Excerpt: It was almost a relief when the rebar went in, like the breath it punched out was something that he had been holding onto for too long. It was a sharp cleansing pain, whiting out his brain, but not enough. It was a flash, and then the pain was back, radiating from the wound and all the way through his body until it became a numb tingling somewhere around his waist. That was a relief at least, that it stopped somewhere. Dean had always imagined that he would die on a hunt, in some blaze of glory. He had died plenty of times. He always forgot how much it hurt. The sounds of the hunt roared back in on his next ragged exhale, fading away again on the inhale. It was a strange thing, new to all of his other deaths. But it just kept going. Dean was more than ready for it to stop. He let his chin drop, staring at the straw and dirt of the floor. Billie had once threatened to throw him into the Empty. Would that still stand? Cas might have described the place as an endless cycle of your worst nightmares, which didn’t sound too different from his life over the past few years. Even after Chuck was defeated. They’d won, but that hadn’t stopped the monsters. It wasn’t even the hunts, not with Sam’s established network. It was the downtime, the lack of an apocalypse. There was too much time and no solutions. And he was tired, so tired. Sam was taken care of, the world was safe, Heaven was under new management. Was it too much to ask for it to end, for that silence? It must have been, because someone came rushing over, Dean spending a moment staring at the shoes in front of him. They weren’t Sammy’s, and it took him a moment to remember why. Sam was back in Sioux Falls. Baby watch. Eileen was ready to pop any second now, but this hadn’t been able to wait. And Dean had...he had… “We can’t waste all of Eileen’s hard work. It’s a milk run, Sammy. Be back before you know it.”