It’s a tragedy, from the human perspective.
Cosmically speaking, the angels consider it the worst mistake ever made, and they have Lucifer as a point of reference.
You wonder what Dean would call it—eyes crinkling, mouth turning up from one corner as he laughs it off, because that’s what he does with tragedies. You wonder, as you consider the dawn breaking from one end of the earth, and he sleeps, or wakes, or eats on the other. You could ask. But what are the right words to form the starting question? Inept as you are with his customs—and they are countless as there are stars. So you stare, digging under skin for answers. They’re written across his soul, but the language is human, murky.
Though you’ve learned new words through him, the story is old. You’d been created knowing, bearing them within your epicenter like a mission statement, a pendulum or magnet, waiting eons for them to pull you to his gravity. Whatever it was meant to be, you're responsible for the revision. And you know to the minute, to that divided millisecond, or nano-space in time when all things already ingrained in you seemed to magnify, when it changed-for better and worse. The story rewritten because he’s asked it of you.
Still, it has always started a tragedy.
You could lie. You could say rushing to his rescue, he’d been a beacon; unmitigated and bright—that he’d been beautiful from the beginning. Romantic, but untrue. He’d screamed profanities at the sight of you, touching down in his little corner of Hell; shunning your grace and all that it represented from the start. You had to pry him from the rack, hands still fisted in his last victim and he’d been terrible to consider; this patchwork soul working on thirty years of self hate, an additional ten learning how to weaponize it. You touched him out of duty, reached into the fetid charred thing he’d become, hoping to stoke the embers of himself, hoping forty years of Hell hadn’t burned out all that he was. And there you left your mark.
The next part is hilarious.
The branding went both ways. A filigree of doubt entered through your grace in place of the crack you already had in your chassis. No matter how many times you tell him you were broken long before he came along, he takes the blame for it anyway. That has always been his tragedy.
Dean Winchester is saved. It had been a premature declaration, breaking through Perdition to the surface with his incriminating weight.
Ultimately, you realize the failure of your mission—the futility. Because you hadn’t saved him at all. It doesn’t stop you from trying. You do it with lies, with deals, with shifting minds to broken things. You called yourself God, and then fell by the wayside with skidded knees. He calls you back to your senses by putting himself and all he loves in danger—and then speaks of choice. Angry, stupid, foolish, headstrong, Dean.
Dean who follows, when he should leave. Dean who prays with disbelief, and begs with fists and rage. Dean who asks you to stay with need, and tells you to go in the same breath.
All these things bind you together like a tragedy. But to the marrow of your bones, to the fire drawn from his eyes as you look into him like the first or the last, you know it for one thing.
From beginning to end, you’ll call the story love.
