#grieving!dean

First you need to get your ass to where Sam and Jack are. Your brother stopped calling a while back. There are a dozen texts. You text him back you’re on your way. Just can’t tell him over the phone. Can’t say the words over the phone. Don’t even know what the words are. Cas is gone. It’s your fault. It’s always your goddamn fault.

You refuse the tears this time, and open the doors back up to the anger, acidic in your chest and directed entirely at yourself as you step on the gas, eyes on the road ahead, one hand reaching for the stereo, the blaring music serving as an intervention, a blocker for the impressions crowding in your head, of the man you’ve known and yet never known completely. Until today.

You reach your brother and the kid and you tell them. The words are perfunctory. The truth, but not the whole truth. So help you. They don’t question. You see their grief and you can’t indulge, can’t join them in it. You fix it, that’s what you do. By giving up? Giving in. Same thing. The kid is disappointed, but the kid doesn’t get that all the cards have been played and there’s no more choices to make—save this one. Sacrifice like a red thread through your entire story and its time to pull on it. You die, Sam dies, willingly, unwillingly, however God wants it, but the world lives. Cas lives.

No dice. 

God dismisses you, because what God wants is for you to stay in this moment of shame, of suffering, of loneliness. The ultimate punishment for disobeying, for refusing to heed him when heeding was offered, for staying defiant to the very last. And here it is then, the last. At last. And so you have your pick of bottles, and a second pick and third pick, pouring their contents down your throat, letting it drown the shame, flood the suffering, pool around the loneliness until you’re on the brink of forgetting the recent, because your mind swims in old memories, clinging to the good ones like they’re life rafts. Cas is right there, present in all of them. He would be. For all your years of denying it to yourself, you’ve known for a while that Cas is the one thing keeping you from drowning. Lending breath whenever you’ve felt like you were fighting for air. Grabbing hold whenever you’ve reached for something to hold onto. 

Sam is your cornerstone, but Cas is the mortar between the better parts of you, because he’s never backed down from calling you out on your bullshit. He never used to. Never did. Before… 

Fuck, you’re drunk.

It’s now, in the seconds between awake and sleeping, that you finally admit it fully to yourself that what you feel more than shame, more than loneliness, more than anything else is regret. What’s causing the suffering is the fact that, when this man you’ve loved for longer than you’re even sure of yourself told you that you’re the opposite of what you’ve always feared yourself to be, when he told you that he sees you as you are, understanding you in ways that you didn’t even realise yourself that you’ve always longed to be understood until he was standing there, understanding you, when this man confessed—professed—his love for you, all you could do was close up, and deny him. 

The failure to act, to speak, to do something, anything other than all the wrong things is like a blade, precise, unyielding, refusing to be ignored.

You are so broken.

You’re not.

How long? How long did Cas know that he loved you? How long could you have gotten to love him back, if you hadn’t been such a fucking coward?

No answer. 

You sleep. Deeply, dreamlessly. 

You wake needing something to kill the pain and needing that something in copious amounts, but the kid distracts you with his antennae pricking: someone else is out there. So into the Impala you pile yourselves and you drive the roads you’ve driven a thousand times with that fifth of whatever sloshing around in your stomach and you find a too quiet stretch of mileage to make a pitstop, but your bladder has to wait when there’s movement and what seemed as lifeless as every other place surprises you with a dog. One dog. The final dog. The only dog on the planet. 

What’re the odds of that? 

And your chest is suddenly swelling with gratitude, because it’s a goddamn miracle, and you feel there’s good here, a sign that there’s still good, and it’s like Cas is there with you, in that moment, standing beside you, his presence filling you up, like a wind billowing out a slackened sail, and you can’t stop fucking smiling. Because you know it’s going to be okay, even as memories blister themselves through your mind with all the times you almost touched him but stopped yourself, you know it’ll be okay, because he’ll come back. He always comes back. 

Then the dog is spirited away and Chuck gives you a smile and a wave and you want to kill him. But he’s gone and how the hell are you supposed to kill God anyway? You’re feeling like you could do it with your bare hands, but then you step through the doors of a church together with Sam and the kid and the someone else is there. An archangel. The one that’s stalked the edges of your story for as long as it’s been written. The one that opened a rift to Purgatory and allowed you reentry and a second chance to have a prayer spoken and answered and you feel yourself tense, because you owe him, but you don’t trust him: he reminds you too much of yourself. Even so, here’s a key for the lock you can’t seem to pick.

Of course, it doesn’t work. 

And then your phone rings. And you stare at the name on the display and it doesn’t seem possible that Cas would have found a way back this quickly, but then there’s his voice on the line saying he’s here and he’s hurt and can you let him in and you’re on your feet in the blink of an eye, taking the stairs to the front door three at a time and feeling worry and concern, fear and anticipation mingle like something mildly intoxicating in your brain until you open the door and face the devil on the other side. There’s shock, bright and discombobulating, like hands grasping your shoulders and shaking you, hard. Already inside the bunker, too late to be stopped, the devil sneers and smirks at his impersonation getting you to let your guard down, as he knew it would. You control the disgust, but barely. You feel like spitting on the floor, something bitter on your tongue, but don’t. The devil is amused. You can’t fucking stand how this ruse means the last time you heard Cas’ voice it was thanks to this dick.

It’s not the last time.

But there’s a sinking feeling in your chest, and the thought that yes, it is, even though you refuse it. Thankfully, the devil and his brother in the same room is more pressing, especially with a freshly minted Death there to read the God book. Everything happens with a rapidity that makes even your head spin and ends with Lucfier dead by Michael’s hand, the God book proving an absolute dud, and the kid taking you and Sam aside for a word in private. Because he just got juiced up and he says, in that quiet way he has:

“I thought this new power meant I was dangerous. That I was bad. So I didn’t tell you. And I know that was wrong, but I didn’t know how to. I’m sorry.”

It’s alright, kid. 

You’re how we fight God. 

You’re how we win.

The plan is formulated through lowered voices as you stand with your brother and the kid at the very back of the library, the dimly lit antechamber housing the useless inter-dimensional geoscope acting as backdrop, and as the steps you need to take are worked out between the three of you, you feel how that fist within begins to loosen again, only this time it’s not because of anything other than your growing faith that this is it. This is how it really ends.

The clarity that comes with it should be startling, but isn’t. Because you’re beginning to see it. How it’s a tapestry. Your past. Woven into something traceable. The only life you’ve ever known, but here the weave is changing color, thanks to you, no one else. Your choices determine the weave, no one else’s. And now, working together with two of your closest, the knowledge that you’ll succeed this time is like a golden thread through all of it, finally catching the light so that you’ll notice it, acknowledge it. You’re stronger like this: together. You always were. 

It’s Chuck’s weakness, because he can’t comprehend it. There’s no compromise in him. No loyalty, no selflessness, no love.

He can’t write your ending. He has no power here. 

You asked what about all this is real—we are.

Cas was right. If only you’d heard him sooner. If only you’d really listened, instead of stacking bricks against him, walling yourself in with your fear and all the self-doubt that has always accompanied it. Warding yourself against the overwhelming lack of control in such utterly idiotic ways; idiotic because your control was never lesser, never hollowed out: you’ve always had a choice. And there was a golden thread, ever present, even inside each brick. All you have to do now is tug on it, and the walls will turn to sand. 

You don’t hesitate.

Knowing you has changed me.

You tug.

Sunshine reflects off the waters of the lake as you pull up. It’s a pretty spot you’ve chosen. The plan is working like a charm. Every tooth of the trap you’ve set is snapping in place at its expected moment, every predicted choice by the opposing force has been made in response to your subtle manipulation of them. Both of them. Because Chuck takes the bait, and shows, and Michael dies at his Father’s hand, and the Father is rendered godless at the hands of his grandson, and the legacy of death and destruction stops here. You know it does.

Except the human on the ground thinks his ending is to be murdered by his own creation, thinks you’ll pull your gun and place a bullet between his brows, or reach down and strangle him, like you’ve had in your head for months, and you leave him behind with the knowledge that he’s been lying to himself, trying to keep you doing the same, but you’re done.

You’re ready for the truth, because the truth…

You’re the most selfless, caring human being I will ever know.