Hiii I love your work so so much
I was wondering if you’d want to write one about s4e5 (The End) but without 2009 Dean? And it’s 2015 Dean/Sam’s twin trying to save the world? <3
Dean Winchester x sister!reader
Sam Winchester x twin sister!reader
Castiel x winchester!reader (platonic)
Summary: You got sent to the future where Sam said yes to Lucifer, and Dean didn't say yes to Michael. So what are you going to do about it?
Warnings: endverse, talks about death and sacrifice
You're in the middle of a sentence when the world ends.
Not literally — though you'll think about that phrasing later, the irony of it — but one moment you're standing in the parking lot of a Gas-N-Sip outside of Stratford, Texas, telling Sam over the phone that you'll meet him and Dean at the motel in an hour, and the next moment the air goes white and total and loud in a way that has no sound, and the parking lot dissolves underneath you like something that was never really there.
The light lasts exactly long enough to make you understand that you have no say in what happens next.
Then it's gone, and you're somewhere else.
The first thing you notice is the smell.
Smoke, old and deep, the kind that's been soaking into things for years. Under it, something chemical — the particular flat smell of a world where regular trash collection has stopped being a reasonable expectation. Under that, something sweet and wrong that you don't have a name for yet but that your body understands instinctively as: danger. decay. stay alert.
The second thing you notice is the silence.
Not quiet — quiet implies the absence of something that was recently there. This is silence the way a house is silent when no one has lived in it for a long time. Structural. Built into the bones of the place.
You are standing in the middle of a street in what used to be Kansas City.
You know it's Kansas City the way you know certain things in the worst kind of dreams — not because anyone told you, but because the knowledge is just there, cold and complete, sitting in your chest alongside the dread that arrived with it. You recognize the shape of certain buildings against the sky. The grid of the streets. The particular way this city was laid out before whatever happened to it.
Before. That's already how you're thinking about it. Before and after, and you are standing in the after.
The sky is the color of a bruise that's had time to go yellowish at the edges — not stormy, not dark, just wrong in a way that has nothing to do with weather. Cars are distributed across the street like someone scattered them and left, some upright, some not, all stripped and rusted into the landscape. A pharmacy on the corner has its windows blown out. The shelves inside are visible from the street, empty and tipped at angles. A billboard above it reads, in red letters someone painted three feet high:
GOD ISN'T COMING.
SAVE YOURSELVES.
Nobody has taken it down.
You stand in the used-up air and breathe and do the math.
Zachariah. It has to be Zachariah. The angels have been circling you and Dean and Sam for months now, all of them with their own angles and their own agendas, and this — a flash of sourceless light and a relocated present — this has his fingerprints all over it. He's been trying to get Dean to say yes for as long as you can remember, which means—
Which means this is a lesson.
You look at the dead street. At the billboard. At the cars sitting where they were abandoned in whatever moment everything changed.
"Okay," you say, to the empty air. "I'm looking. Happy?"
You find the little girl four blocks in.
She's crouched between a dumpster and the back wall of what used to be a restaurant, small enough that you almost miss her, and your whole body does that thing it always does around kids — drops into a lower register, careful and slow — before you've made a conscious decision to approach.
"Hey," you say, from ten feet away. Hands visible. Voice neutral. "Hey, you okay? Are you hurt?"
Her eyes are the specific wrong that you have seen exactly once before, in Rivergrove, Oregon, when you and Sam and Dean drove into a town that had stopped being a town and found the word CROATOAN written on a telephone pole. Her eyes have that quality. Like something has gotten in behind them.
She moves fast — faster than a kid her size should be able to move — and she's got a piece of glass in her hand and she's already swinging before you finish processing the wrongness of her eyes. You catch her wrist on pure reflex, redirect the momentum the way your dad drilled into you before you were old enough to drive, and she goes into the dumpster and slides down and stills, and you stand there in the alley with your heart loud in your ears and her sleeve in your fist.
You look at the wall behind her.
You let go of her sleeve and turn around and the sound is already there — feet on pavement, a lot of them, with that horrible off-rhythm quality that means the people making the sound are not entirely people anymore — and you run.
Then the military unit appears out of nowhere like a stage trick, six armed people in tactical gear who open fire over your shoulder with a precision that says muscle memory, that says we have done this exact thing many times in this exact city — and you hit the ground and roll and come up moving and you don't stop until the sounds have faded and you're three blocks away with your hands on your knees in an alley that smells like rust and old rain, breathing.
You stay there until your heart decides to stop trying to exit your chest.
Then you stand up, and you wipe your palms on your jeans, and you look at the end of the alley and the ruined street beyond it, and you think: okay. Not acceptance — you're not accepting any of this — but okay in the hunting sense. In the sense of: this is the situation. This is what you're working with. Move.
You find a car with the keys still in it three blocks from the alley. Someone left it running and just — stopped. You don't think about that. You get in, you adjust the mirrors by habit, and you pull out onto the highway and start looking for a radio signal.
What there is, instead, is Zachariah, who appears in the passenger seat with the casualness of someone who owns the air in any room he enters, a folded newspaper already in his hands like a prop he's been looking forward to using.
You don't scream. You've stopped screaming at angels appearing in enclosed spaces. It took a while.
"What do you want?" you asked, but not necessarily in an asking tone.
"Always such a warm greeting." He unfolds the newspaper with a satisfied snap, the way someone unfolds a particularly good crossword. "Would you like to know what's happening in the world? Croatoan Pandemic Reaches Australia." He turns the page. "President Palin Defends the Bombing of Houston. Congress has been functionally dissolved — there aren't enough people left to assemble, which makes the legal question somewhat moot —"
"Three days." He folds the paper and looks at you with the patient, pleasant expression of someone who has already won and is just waiting for you to figure it out. "I need you to see all of it. The full picture. You, your brothers — you've been operating under the assumption that there's another way. I need you to understand, clearly and completely, that there isn't."
You keep your eyes on the road. The road is a disaster — cracked, overgrown in places, littered with the evidence of emergency that never got cleaned up — but it's there and you drive it and you don't look at him.
"Where are my brothers," you say.
He's quiet for a moment. Which is its own answer.
"Zachariah. Where are Sam and Dean."
"That," he says, "is part of what you'll be finding out." He vanishes. His absence makes the car feel cleaner.
You drive through the ruins of the future and don't let yourself think too hard about what he meant.
Bobby's house is the thing that breaks the first layer of composure.
You've been holding yourself together through the walk and the girl and the Croats and Zachariah in the car, running on the particular autopilot that the Winchester family has treated as a life skill since before you could name it. You've been fine, in the hunting sense — moving, assessing, functioning. And then you pull up to Singer Salvage and you see the house, and something in your chest drops.
The wheelchair is on its side just inside the door. There are bullet holes in it. The kind that came from inside the house, from a struggle, from someone who was where the wheelchair is when the shots were fired.
You stand in the doorway for a long time.
Then you go to the library. You go to the third shelf, the false backing, the hiding place Bobby showed you when you were fourteen and said if anything happens to me, you'll know where to find what you need — and you pull out the journal and you open it and there's a photograph tucked inside the front cover and that's when the second layer of composure does something complicated.
The photograph is of a group of people standing in front of a sign that reads CAMP CHITAQUA beside an arrow. They're all holding weapons. They're squinting against bright sun. They look like people who have survived things by becoming the kind of people who survive things, at cost.
He's older — not old, Dean couldn't look old, but reduced, that's the word, like something has been taking small amounts from him for years and he's been compensating without knowing he was compensating. He's not smiling. His eyes have the specific quality of a person who has been expecting bad news for so long that they've stopped flinching when it arrives.
Castiel is in it too. Wearing a flannel shirt, which should be funny and isn't. His arm is around someone. He looks human — not in the way he always looked slightly human, the endearing stiffness of an angel wearing borrowed skin — but actually, genuinely, stripped-down human. Like all the light has been taken out of him and he's been learning to live in the dark.
You look at the photograph for a long time.
You notice who isn't there.
You put the photograph in your pocket, and you get back in the car, and you go find the camp.
You go in through the east fence.
The camp is — it's a lot of things. It's organized in a way that speaks to someone with a military mind running it, the structures laid out with clear sightlines and a logic to the positioning. It's also barely holding together, the organization a framework over something that's been strained past its limits for a long time. People move through it with conserved, careful movement. There are weapons everywhere. There are children, which is the detail that lands heaviest — kids growing up inside a perimeter fence, learning the geography of the end of the world before they've learned anything else.
You're moving toward the largest structure when you see the Impala.
She's parked at the edge of the motor pool, and she's been through it — the paint is wrong in places, the rear panel is dented, there's a crack in the windshield that's been there long enough that someone has stopped seeing it — but she's here. She's here and that means Dean is here and your feet are moving before you make a decision about it, crossing the distance with something that isn't quite walking, pulling up short when you're close enough to put your hand on the hood.
She's warm. She's been driven recently.
"Hey, baby," you say, very quietly. "What happened to you."
The answer comes in the form of something hitting the back of your head, and then the night goes away.
You wake up to your wrists zip-tied to a fixed ladder and Dean Winchester staring at you from across a bare room.
Not your Dean. A Dean. A Dean that is your Dean five years from now, wearing everything those five years have cost him on his face like a second skin.
He's got a gun out. Not pointed at you — angled down, finger off the trigger, the careful hold of someone who hasn't decided yet. He's looking at you the way you look at something you don't have a category for, something that doesn't fit the existing taxonomies. His jaw is tight. His eyes are moving over your face in quick assessments, cataloguing details, running checks.
You look back at him and don't say anything.
"How are you here." Flat. No affect. "Start talking. I've already checked you for possession, for Croat infection, for shapeshifter tells — you're clean. You don't register as a threat. But that doesn't explain what I'm looking at."
"What are you looking at."
His jaw tightens. "Don't."
"I'm not trying to —" You pull against the zip ties, not hard, just testing. "I'm from 2009. Zachariah pulled me forward. I don't know how long I'm here." You look at him. "It's me, Dean."
"You look like —" He stops. His voice does something at the stop, some minute fracture that he shuts down immediately. "You look like someone. That doesn't mean you are her."
The word sits in the air between you.
You hold very still. "Tell me something," you say. "Something that would prove it. Ask me anything."
He's quiet for a moment. The gun stays angled down. His eyes stay on your face with that cataloguing quality, running checks you can't see.
Then he says: "When you were eleven. The apartment in Baton Rouge. What happened to Sam's fish."
The memory arrives immediately, the way memories do when they're attached to something embarrassing. "I knocked the tank off the dresser trying to reach the top shelf. Sam cried for an hour. I told him it went to a better place and he said fish don't go to heaven and I said how would he know." You pause. "Dean, you made me re-enact the whole thing for Dad when he got back and I didn't speak to you for four days."
The gun lowers all the way.
He looks at you with the expression of a man who has been keeping a door locked for a long time and has just heard a key in the lock and does not know yet whether to open it.
"You're really from 2009," he says. Not a question anymore.
"Zachariah. Apparently he thought the field trip would be educational."
Dean makes a sound that isn't quite a laugh. He crosses the room and crouches down in front of you and pulls a knife from his belt and cuts through the zip tie in one motion and then stays there, crouched at your level, just — looking at you.
Up close, the five years are more specific. There's a scar near his jaw that you don't recognize. The lines around his eyes are deeper than they should be for thirty-one. He looks like a man who has been getting up every morning and choosing to keep going through sheer stubbornness, for so long that the stubbornness has become load-bearing.
"Hi," he says. His voice is rough.
"Dean. I need you to tell me where Sam is."
The door locks again. Not all the way — there's something different in his face now, something that wasn't there before, cracked open and struggling to reseal — but the flatness comes back, the functional armor of it. He stands up. He moves to the table and pours two drinks you didn't ask for and sets one in front of you and wraps both hands around his own.
"There was a showdown," he says. "In Detroit. Five years ago."
"Sam didn't come out of it." He looks at the glass. "Not — he didn't die. He said yes. He said yes to Lucifer, and Lucifer is —" He stops. Takes a breath that's more controlled than it looks. "He's been wearing Sam ever since. I've been trying — there's a plan, tonight, we're going to —" He stops again. "We're going to try."
You sit with that for a moment. Not with the feelings it produces — you put those somewhere else for now, file them away with everything that needs to not interfere with functioning — but with the information itself.
"Okay," you say again. "Tell me the plan."
He tells you over the two drinks and then a third.
Not all of it — Dean never tells all of anything at once, you've known that since you were old enough to notice — but enough. He's found the Colt, after five years of tracking it. He knows where Lucifer is going to be tonight. He's assembled a team. The plan has the particular clean simplicity of plans made by someone who has stopped needing it to work in the way that means they stop themselves — they've stopped being precious about the details because the details aren't the point.
You say: "That's a trap."
"The demon we interrogated —" He sees your expression. "Tortured. We tortured him. Yes. You can have an opinion about that later." He looks at the glass. "I know it's a trap. I'm going anyway."
"Because you think you can get to Lucifer through the back if you send everyone else in the front."
"That's not a plan. That's a —" You stop. Look at him. At the way he's holding his glass, the way he's sitting, the particular angle of his shoulders. You have been reading Dean Winchester's body language since before you had language for it, and what you're reading now is not a man running a mission. "That's not a plan," you say, again, quieter. "That's just an ending."
"You're done," you say. "You've decided you're done and you've built something around it that looks like a mission so the people in this camp don't have to watch their —"
"I'm not stopping. Dean, I am not going to —"
"I know you're not her." His voice cracks, just barely, just at the seams, and he shuts it down with the speed of someone who's had a lot of practice. "Okay? I know you're not. I know you're 2009 and you're here and you're — I know. But looking at you is —" He stops. Sets the glass down very carefully. "You need to understand that looking at you is not a small thing right now."
He's not looking at you. He's looking at the table, at the glass, at some middle distance where he can hold his face still.
"Dean," you say carefully. "What happened? To her. To me, in this — what happened?"
The silence is long enough that you start to understand the shape of it before he answers.
"Lucifer," he says. One word. The rest of the sentence doesn't need to exist.
The stone drops into your chest.
"Eight months ago." He picks the glass back up. Drinks. Sets it down. "He — from what I understand, you were trying to —" He stops. Shakes his head. "It doesn't matter what you were trying to do. It matters that you're not here anymore and I have been —" He cuts himself off. "It's fine. It's been eight months. It's fine."
"It's not fine," you say.
"No," he agrees. "It's not."
You look at your brother's profile. At the scar you don't recognize. At the exhaustion worn into him so deep it's become part of his structure, invisible the way load-bearing walls are invisible because they're just the building now, you don't think about them until something shifts.
You want to fall apart. You can feel it, the specific pressure of something that needs to break, sitting behind your sternum. The knowledge that in five years from your time, you are going to be dead. That Dean has been in this camp for eight months carrying that. That Sam is somewhere in this ruined world wearing something that isn't Sam.
You file it. For later. For the private somewhere later.
"Okay," you say. "So here's what I need to know. Castiel — is he here?"
Dean blinks. "Cas? Yeah, he's —" The shift in topic catches him off-guard enough that he answers before he can decide whether to. "He's in the camp. He's —" He pauses. "He's not exactly what you remember."
You find Castiel in a cabin that smells like incense and something herbal and the particular warm haze of several different things being burned at once.
He's cross-legged on the floor at the head of a loose circle of people — women, mostly — speaking softly about something you can't quite catch from the doorway. When you step through, he stops. He looks at you.
His eyes are flat. Not cold — flat, the way eyes go when the light behind them has been removed. He's wearing a flannel shirt and his hair is too long and he looks human the way someone looks human after they've had everything else removed, down to the basic chassis.
Something moves in his face when he sees you. Not recognition — the recognition that would be recognition of you lives in Dean's face, in the way he can't look at you directly for more than a few seconds. What moves in Castiel's face is something quieter. The shape of where recognition used to be, before it became grief.
"I'll give you a moment," he says to the group. They file out around you, some of them looking curiously over their shoulders.
You and Castiel look at each other in the empty cabin.
"You're from another time," he says. "Not a difficult inference. You're too clean. And your — the other one, she —" He looks at his hands. "I would know if she had come back."
"Yes. He would have." He unfolds from the floor with the particular awkwardness of someone who's had to relearn how their body works, who keeps expecting the ease of something that isn't there anymore. "What do you need?"
"I need to know everything you know about how to put Lucifer back in his cage."
He looks at you for a long moment.
"That's not what Zachariah sent you here to ask," he says.
"No. It's what I'm asking."
Something moves in his flat eyes. It's not quite the old Castiel light — that's gone, you can see that clearly, the specific quality of it has left and isn't coming back. But it's something. The place where that light was, recognizing what it's looking at.
"Sit down," he says. "I'll tell you what I know."
He tells you about the rings.
He tells you slowly and carefully, sitting on the edge of a cot while you sit across from him on a chair that's been repaired twice with different materials, and he lays it out the way he's always laid out information — without decoration, just the facts arranged in order of relevance. The four horsemen. Their rings. A key that the four of them together can turn. Lucifer's cage, not destroyed — sealed. Seal-able. The door exists, and it can be opened, and there is a version of this that does not require Sam Winchester to say yes and stay said.
"Have you told Dean?" You asked.
"I have mentioned the horsemen. The full picture —" He pauses. "I have been trying to approach it. Dean does not want approaches. Dean wants a mission. Tonight's mission gives him what he wants, which makes it very difficult to introduce alternatives."
"How long has he been like this?"
Castiel looks at his hands. "Since you died," he says. Simple. Information. "He continued, because he always continues, but the —" He searches for the word. "The interior of it changed. He has been doing everything correctly, from the outside. Running this camp, keeping these people alive. But the purpose behind it has —" He pauses again. "It has shifted from surviving toward taking a shortcut. Do you understand the difference?"
"Yeah," you say. You understand it very well. "He's done."
"He believes there is nothing left to do it for." Castiel looks at you. "He does not know you are here yet. Only that someone arrived who looked like —" He stops.
"He knows," you say. "I was just with him."
Castiel goes very still. "And?"
You look at the floor. The stone in your chest is very heavy. "He's still planning to go tonight."
"Yeah." Castiel exhales. "That would not change easily."
"Maybe not easily." You stand up. "But it's going to change." You look at him. "Will you back me up?"
His flat eyes hold yours. "I was going to tell him," he says quietly. "About the rings. About the cage. I was — I have been trying to find the moment. But Dean does not make it easy to find the moment."
A pause. Then, from Castiel: "Yes. All right."
You find Dean in the armory.
He's running a check on a handgun with the focused, automatic efficiency of someone who stopped thinking of this as an extraordinary activity a long time ago. His hands are very steady. They've always been steady, Dean's hands. You've noticed that since you were small. Your hands are steady too — a different kind of steady, harder won — but Dean's come from somewhere else, some bedrock quality, and you've always found them reliable to look at when things are bad.
He looks up when you come in and something shifts in his face — the careful realignment of someone who is still adjusting to what you are, what you mean, what it costs to look at you.
"Cas told you," you say. Not a question.
"Cas told me a lot of things over the years. Most of them right before something went badly." He sets the gun down. "Which specific thing?"
"He didn't. But I'm about to." You position yourself between him and the door — not aggressively, just in the way of someone who knows how exits work and knows this particular person's relationship to them. "The plan tonight."
"Is a trap and you know it." You hold his eyes when he opens his mouth. "Don't. I was born four minutes before Sam and thirty seconds after you started learning to lie to me. I know your face. That's my face." You step closer. "You know it's a trap. You're sending Castiel and Risa and everyone in those vehicles in through the front while you go around the back, and you know they're going to —"
"Someone has to get to Lucifer."
"Not like this." Your voice is steady. You are making it be steady. "Not while you use the people in this camp as a diversion. Dean, those are people."
"I know they're people." His voice hardens. "I know every one of their names. I've kept them alive for five years. I know exactly what I'm —"
"Do you?" You take the last step between you and him and you look up at him and you say, clearly: "Or have you stopped caring whether you come back from it? Because those are different things. Knowing their names and caring whether you live — those are different things."
The armory hums around you. Some generator still doing its job at the end of the world.
"Dean." Quieter now. "Cas told me about the rings. The horsemen, the cage — there's another way. It's not fast, it's not clean, but it's a way, and you have been standing in front of it because this —" you gesture at the gun on the table, at the camp beyond the walls — "because this ends things, and ending things is what you've decided you want."
"Eight months," you say. He goes very still. "You've been doing this for eight months since she died. Since I —" You stop. Start again. "And I know — I know I'm not her. I know that. But I am standing here right now and I'm telling you that the plan tonight is not a mission. It is your death, and I am not watching you walk into it while I'm standing here."
He's not looking at you. He's looking at the wall above your shoulder, the particular focusing-on-nothing that means he's holding his face together by will alone.
"She was trying to get to Sam," he says. Very quiet. "When Lucifer — she was trying to find a way to get to Sam and I wasn't there and I didn't —" He stops. His jaw works. "I have run this camp for eight months alone, I have kept every person in it alive, I have done everything I was supposed to do, and it hasn't —" He exhales. "It doesn't fix the part where I wasn't there. That part doesn't go away."
"No," you say. "It doesn't."
"So you understand why tonight —"
"I understand why it feels like the only thing left." You hold his gaze when he finally looks at you. "I also understand that it isn't. Dean, Sam is still in there. Castiel told me that — Lucifer hasn't — there is still Sam, somewhere inside, and there is a cage that can hold Lucifer and there are four rings that can open it, and in 2009 I can — we can —"
"You're going back." His voice is flat again. Not the wall-flat — something else. Something that sounds like a man talking himself out of something he wants.
"Zachariah is going to send me back. I can't stop that. But when he does—" You step toward him and you put your hand on his arm and you feel him go very still, like a breath held. "When he does, I am going to remember this. All of it. And I am going home and I am going to find Sam and Dean and I am going to tell them about the cage and the rings and we are going to find a way that is not this." You hold his arm. "But I need you to not die before I get the chance. I need you to not walk everyone in this camp into a trap tonight because you've decided there's nothing left to come back for."
The armory is very quiet.
Dean looks at your hand on his arm.
Something in him does what it does when he's been hit somewhere real — a brief, total, undefended moment, the kind he's usually fast enough to prevent — and then he breathes, and the moment closes, and he looks like himself again. Worn-down, load-bearing, stubborn self. But something is different in it now. Some degree of the rigid forward lean has shifted.
"The rings," he says. Slowly.
"We'd need all four. We don't have any."
"No. But I will. In 2009 I'll have a starting point and you and Sam and I—" You stop. "You and I. And Sam, if we can — there's still time, Dean. In 2009 there is still time, and I am not going home and wasting it because I watched you decide it was already over."
He's quiet for a long time.
Then he says, "You're better at this than she was."
"Getting through." Something almost moves at the corner of his mouth. "She got through too, but it took her longer. She didn't have — she hadn't seen this yet. You have an unfair advantage."
"Watching the future wreck you is not an advantage, Dean."
"No," he says. "Probably not."
He puts his hand over yours where it rests on his arm. He holds it there for a moment. His hands are still steady, even now. Even here.
"I'll call off tonight's mission," he says. Quiet. Decided.
"Don't thank me. Risa's going to be furious and it's going to be a whole thing." He pulls his hand back and picks up the gun from the table and you can see him already moving into the next thing, the logistics, the management, the endless work of keeping a camp alive. But the quality of the movement is different. A fraction less like a man walking toward a conclusion.
"Dean." He pauses. Looks at you. "When I get back to 2009, I won't do anything stupid alone." You hold his gaze. "I mean it. She died trying to reach Sam by herself. I'm not doing that."
Something moves through his face. "No," he says. "You're not."
You find a quiet corner of the camp that night.
Behind the motor pool, between two vehicles, with your back against the Impala's driver side door because it's the only thing in this whole ruined world that's where it's supposed to be. The stars are out. They're still there — indifferent and permanent and entirely unhelpful, but there.
This is where you let it happen.
Not all of it — you don't have the capacity for all of it, and you're not sure you'll ever have the capacity for all of it. But some of it. The fact of your own death, the specific shape of it — Lucifer in Sam's body, which means Sam's hands, means Sam's face, which is a cruelty so precise it could only be designed. The eight months Dean has been carrying it, alone, in a camp full of people counting on him to not be a person, to be a function instead. The photograph in Bobby's journal with the faces you didn't find in it.
You sit behind the Impala and you press the heels of your hands against your eyes and you breathe in and you breathe out, and you let the thing in your chest be what it is for a few minutes in the dark where no one can see it.
Then you breathe out one more time. And you put it somewhere. Not gone — you know it's not gone, it's going to be there for a long time — but somewhere workable. Somewhere that doesn't interfere with moving.
"I'm not going to let it happen," you say, to no one in particular. To the future, maybe. To the version of yourself who isn't here. "Okay? I'm going back and I'm not going to let it happen."
Castiel sits down beside you, quietly, in the way he has of being somewhere before you notice he's arrived.
"He's telling Risa," he says.
You almost smile. Almost.
You sit in silence for a moment, you and this faded, grounded, still-trying version of Castiel, under the wrong-colored sky of 2015.
"In my time," you say, "you're still an angel."
"I know." He looks at his hands. "I know. I remember what that felt like." A pause. "I think I would have kept it, if I'd known. I took it for granted." He looks at the sky. "Don't tell the version of me in 2009 that I said that. He's insufferable enough without the validation."
This time you actually smile. "Yeah. He really is."
Dean finds you just before the light comes.
You don't know how he knew — maybe he's been watching the camp all night, maybe he just knows where you'd go, maybe it's the same muscle memory that always brought him to wherever you were when things were bad. But he comes around the back of the Impala and sits on the hood, and you stand up from the ground and lean next to him, and for a while neither of you says anything.
"In 2009," he says finally. "What's happening?"
"We're trying to find the Colt. Sam thinks it might still be out there."
A quiet sound. "Sam's always right about that stuff."
"And you're — the three of you are —"
"Yeah." You look at the camp. The fires burning in their careful containment. The people moving in the dark, doing the ordinary unglamorous work of staying alive. "We're fine. All three of us. Still together." You pause. "Still arguing about everything."
"Good." He says it like it means something. Like the image of the three of you arguing about something in a motel somewhere is the most valuable piece of information he's received in years. "That's — yeah. Good."
You look at him. At your brother's face, worn down to the last layer and still there, still Dean, still the person who sat outside your bedroom door every night in every strange motel for your entire childhood because he wanted to be sure he'd hear if something happened.
"She knew you'd keep going," you say. "She knew — I know — that you'd keep doing this no matter what. That's not the question." You pause. "The question is whether you're doing it for something or just doing it. And I need it to be for something. Okay? I need you to have a reason."
He's quiet for a long time.
"Yeah," he says again. "Okay."
He reaches over and he puts his hand on the back of your head, briefly, the way he used to when you were small and something was wrong and he didn't have words for it. Here and gone.
"Go get my brother back," he says.
"Yeah," you say. "That's the plan."
Lucifer finds you the next morning.
You're in the main clearing of the camp, watching a group run equipment checks, and you feel him before you see him — a shift in the air, a drop in temperature, the specific quality of something ancient and vast arriving in a space too small to contain it properly. You turn around.
Your brother's face wearing something that isn't your brother, and the wrongness of it is so precise that your body has a physical response to it — cold, fast, instinctive, the way your body responds to threats that are also things you love. You stay very still.
Lucifer tilts Sam's head. Looks at you with Sam's eyes, which are the exact color you've known your entire life and which are currently being used by something that has existed since before the concept of time.
"You're not from here," he says. Sam's voice, Sam's register, the cadence underneath it something ancient and unhurried.
"2009." He takes a step toward you. You don't step back. "Zachariah's doing."
"He wants you to say yes to Michael." He tilts Sam's head. "Seeing all of this — he believes it will convince you." He looks at you with something that might be curiosity if it were human. "Does it?"
A small smile with Sam's mouth. "No. I didn't think so. You're —" He considers you. "You're stubborn in a way that's specific to this family. It's almost impressive."
"Let him go." You say it clearly. Flat. "He said yes because he thought there was no other way. There is."
"The cage." He says it without surprise, which means he already knows what Castiel told you. Of course he does. "You've been busy."
"I've had a productive visit."
"You think a cage holds me."
Something moves in Sam's face — not Sam, but using Sam's face to express something that Sam's face was not built to express, and the wrongness of it is so specifically awful that you have to actively work to hold eye contact. "It did," Lucifer says. Quietly. "For a very long time." He takes another step. You hold your ground. "You understand that even if you find the rings — even if you find all four, which would require —"
"I know what it would require."
"Even then." He stops. He looks at you with Sam's eyes. "You would have to get Sam to say yes to me of his own free will and then get him to say no. Are you prepared for what that means?"
He looks at you for a long moment. The ancient weight of him is visible, slightly, at the edges — the way something vast is visible at the edges of something it's been poured into, just past the seams.
"He's in there," you say. Quieter. Looking at Sam's face, looking for the lines of him underneath everything else. "I know he is. You haven't —" Your voice catches once, and you let it. "He's still in there."
Lucifer is quiet. Then: "Enough of him."
"For you." He considers that. "Yes. I suppose for you it would be." He steps back. "You know that Zachariah showed you this to prove a point. That no matter what you do —"
"I heard his speech. I'm not interested."
"You will be in five years." He says it without threat, without pleasure. Just — information. "This is where we end up. The two of us, here. Whatever you do between now and then."
"Maybe." You look at him. At Sam's face. "Or maybe not."
Lucifer's expression shifts — something that isn't quite amusement and isn't quite respect, something between them. "You know," he says, "I understand why they want you. You and your brothers — you are extraordinary, for what you are." He tilts Sam's head one last time. "I'll see you in five years."
He walks away. You stand in the clearing and watch Sam's body walk away from you with something that isn't Sam in it, and the stone in your chest weighs more than you have words for, and you breathe through it, and you breathe through it, and you don't move until you can trust your legs.
He puts his hand on your shoulder and doesn't say anything, and you're grateful for it, because if anyone said anything right now you'd lose the composure you've been carrying like a glass too full to put down.
After a moment: "He said enough of him," you say.
"Yes." His voice is quiet. "There is enough."
"That means Sam is still — he's still Sam, he's still in there, he's still —"
"I'm going to go back," you say. "And I'm going to find your 2009 self and I'm going to tell him everything. The rings, the cage, all of it. And then I'm going to find my brothers and tell them."
"And we're going to find another way."
"I know," he says again. And the flat eyes, stripped of light, exhausted and human and still here — they hold something. Not hope, exactly. Something quieter than hope. The shape of what's left when hope gets very worn. "I know you're going to try."
"It's not nothing," he says. "Trying is not nothing. It never was." He drops his hand from your shoulder. "Take care of the version of me in your time. He's going to need it."
"He's really not that bad."
A pause. "...so I've been told."
The light comes without warning.
You're standing in the middle of Camp Chitaqua and the world goes white around you the same way it did in that parking lot in Texas — total and sourceless, belonging to somewhere else — and you have time for exactly one thing before it takes you.
He's across the camp. He sees you — he's already seen you, he's already been watching, some part of him tracking you the whole night the same way he always has, the same way he always does. His face does what it did in the armory, that brief, total, undefended moment.
Sam's shoes are by the door, one slightly ahead of the other the way they always are because Sam never lines his shoes up properly. Dean's jacket is over the chair. The TV is off and the curtains are almost closed, the orange of the parking lot light coming in at the edges. There's a cup of cold gas station coffee on the table and it's the most painfully, achingly ordinary thing you've seen since you left.
You stand in the middle of the room and breathe.
The stone is still there. It'll probably always be there now — the specific gravity of what you've seen, the weight of the future you are going to spend everything you have trying to prevent. That's okay. You know where to put weight so it doesn't stop you moving. You've known that since you were small.
He picks up on the second ring, already sounding slightly harassed, which means he's been standing on a roadside in the dark for however long and is managing it about as well as he always manages waiting. "I thought you were going to call in four hours."
"Change of plans." You sit on the edge of the bed. "Cas. I need you to tell me everything you know about the four horsemen and their rings. Everything. Don't leave anything out."
A pause. "That is quite a significant —"
"And I need to know about Lucifer's cage. What it would take to open it. Start from the beginning." You look at the door. At Sam's shoes, one slightly ahead of the other. "We're going to find another way."
"Another way to what, exactly?"
"To end this without anyone saying yes." You look at Sam's shoes. "Can you come here? Tonight?"
A pause. You can hear him outside on the roadside — the specific stillness of Castiel thinking, which sounds like nothing but feels different from regular silence. "Yes," he says. "I'll be there."
"Thank you." You hang up.
He picks up after one ring because he always picks up after one ring. Your Dean — 2009 Dean, with all the softness that five years hasn't yet worn away, the laugh lines instead of the exhaustion lines, the voice that doesn't have that particular crack in it yet. His voice sounds like something you want to put between your hands and keep exactly as it is.
"Hey," he says. "Thought you were meeting us at the —"
"I need you to come here. Both of you." Your voice is steady. You're making it be steady. "I need to talk to you and Sam together. Tonight."
You look at the cold coffee. At the parking lot light coming through the curtain. At this ordinary room in 2009 where the world is still intact and your brothers are still your brothers and nothing has ended yet.
"I will be," you say. "Just— come here. Don't stop anywhere. Come straight here."
"Yeah. Yeah, we're on our way." His voice shifts — the specific shift that means he's already in motion, already moving toward you, because that's Dean, that's always been Dean. "What happened?"
"I'll tell you when you get here." You pause. "Dean. I love you. Okay? I just— I need you to know that."
A silence. Long enough that you wonder if the line dropped.
Then: "Yeah," he says, rough. "Yeah. We'll be there in ten minutes."
You sit in the motel room in the living present, in the world that hasn't ended yet, with the stone in your chest and the plan forming in the back of your mind and five years of future that you are going to spend the rest of your life trying to make sure stays a possibility instead of a certainty.
Sam is alive. Sam is in there. Lucifer said enough of him and that means enough.
The door opens ten minutes later and Sam comes through it first because Sam always goes through doors first in new places without knowing he does it, and he looks at you and his face does the thing it does when he knows something's wrong, those careful eyes reading you the way they always have, the way only twins can.
"Hey," he says. "Hey, what —"
You cross the room and you put your arms around him and you hold on.
He holds on back immediately, no questions, both arms, the way he's always done it. "What happened?" he asks, into your hair. "Talk to me."
Dean comes through the door and looks at the two of you and his face does several things in quick succession and then he comes over and he puts his hand on the back of your head, briefly, and you laugh a little, because he did exactly that in 2015 and you hadn't known it was a habit, hadn't known it was a thing he'd still be doing in five years.
"Okay," Dean says. "Okay, what's going on."
You pull back. You look at both of them — Sam's careful eyes, Dean's already-moving jaw, both of them reading you and waiting.
"Sit down," you say. "Both of you." You look at them. "I have to tell you about the future."
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