingers to smash on the floor, and flops down onto his stained and flattened pillow.
Above his head the world spins, tilts on its axis.
But Dean’s world has stopped. It screeched to a halt the last time Cas touched him.
If he makes it to Heaven, maybe he can find a way to persuade Jack to help him.
If it’s Hell, he’s sure Rowena would do the same.
And if it’s the Empty, like Billie promised, well then. They’ll be together.
Castiel’s glistening blue eyes float into his mind and Dean lets his own lids slip shut.
“I love you.”
This time Dean welcomes the blackness when it comes for him.
*****
This isn’t Heaven.
It must be Hell, Dean reasons as he squeezes his eyes shut against the blinding white light. He shivers, freezing.
Rowena must have redecorated, because this is different than he remembers.
Sharp objects prod his naked, pebbled flesh and his throat feels like it’s on fire. There’s a high-pitched whine of fluorescent lighting and sharp voices trying to get his attention.
“Damnit, Dean!”
Shit.
Sammy.
Not in Hell then. Just hell on Earth.
He shivers again, trembles wracking his entire body and all his muscles ache and he’s just so tired and so cold.
Another sharp jab and now it sounds like he’s under water as he listens to the rumble of his brother’s voice. His body stops shaking and he curls onto his side, hoping this was just a pit stop on the way to wherever he’s going to end up.
Instead of blackness, everything fades to a soft white.
*****
This is not the end of the world.
When Dean swims back to consciousness, it’s to a soft glow and a rhythmic beeping. He’s warm, tucked under something soft.
Blinking past the crust on his eyelids he manages to make out the slumped form of Sam folded into a hard plastic chair at his bedside.
Hospital.
Sam looks exhausted. Unshaven, long hair lank and greasy, worry lines deeply etched onto his forehead and around his mouth, even in sleep.
But in the rose gold touch of the rising sun, Dean can see the baby he rocked to sleep and the toddler who gripped his hands so tightly as he learned to walk. The scrawny, short pre-teen who braved new school after new school and held his own in a way Dean never could. The man he’s become.
Dean feels a rush of emotion so strong in his chest that he gasps.
Sam startles awake, hand automatically reaching for his knife before he realizes where he is and his hazel eyes find his brother’s matching pair.
“You dumb sunovabitch.”
Dean winces away from both the tone and Sam’s worried glare and attempts to clear his raspy throat. He ends up coughing, each exhale feeling like sandpaper tearing up his esophagus.
A gentle but firm hand pulls him to a sitting position and holds a plastic cup to his lips. The water is stale and room temperature, but it feels amazing, and Dean has to force himself to sip slowly. Sam leans forward and clicks a button to bring the top of the bed up to his level and Dean can feel the whirring vibration through his legs.
Sam eases him back down when he’s done and adjusts the pillows behind him while he gets his breath back.
“Wha-” he croaks.
“Severe alcohol poisoning, Dean.” Sam’s tone is flat, but wobbles on his name. When Dean looks up at him, he sees his brother worrying at the skin of his cuticles. Finally, he meets Dean’s gaze. “They had to pump your stomach and flush you with so much saline. Jesus, were you trying to kill yourself?”
Dean looks away, but not before he catches the way his silence makes his brother’s face fall.
Sam clears his throat, blinking fast. “Well, too fucking bad. You failed.”
Sam tips his head back, sniffs. “If Miracle hadn’t found you when she did-”
“She- where is she?”
“At Jody’s. Claire came and got her when I drove you to the hospital.”
The wash of relief makes Dean feel lightheaded. “Good. That’s- that’s good.”
Sensing his weakness, Sam leans in for the kill. “You know she loves you, Dean. She was crying and howling and biting at my heels as I carried you out the door.”
Shit. His stomach plummets at the thought of his girl being upset.
“Dean,” Sam tries again, his earnest face plastered all over his tired face, “if you can’t do it for me, or for Jody and the girls, you gotta do it for Miracle, okay?” He starts blinking again as tears fill his eyes. One escapes, and Dean watches as it gets caught in a groove worn by worry and is channeled down until it drops off Sam’s chin. “You gotta at least try. He would have wanted you to.”
Sam’s image wavers suddenly as his own eyes fill with tears and he chokes back a sob. Suddenly Sam is there, in his space, long warm arms wrapped around to catch him as he falls forward into his little brother’s chest.
“I don’t want to do this without him,” Dean wails, soaking the front of Sam’s shirt.
“I know, Dean,” Sam rumbles and Dean feels it more vibrating from Sam’s chest to his forehead than hears it. “But you gotta try. There are still people here who love you. You gotta promise me you’ll try. For them. Okay?”
Dean nods, and Sam’s grip tightens, cocooning Dean from his misery
*****
This isn’t the end of the world.
At least that’s what Dean tells himself as he forces his creaking knees to straighten and he stands. He clears his throat, the rasp of it echoing in the too-large and mildewy hall.
“Hi. Um. My name’s Dean. And, um. I’m an alcoholic.”
He croaks out his sad sack story: raised by a drunk, repressed trauma and hidden abuse, PTSD from a job that has been doing its best to kill him since he was big enough to hold a shotgun.
And he talks about losing Cas, and how that was the end. “He knew me better than anyone else. Better than my own brother. He knew all of it. And he loved me anyway. And now he’s gone and I don’t know how to put one foot in front of the other anymore.”
At the end of the night when he’s hovering in front of the coffee urn pouring out the dregs of the lukewarm watery brew, an older lady sidles up to snag a stale cookie and tells him about learning how to walk again after driving drunk and causing an accident that killed her sister.
“The trick to putting one foot in front of the other, son, is just to do it. You put one foot down. Then the other. And then you do it again and again even though it hurts, because that’s what they expect of you.”
Dean swallows down the grainy coffee. “‘They?’”
She nods. “The ones that are still there after all you put them through. The ones who love you anyway.” She takes a bite of the cookie and grimaces at the taste. “And you keep going, because you know you can’t do that to them again.”
Dean thinks of Sam, and the now permanent lines on his baby brother’s face. And he thinks of Claire and how she punched him so hard in the arm when she dropped off Miracle that he still has the bruise. And he nods, and thanks the woman for her advice.
And then he puts one foot in front of the other and makes it out the door before collapsing into Baby and sobbing into the steering wheel.
*****
This is putting one foot down.
Dean rebuilds Bobby’s house. He makes it bigger, with more windows, and refuses to buy curtains because he likes the way the morning light invades all the corners of the house that he built.
He takes a bulldozer to the back forty, leveling the ground and trucking in topsoil so that in the spring he can plant a garden. He thinks Cas would have liked the forget-me-not seeds he’s already scattered in anticipation.
Dean learns to pray again. He takes to his knees every day and talks to Cas, and to Jack, and to anyone who will listen, and asks for his family back. And he puts another chip in the growing collection in his bedside drawer and he falls asleep without a bottle, after a hard day’s work instead.
And when he’s finished with the house and he has a yard, he gets itchy with nothing to do and heads into town to see what he can do about the rusting heaps still dotting the edges of the property.
Dean pulls the Impala into the local garage, and introduces himself to Jeff, the owner. They get to talking, about Bobby, and about cars, and after two hours, Dean has a buyer for the scrap metal and a job.
*****
This is learning to move forward.
Dean invites Eileen and Sam for Easter dinner, and when he pulls the hot crossed buns from the oven Eileen starts to cry and tells him, through her hug, that Lillian had taught her to make them as a child and it was one of the few memories she has of her hunting trainer that doesn’t involve blood and sickness, and death.
With the spring sun setting and casting a warm glow through the front window, and the candles at the table flickering invitingly, they can talk for the first time about what happened to them, at the end. Where they were. And how they found each other again. And share, tentatively, with a few tears, stories about those they’ve lost. And how they plan to make this a new beginning.
And the next morning, when Eileen and Sam head back to the Bunker, which they’ve converted into a roadhouse-slash-help center for the hunting community, Dean, for the first time, doesn’t feel like a part of himself is being ripped away, even though he does feel a bit lighter.
And the morning sun gets steadily warmer as he takes his second cup of coffee into the backyard and he notes with satisfaction that the forget-me-nots are starting to peek little shoots out of the warming soil. He decides to build a pergola, which he’ll paint blue.
Jeff calls, tells him someone rolled a decrepit Chevelle into bay three, and asks him if he can come and take a look at it.
Dean’s fingers itch to get his hands on the old car, to remake it into something beautiful.
*****
This is a stumble.
Dean wakes at the first crack of thunder, startled out of dreams he usually doesn’t remember. This time, though, the piercing blue eyes shimmering under tears is still fresh in his mind. The dark hair he’d always figured was softer than it looked, if he’d ever been able to touch it. The tan trench coat that always smelled of wind and ozone.
The sharp ozone of the storm and the petrichor as the rain begins to fall seeps through his cracked window and Dean huddles under his sheet, pulling the soft cotton to his cheek in a mockery of what it would feel like to lay his head on Cas’s shoulder. He cries himself to sleep, missing Cas so hard that everything hurts, and when he wakes in the morning, he feels like he’s pulled every muscle, and he has to call in sick to the garage.
Dean doesn’t get out of bed that day.
If he gets out of bed, he’ll get into his car. And if he gets into his car, he’ll drive to a liquor store.
So it’s safest to stay under his sheets, eyes half closed so that through his lashes the blue cotton kind of reminds him of the warmth of Castiel’s gaze.
He sleeps fitfully, dehydrated and with an empty stomach, and wakes feeling empty in more ways than one.
But the sun slants through the kitchen window and sets the tiny cupful of forget-me-nots on the counter glowing and it makes him smile and he forces himself to put one foot in front of the other and make himself some coffee, and then some breakfast.
He checks in with Sam, because Sam worries when they don’t speak for any longer than a day. Sam asks him if he remembers where the Donegal Sword is hidden in the Bunker. Dean thinks it’s in the armory.
Settled by the mundane in their conversation and soothed by Sam’s calm tone, Dean cleans up his dishes, packs himself a lunch, and looks around his spotless, bright kitchen one last time.
Then he gets in his car.
And drives to work.
Jeff sees his sad eyes and gives him a knowing half smile before leaving him to it. He makes it through the day, quiet but cloudless like the summer sky he sees as he leaves the garage in the early evening. He made great progress on the Chevelle. The owner has given him carte blanche to make whatever restorations he deems necessary, and Dean gets excited thinking about the custom upholstery he ordered this morning.
He sighs as he slips behind the wheel, glancing over in the golden setting sunlight to where an angel sometimes rode shotgun. “I love you,” he says to the empty seat. “Always have. Come back to me. Please.”
He drops his keys halfway to the ignition when his phone rings in his pocket.
Sammy.
“Dean, I think I’ve found something.”
*****
This is the breaking dawn of hope.
Sam found a slim volume tucked behind a panel in the armory when he was grabbing the Donegal Sword. Looks like it was kicked under the edge of the baseboard and forgotten. It’s a book on crossing between realms.
It’s the longest of fucking long shots.
Dean almost smiles as he remembers Cas talking about a hail Mary.
“Dean. Are you listening?”
“Yeah. What? Yeah, I’m listening.”
Sam rolls his eyes, but Rowena shoots him a small smirk that he returns with a sheepish grin. She sits up straight, the sequined number she’s wearing draping elegantly off her small frame, and looks him squarely in the eye. “This spell, ‘tis rather like a cosmic weddin’ ceremony, aye?” She raises her eyebrows. “An’ that’s alright with you?”
Dean nods. “Yep. Strap me to that comet for all eternity.”
“Dean-”
“No, I’m serious, Sam. Cas is it for me. And for some reason, I think he feels the same.”
Rowena’s smile this time is soft. “Aye, for some reason…”
Dean blushes, and pulls the old scroll closer to him as a distraction. “So what do I gotta do, again?”
Sam scowls at him for his inattention but because he’s a giant nerd he doesn’t hesitate to lay the smackdown of knowledge on him once again. “So get this. In most marriage ceremonies, there’s a lifelong commitment, right? Heart, body, and soul. This is more or less the same - you’re just committing your heart, body, and soul to, well, to the ether, I guess, and just hoping really hard it gets to its recipient.”
Rowena leans over the scroll with a skeptical twist to her mouth. “Aye, there’s the rub. If we had a better idea where Tweetybird ended up in the Empty then we’d have a better chance of pulling him out. As it is, we’re basically tossing the spell into the void and counting on the bond between the two a ye tae do the work.”
Dean swallows. “Well, let’s hope this bond is as ‘profound’ as Cas says it is.”
“Indeed. So. ‘Heart, body, and soul’ is what we need to send to Cas. The soul part we think is taken care of due to the bond-”
“Yeah, Cas told me once that when he pulled you out of Hell, he held you so tightly that some of his grace merged with your soul, and vice versa. That might be the source of the profound bond.”
Now it’s Rowena’s turn to glare. “Yes, thank you, Samuel, for the exposition.” She turns back to Dean. “Heart-”
“He already has it.” Dean realizes what he’s just blurted out, but then decides to own it and raises his chin.
She smiles. “I know, darlin’. We just need some way to tell him that.” She taps her manicured fingernails smartly on the tabletop. “The body component at least I know what to do.”
From Dean, Rowena collects three small crystal vials containing his blood, sweat, and tears. Dean had thought the last one was a tall order, but all it took was a short visit to the dungeon and he filled the little tube to the brim.
She accepts the vials with a smile of thanks. “Now the heart is what binds it all together. We need some kind of material representation of that.”
Dean reaches to his back pocket for his knife. “I’ve got an idea for that. Be right back.”
In the motor pool, Dean pulls open Baby’s driver side door and, with a deep breath, stabs his knife into the leather on the driver’s seat back. He slices off a large strip, thankful that his custom upholstery order included some leather in black for trim. Even neatly sewed, it’ll leave a scar, but the best things always leave a mark.
He winds the leather, worn supple from fifty years of Winchester hearts resting against it for support, around his fingers, and his eyes fall on the silver Sharpie sticking out of his toolbox. Grabbing it, he scrawls across the shining black surface
You have it. You’ve always had me. I love you.
Once the letters have dried, he presses a kiss to the sentiment and then hurries back to join the others. Rowena raises her eyebrow at the offering and Sam looks at him like he just amputated his leg but they both take the leather strip without comment and work quickly to tie it around the vials as well as some herbs and other magicky-type items that they seem to believe will boost the effects of the spell when it goes through to the Empty.
Rowena instructs Dean to pray as hard as he can while the walls between the realms are thin and he falls to his knees with the ease of long practice. Behind him, Rowena and Sam begin the spell, chanting a sing-song lament in Enochian that seems to fade into the background when a rip in space opens up before him and black tendrils begin to slide through the opening.
With a final shout, Sam heaves the magic bundle through the hole and another exclamation from Rowena causes the rift to snap shut with a pop that leaves Dean’s ears ringing.
“Is that it?” He asks, pushing himself unsteadily to his feet. “What happens now?”
Rowena touches him softly on the arm. “We wait. And we pray that it works.”
And Dean finds that putting one foot in front of the other has turned into taking a mighty leap of faith.
*****
Sam kicks him out of the Bunker after two days, complaining that he’s wearing a track in the stone floor of the war room and promising to call him the second he gets any sort of “vibe” from any other realms.
Dean returns to Sioux Falls and transfers his nervous energy into weeding the vegetable patch, which has become overgrown in his short absence. He wipes the sweat and dirt from his face and hopes that Cas likes tomatoes, because he’s going to end up with a bumper crop this year.
He pauses on his way inside to snap off some of the late Siberian irises he’s got tucked into the shade next to the porch. They’re much more delicate than their bigger, bearded cousins, and he’s pretty sure that the intense lapis of their petals is an exact match for a certain angelic gaze.
Dean pulls two narrow glasses from his cupboard, and slides the stiff stems into one of them, along with some water. He washes his hands and face, and leaves the dish towel around his neck when he’s finished drying off. He snags the lemonade from the fridge and fills the second glass before sitting at the kitchen table with a grateful sigh.
The work has kept him distracted, but now that his hands are idle once more he finds his fingers twisting around each other as he wordlessly prays.
Outside, a cedar waxwing sets up shop on the porch railing and lets the world know that he is here to party. His song almost but not quite drowns out the distant hum of a car engine. Dean finds himself idly thinking that it sounds like it could use a tuneup as he washes out his glass.
When the waxwing finishes his song and flies off, the engine noise is gone. Dean sets the glass on the draining board and prays again - this time, just one word: please.
The doorbell rings.
Time stands still.
This is how the world begins.
“Hello, Dean.”
*****
This is Dean’s world.
Jeff left at noon today, beginning the long drive to his sister’s before the holiday weekend traffic. Dean’s been taking advantage of the lull before the holidays and reorganizing the service bays until they’re just the way he likes them. He knows Jeff will complain but also that he’ll adapt and eventually claim that the shuffle was entirely his idea.
Dean drifts into the locker room/office at the back of the shop and smiles at the wall as he strips off his coverall. Jammed crookedly in a dollar store frame is a photo of Dean and Jeff, covered head to toe in engine oil, the day that they battled an old junker’s front end - and lost. Jeff had scrawled Employees of the Century on a scrap of masking tape and stuck it to the glass.
Jeff’s been so good to him. A quiet man with his own secrets, he just seems to kind of get where Dean’s coming from, taking his good days and bad days in stride. And there are still bad days. Dean shudders and shoves the coverall in the laundry basket, then hefts it up to start a load. Even now, thinking about that night in the dungeon is often enough to send him into a panic attack. The two-year anniversary was a couple of weeks ago. He thought he could handle it, but he couldn’t. Jeff sat with him in the cramped bathroom and rubbed his back and handed him a tissue until he could stand up and drive himself home.
And it is really home now, not just a sunny window into a life that he always wanted.
Grinning, Dean picks up his pace in shutting the office and the shop down for the long weekend. Even so, it’s already dark by the time he locks the back door and heads out to where the Impala waits, partially covered by the protective awning Dean rigged up last spring.
The bright security lights cast a glow across the black leather seats and the neat row of stitches around a rectangular panel on the back of the driver’s seat. Dean changed his mind about hiding it and replaced it with a specially-ordered, embossed segment of blue leather. Before he sits down, he traces over the raised outlines of feathers and then raises his fingertips to his lips.
It hasn’t snowed yet, but the rain’s been coming down on and off all day. Combined with the street lights, the puddles and slick asphalt create haloes that have Dean squinting as he carefully navigates the deserted streets. He’s probably going to need to cave and get himself some glasses in the new year. Eileen pestered Sam into doing it, finally, and now he doesn’t have to curl his overlarge frame over itself in order to read the fine print in his older Latin texts.
It’s not a long drive, about three and a half tracks from Dark Side of the Moon and he’s pulling through the refurbished iron gates and up the drive. He weaves around the cars already parked near the house, noting as he does so that he won’t let Claire drive away without seeing to that broken taillight.
Dean pulls in close enough to see through the large front window, and smiles. Claire and Eileen stand before it, gesticulating wildly as they work their way through some exciting tale. Kaia and Sam are curled into the nearby couch, leaning into each other as they wipe tears of laughter from their eyes.
The rumbling of the Impala’s engine surrounds him as he eases into the space in the garage. He stops at the sink near the door that he’d installed for the precise purpose of washing his hands after a long day of hard work. It’s engine grease under his nails now, not blood, and that’s just fine.
Dean steps inside to the mudroom and toes off his work boots, setting them neatly on the shelf in their place, and hangs up his jacket. Even from this distance he can hear the hilarity ensuing in the front room. He takes an appreciative inhale of the warm, spicy scents wafting from the other direction, and follows his nose into the bright kitchen. He pauses to lean against the doorway and gaze inside.
This is Dean’s heart.
A man in dark jeans that sinfully hug his broad thighs bends to pull something hot and fragrant from the oven. He sets it carefully on the trivet on the counter and pulls off his oven mitts to dust something from the front of his shirt. Dean knows just from the back that it’s his nearly threadbare Zeppelin shirt with the sagging collar and the hole under the left nipple. The one that keeps mysteriously disappearing from his drawer after laundry day.
The man turns back to the stove and stirs something bubbling away in a pot. He hums tunelessly under his breath, a low rumble that Dean knows intimately by now.
Dean smirks and sidles quietly up behind him. He circles his hands around the broad, muscled torso and buries his cold nose into the juncture between the man’s shoulder and neck.
Cas jumps, and lets out an unexpectedly high squeak.
Dean laughs. “Whatever happened to ‘I will always be able to sense you anywhere in existence,’ sweetheart?”
Cas huffs, leaning forward to stir again at another pot. Dean leans with him, plastered fully against his back. “I knew you were on your way. I just - got distracted with the sauce.”
Dean presses a slow, wet kiss into the skin that still smells very slightly of ozone, even after all this time. “If you’re looking for a distraction, I can help you with that.”
Cas leans slightly into the touch for a moment before he swats at Dean’s arms and pulls away. “I can’t burn the biscuits, Dean. Not again.” He turns, still in Dean’s space, and pecks him softly on the lips before he pushes back and smiles. “But if you’re not busy later…”
Dean matches the smile with one of his own. “I’m all yours. Heart, body, and soul.”