Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The bunker emergency lighting flashes red against the walls, pulsating once before a soft whirring noise breaks through the harsh cry of the alarm. The strip lighting flickers again, and then the overheads come back on. Dean is flat on his back, staring up the barrel of a gun, at his father. 

Voice hoarse, he hears himself ask, “Dad?”

And there’s his father looking back at him, hair cut short the way he used to wear it, sight of the gun lowering a little without dropping all the way. John Winchester’s expression is tight, his mouth set in a distrustful line. His eyes are wide.

“Dean? Sam? What in the hell?”

Dean eases himself gingerly off of the floor, eyes on the gun in his father’s hands. Beside him, Sam is standing too. John follows the movement, frown dropping down to cover the look of shock playing out on his face. There’s something about him that Dean can’t quite place. His close-cropped dark hair, the slight hunch of his posture.  

John stands favoring his right leg, left shoulder pulled down, same way he’d done for a while when Sam was at Stanford, and they’d tracked a werewolf pack through Montana that had gotten the jump on them. He’s wearing a jacket that Dean barely recognizes, and when he does he’d swear they’d left it behind at a truck stop, covered in blood and half torn to shreds with $50 in the pocket that he’d sorely missed, after. 

Sharp as anything, John says, “Sammy, aren’t you supposed to be in Palo Alto?”

His face looks unfinished somehow, particularly when he glances over at Sam, who is doing that head-tilt thing with his brow creased in the middle. He’s got his hands raised half-way up his chest, like he’s still deciding whether or not he’s gonna be shot. 

“Palo Alto?”

John gives him a once over, taking in the sharp decline of his widow’s peak and the semi-permanent little “v” on his forehead (Sam is always doing that head-tilt, brow-creased thing). His eyes flick over to Dean too, and Dean can’t tell what he sees. 

Whatever it is, it finally dulls the edge in John’s voice. His next words come out harsh, but with less of a bite. Sucked in on the tail end of a sharp inhale. “You’re—what happened to you? Where the hell are we?” 

A line draws itself between two points in Dean’s head. A connection sparks. 

“Dad…” He says, cautiously, “What year is it?”

The cage in his head has gone quiet. Like even Michael is listening. 

John eyes him sharply. Dark eyes, Sam’s eyes, narrowed in his unfinished face.

“What are you—it’s 2003.”

And Sam says, “It’s 2019.”

John’s expression goes slack. He’s looking around the bunker now, between the bookshelves and tables and back again to Sam and Dean. “No. How?”

Sam says, shifting on his feet, almost awkward,“We, uh… I—I think we summoned you.”

“Summoned me?” John echoes, but it sounds different when he says it.  

Dean swallows, “Through… time.”

John cuts his eyes to Dean, a quick flash of disapproval extinguished just as it sparks. “You boys better tell me what the hell is going on right now.”

Dean opens his mouth; good soldier ready with his report. He hears himself say, “Mom’s alive.”

John’s face has gone perfectly still, color drained. Dean listens through glass as he says, “Mary… Mary’s—” and then he can’t finish, and Dean can’t either. 

“We didn’t summon her,” Sam fills in, and then he adds quickly, “and it wasn’t a deal. Dean stopped the Apocalypse and—”

John cuts him off, looking towards Dean. “Where is she?”

There’s a lump in Dean’s throat. There’s a feeling behind his eyes like the door might be giving. Behind John’s head, one of the bookcases begins to melt onto the floor. Dean watches an old volume of celtic lore split slowly open at its spine, delicate pages dripping down the shelves.

He grits his teeth, breathing steady. He keeps his eyes locked on John. From the corner of his eye, he can see black ink beginning to vine delicately out across the surface of the hardwood floor. At first it looks like nothing, and then it begins to look like something. A high, shining window. The back-lit arch of a tall, white room. 

It’s Sam who says, “Well—”

John’s eyes cut away from Dean’s face. 

The blueprint scatters. The vision recedes.

Sam is scuffing his boot across the floor, body hunched over almost automatically. “She isn’t actually—”

Dean says, louder than he means to, “I’ll call her.”

The wifi in the bunker is not actually that great—slow in certain spots despite Sam’s best efforts and Cas’ strategic help. So Dean has a good excuse to duck into the bathroom to make the call. No excuse for turning on the faucet or switching on the fan, but he’s forty now and doesn’t need one.

Encased in the soft hum of the water, he leans his head back against the door, breathing slow through his nose. 

It hasn’t been bad like this in a while. The visions. Hallucinations? Whatever you want to call them. 

They haven’t been that bad. 

He kneads at his forehead. 

It’s not that bad.  

Solid wood of the door at his back, steady rise and fall of his chest. Just a slight give to the air in front of him. A shimmer.

His heart pounds against his aching ribs. The cage rattles behind his eyes. Not enough to break but. 

Enough. 

He digs his phone out of his pocket with shaking hands, scrolls down through his contacts. The room around him has got that wrong-textured feeling to it. Like the elements are switching. Like he might open his mouth and breathe in water.

The line rings once, then twice, and then cuts off into Mary’s voicemail, the canned recording staticky and familiar.

Dean clears his throat. The air stays air. 

“Uh, hi,” he says, “listen, I know you were planning to just go straight through on your run without stopping but something’s—” and then he has to break off so that the tremor doesn’t catch in his voice. He stands there for a second, holding his phone in one hand and the bridge of his nose in the other, head tipped back against the door, breathing. 

Then he pulls himself together, brings the receiver back to his mouth. Clears his throat, quick, and says, “Listen, there’s no good way to say this so I’m just going to say it. Dad’s back,” he stops again. He breathes. “Not back back—not like you. He’s from the past, but,” above his head the little air vent whirs and whirs, “he’s asking for you.”

Dean lumbers out of the bathroom right as Sam lumbers in, and for a second they stand locked in the doorway, blinking at each other. Sam’s eyes skate off to the side, pulled by the invisible presence of John Winchester.

Glancing back towards Dean, he does the ASL sign for, how bad?

There’s a tick building at the base of Dean’s jaw. He signs back, mind your own fucking business.

Sam’s mouth tightens. And then it’s like he catches himself, because he rolls his eyes. Shoulders into the bathroom past Dean and closes the door behind him, slapping the fan on as he flips the lightswitch.  

Dean turns the faucet back on. He waits.

“I did most of the tests,” Sam tells him, swiping a towel from one of the shelves and a bottle of shampoo out of the cupboard. “On Dad, just to be safe.”

Dean lets out a breath. The pressure at the back of his head lessens. “Right,” he says, “Right. Good call.” 

“Yeah,” Sam is rummaging around in one of the drawers. He comes up with a somewhat suspicious looking toothbrush and a newish razor handle with a flight of fresh blades, “‘Cause I mean, it doesn’t seem like Micheal would be behind this—not exactly his style, but—”

Dean watches the pantomime of it all. Sam too-specifically going through the motions, carefully not looking at him. The way he frowns at the toothbrush before seeming to reach a verdict, and tosses it semi-casually back into the depths of the drawer. How he leaves it open a little, so Dean has to reach over and slide it all the way shut.

“How’d he do?”

Sam straightens up, joints popping. He hefts the towel and the shaving kit in one arm, then reaches forward to flip open the medicine cabinet. Dean smacks it closed.

“Do fucking not,” he says icily, “even think about messing up my system. What do you need? I’ll get it.”

Sam blows a lock of hair out of his face, “Soap, deodorant, toothbrush,” he rattles off, “and Dad’s clean. Not a demon. Not a spirit. Not a shifter. As far as I can tell.”

Dean’s hand stalls on the cabinet door. He and Sam meet each other’s eyes in the mirror. “I mean,” he hedges, “That’s good, right?”

Sam says, tone convincingly neutral, “It’s something.”

Dean turns his head to look back at him, “You think this could be another kind of trap? Something else, something—”

Sam scratches at the nape of his neck, “You know what, I think it’s actually Dad,” he says, and Dean feels it sink into the pit of his stomach.

“Oh,” he says, softer than he’d meant to. An exhale, on instinct. 

Sam grimaces at him, not a smile so much as a reflection of the complicated knot tying itself in Dean’s chest. “Yeah,” he says. 

Dean clears his throat. He sorts efficiently through the contents of the cabinet, but he has to do it a couple of times before he comes up with the things Sam wants. He says, low so as not to be heard outside of the bathroom, “I called Mom. She didn’t answer.” 

Sam raises a considering brow, “Were you expecting her to?”

Dean’s hand slips on the cabinet, and the door closes a little harder than he meant it to. The mirror trembles.  The air around it trembles too. “I left her a message,” he says gruffly, “She’ll probably check it after the hunt.”

“Right,” says Sam. 

They stand there in awkward silence beside each other for a moment. Dean can hear the sound of water dripping somewhere very close by, echoed and over-loud, an endless cavern stretching out behind him. He doesn’t turn. 

Sam catches the look. “Hey,” he says suddenly, hunching down so he’s crowding Dean’s eyeline, “seriously, how many fingers am I holding up?”

Dean swats at his hand. 

The walls go back to where they’re supposed to be.

“You’re such a brat,” he grumbles.

“Yeah well,” Sam tells him, “you should have raised me better.”

They shoulder their way out of the bathroom, and John Winchester is still there. Standing in front of one of the Men of Letters bookshelves, dried mud from a case Dean must have either worked or heard about caking his boots. Sam proffers the towels, “Uh, here,” he says, “there’s soap and shampoo and a razor—and we can grab you something to wear from—”

“Fine,” says John. 

Sam hesitates. His eyes dart over to Dean, and Dean gives him a little what look. Sam gives him one back, eyebrows raised and lips pressed.

“Are you hungry, we could—”

John cuts him off, “I don’t much feel like going out,” he says, “Not until you boys explain what happened here.”

And Dean opens his dumb, traitor mouth and says, on autopilot, “I’ll cook.”

John goes from looking at the bookshelf to looking at Dean. If there was a pin to drop, they’d hear it. 

Sam clears his throat, “Oh yeah,” he says, “this isn’t really a town for take-out. Especially on,” and Dean watches him mentally flick through the calendar, “… Mondays.” 

There’s an awkward beat. A lull. Dean feels the prick of sweat rising at the base of his neck. John is still looking at him. Dean’s eyes water. He doesn’t look away.  

And then it’s over. John is turning back towards the bookshelf, and he’s palming the deodorant and saying something flippant about how it’s been sixteen years and Dean (because it’s Dean’s, of course it’s Dean’s) hasn’t changed brands, and Sam is doing that awkward ah ah ah laugh that he pulls out at crime scenes and funerals. 

Dean breathes. His vision blurs. For a second the conversation becomes an unintelligible  rush of muted words, the brutal slam and crush of a walk-in freezer door. And then he’s back and John is saying, “—the ritual.”

Dean says, “What?”

John rolls his eyes a little, but it’s in good enough humor, “The summoning ritual,” he says, like he’s repeating himself, “where did you get it?”

“Oh,” says Dean. He still feels half a step behind, “uh, an antique shop.”

“Right,” says Sam, “We were working this case, and then we…” and then he trails back off and looks at Dean, and something in the way he does it makes Dean wonder just how much of Micheal he can still see in him. 

Dean clears his throat. He starts to speak. He swallows.

But John is turning away from both of them, nodding his head absently as if he’s had his question answered. There’s a sick, swooping feeling in the pit of Dean’s stomach, same feeling he got as a kid, about to get caught with a secret.

He watches as John drifts closer to the bathroom, and he opens his mouth to tell him the rest of it. And then he closes it again. 

And then the bathroom door is closed between them and there’s the muted sound of the shower running, and Dean still hasn’t said anything. 

Sam clears his throat into the silence, “Ooookay,” he says, “well I guess I’ll just—”

Dean rubs at his eyes, “Don’t start,” he mutters, “I’ll fill him in, I will. Just. Later, okay?” 

“Sure,” says Sam, “whatever.”

Dean cuts him a look, “I mean it,” he says weakly, “I will tell him. I just. Not yet.”

“Sure,” says Sam again, easy. 

Dean squints at him. 

Sam raises his hands, “Hey man,” he says, “Dad told you to kill me just because Azazel fed me a little demon blood as a baby, so yeah, no, I don’t think we should rush to tell him you’re possessed by an archangel.”

Dean makes a sound somewhere between a scoff and a laugh, “That’s not—” he starts. John on his deathbed, hand at the base of Dean’s skull, telling him he’d have to be the one to do it “I mean, he wouldn’t—”

Sam rolls his eyes. But there’s something there too, guarded. 

“Dean,” he says, “I was a baby. I didn’t even have a choice. You let a whole-ass archangel crawl inside your skull and use your body to incite the end of days.”

Dean flinches. 

Sam bitch faces, apologetic.

“Facts are facts, man. As far as Dad knows, angels are just one more thing we’ve gotta put down. And I don’t think he’d take any better to the idea of you saying yes to Michael than he did to Azazel putting his mark on me.”

They lapse into silence. The implication sits heavy in the air between them. Dean exhales, shaky. He clears his throat, trying to make his voice sound light. “You very much did drink demon blood,” he says, “on purpose.”

Sam’s eyes roll, “Yeah,” he says, “and we’re not gonna tell him that either. Jesus.”

Silence falls again between them. Dean breaks it after a beat with a feeble, “Guess we should make a list, huh?” He tries his best, but the joke doesn’t land, “everything we’re not telling Dad since he came back from the dead.”

Sam mutters darkly, “You first.”

From the other side of the bathroom door, the shower shuts off.  

They stare uneasily at each other, shifting a little on the hardwood. Dean brings a hand to the back of his neck.

“I mean,” he says, and his voice sounds rough in the echoed silence, “it is good to see him.”

He clears his throat. Then he clears it again. Something happens inside the cage. Not a blow but like. A weight shifting. Like Michael is listening. His postures sways, and he takes an awkward half step forward to correct it. 

Sam gives him a strained smile, brow pulled tight with concern. 

“Yeah man, of course,” he says quickly, and Dean hates how fucking soft he says it, “of course it is.”

Coming out of the bathroom, John says, “Where’s my car?”

And. Oh shit. 

“Uh,” Dean stalls, “right, well—”

John runs a towel back over his cropped hair. They’d given him a mix of their clothes to wear, but none of them fit quite right. He laughs. 

“Don’t tell me you got rid of her.”

Sam scoffs, quick on the trigger. Gun shy. “As if,” he says, “Dean’s obsessed with that car.”

Dean says, “Cas has it.” Staring straight ahead, speaking low out of the side of his mouth like that’ll help him.

Sam says, “What?”

Dean takes in a breath, eyes fixed forward. “Cas has the car. I told him he could take it. For that case that he’s. Yeah.”

“Oh,” says Sam, and they both freeze again. That weird, deer-in-the-headlights thing they’ve been doing since John got here. 

Sam rallies quickly, glancing back between John and Dean with a kind of weird, frenetic energy, “Well, then, it’ll be back soon, right? No way he’d ever crash it. He knows you love that car.”

Dean nods, brief. He starts to turn towards the kitchen. 

John says, “Who’s Cas?” Dean feels his throat stick. He doesn’t turn. Sixteen years later, and John’s footsteps are clear as anything behind him. “Another hunter? You sharing cases now?”

Sam says, “Yes,” right as Dean says, “No,” and then they look at each other again with those same wide eyes. Dean wonders in absent horror if he should just let Michael in now and be done with it. He says, “You’ll meet him later.”

John says, “When he brings back the car,” like it isn’t a question.

“Right,” says Sam, he scratches at the back of his neck, “uh—also, he lives here.”

Dean gives up on wishing for immediate angelic possession and just closes his eyes. He can feel John’s stare hard on the side of his face. Somewhere deep in the cage, he can feel Michael push experimentally against one of the walls. Dean is going to open his eyes and then he’s going to have to—

John says, “Where’s Mary?”

Dean’s eyes come open. The room around him distorts briefly, then resolves. 

He swallows. His voice doesn’t shake. “I called her.”

Dad’s eyebrows raise, waiting for the rest of the report. 

Dean nods, automatic. “I’ll try again.”

And then he’s in the kitchen, back to the door. 

He breathes in. Once. Twice. Sharp through his nose and out slow through his mouth. Once. Twice—

He picks up his phone. 

Cas answers just as he thinks the line is going to ring out to silence. Dean can hear the scuffled sounds of a fight in the background. Cas’ voice is labored as he says, “This is not really—”

Dean says, “My dad’s back.”

There’s a sudden, crackling buzz, the sound of bodies falling, and then Cas says rough into the silence, “I’m coming back right now.”

Dean grips the phone, tight like he might be drowning. “Okay,” he whispers. 

There’s a pause, a muffled, shuffling sound. Then Cas’ voice comes back on the line, clearer this time. “Do you want me to stay on the phone while I drive?”

Dean pinches the bridge of his nose. He breathes in sharp. “No man, you gotta focus on the road—and I’ve got. People to feed so—”

“Sam can help with that.”

Dean laughs, shakily, “We both know he cannot.”

There’s silence on the other end. Dean shuts his eyes. 

“Really,” he says, quiet, “I’m okay, just—” he swallows,  “come home.”

Cas says, “I am.”

The phone clicks off into silence. Dean lets out a breath into the empty room. 

“Okay,” he says, “okay.”

The last time Dean had seen John alive, John’s hair had been longer and his cheeks had been fuller. Right before he died he’d had that scruffy, unwashed look that meant he’d been living rough and hadn’t had the chance to shower in a couple of days. 

The “up” John. The high energy John. The guy who’d drag you through three different towns and four different cases in the span of one week. Who was great at poker and quick to laugh, sharp-witted and quick-thinking, easy to talk to. Generous with his time, focused in his attention. Dean’s greatest ally, his closest friend.

This John, 2003 John, is thinner. Meaner. With his shaved head and that haunted, hollowed out look to his eyes. 

Dean can’t remember exactly what cases they’d been working back in February of that year.

If he prods at it, there is a memory of an empty stretch of highway through the iced over windows of the Impala, the shitty, leather biker gloves he’d worn that winter. Made him look tough but left his hands numb and aching. A lighter flicked on against the glow of a cigarette. The rough exhale of smoke. He’d quit after he’d picked Sam back up from Stanford (fire, Jess), and quit again last year. But sometimes he still gets cravings.

He’d partnered up with some other hunters for a while that winter. Guys a little older than him, a few women. He remembers the lights of different roadhouses gleaming through the snow. Cold breath exhaled in empty parking lots. Red, open mouths. Laughing over the lip of his beer. The warehouse where they’d found that nest of ghouls. Ash ground out against cement. 

Dean’d liked those guys. 

The memories are hazy, disjointed. There and not there. Just a string of different motels and roadhouses, and then the next hotel room after that, empty. He can’t even remember if they’d said goodbye. 

He knows he had to go scrape John off of the rotting floor of some shit-hole motel soon after that. But it’s hard to place exactly when. It could also have been that he’d peeled him off of a barstool in a dingy dive bare. Maybe picked him up bleeding drunk in a frozen alley. He can’t remember.

Either way. One of those times must be—he’s got the right look for it. The motel or the alley, the bar. Whichever one it was must have been right before John got snatched forward to the future. Or else right after he got back. Because he’s got that same stray hangdog look in his eyes. 

Starving. 

The kind of hunger you can’t even get close to. 

But Dean tries to get close to him anyway. 

He comes out of the kitchen, sliding his phone back into his pocket, and there’s John. Sitting in the library, staring off at the wall in a familiar, unfocused way and— God . It hurts. Dean’s got that ache in his chest already as he walks over towards him. 

“Hey Dad,” he says quietly, and he lays a hand on John’s shoulder. John starts a little and turns to him without malice or scorn, ghost of a smile pulling at his hollow cheeks. The jacket feels familiar under Dean’s fingers, the same as it did all those years ago. 

Weight of a revolver in his palm, finger on the trigger, he asks, “You want something to eat?” 

John’s calloused hand comes up to rest atop his own. “Sure, son,” he says, “that’d be great.”

The hammer clicks. The chamber is empty. John pulls his hand away. 

Dean can see him looking around the library, tracking over everything like he’s just now taking it in. He watches his dad’s face as it settles. The slight change in expression. The way he holds his head. The commanding officer ready for action, shouldering his coat back on. 

John says, again, more clearly, “Where’s Mary?” 

“I don’t know,” says Dean. And then, “On her way.” 

His eyes sweep over the table and he catches Sam looking up from his book, watching them. Sam raises his eyebrows imperceptibly. Dean gives him a hard, narrow-eyed stare, ‘cause exactly what the fuck is he supposed to do?

Sam shrugs a little, and goes back to his book. Dean squares his shoulders. He fishes his keys out of the fresh-washed pocket of his flannel, and raises his voice in Sam’s direction. 

“Hey man, you want pie?” Sam looks up again, a little startled. He blows a lock of hair out of his face. 

“Oh, uh, yeah,” he says, glancing over at John, “Yeah, pie sounds great.”

“Awesome,” Dean tells him, and heads for the garage.

The last time John had seen Dean before they’d pulled him forward in time, back in 2003—Stanford Era—Dean had been. God. It’s hard for him to think about it. Younger, sure. Thinner too. Unfinished. Tracing the delicate ridge of his elegant cheekbones in a grimy truckstop bathroom. The slight softness of his cheeks. The splash of freckles. Trimming down his eyelashes with the little pair of scissors that had come in his shaving kit, fine blond hair falling to chipped porcelain. The faint scar on his left eyelid. Touching his bloodied mouth in the Impala’s rearview mirror, obscene and messy. The aching crack of his knuckles against the jaw of the man who’d told him so. 

He’d had a lot of split lips that winter. He’d been told a lot of things. 

He remembers the way that his hip bones had jutted out beneath the waistband of his torn jeans. They’d made him scrawny as a kid. Awkward and lanky with everything sticking out in the wrong direction. But then, he’d been suddenly—how his body had looked a little like the bodies of the women he’d started picking up sometimes in half-empty bars on lonely highways. Who’d started picking him up. 

Then he wasn’t as lonely. 

He was something else instead. 

He’d filled out more by twenty-six, the last time Dad had, or would, see him alive in that graveyard. Broader shoulders and thicker thighs. The weight of a gun and the weight of a shovel. Less easy to take in a fight. Easier to take, maybe. In other ways. But at twenty-three he’d been—it’s hard to think about.

2003.

He runs a hand back over the bottom half of his face. The catch of stubble against his palm, his wide, full mouth. 

He needs a fucking meeting.  

He shoulders on his jacket—not an old one of John’s. Something nice that Cas had bought him for Christmas. Dark green that brought out his eyes, which no one had mentioned. Kissing unobtrusively under the mistletoe when he was supposed to be getting something from the kitchen, fisting his chapped fingers around Cas’ tie. Cas’ nose still cold from a last-minute run to the grocery store.

The rest of it. Jack’s adamant insistence that it might still technically be possible for Santa to exist, Dean and Sam making pointed eye contact above his head. Cas frowning up at the angel on the top of the tree. Sam insisting on baking gluten-free, vegan cookies and then bitching when they turned out bad. Because, duh. Cas and Sam giving eachother the exact same book, followed by their solemn and inevitably futile attempts not to laugh. Cas’ gift to Jack. A coat in an identical cut as Dean’s, but a different color. None of them acknowledging this either, except Jack with a huge, delighted grin.

Cas has the Impala. So Dean takes one of the trucks. Something that Cas stole, or found. Maybe something they’d picked up on a case. Abandoned by the victim of the week. Borrowed under a false name and never returned. Who knows. 

The tires give a dull crunch as he pulls out of the garage and onto the gravel driveway. There’s a slight ringing in his ears as he does it, a thin, mosquito whine that builds at the base of his skull as the car coasts forward.

For a second it’s like he’s wearing headphones, like all the sounds around him have been shut suddenly off. A heavy, settled weight blocking out the world. 

Then his ears pop and there's the rush of his own blood, his breath in his lungs, the air pressure shifting.

He shifts his fingers on the steering wheel. 

There’s this statistic he thinks about every time he leaves the bunker. About how most car accidents happen within ten miles of home. Another one about how most workplace accidents happen in the last ten minutes of a shift. 

He has no idea if they’re true, or if it’s just something people say. But it feels true. He always feels the most fragile, the most vulnerable, the closer he is to home. 

And he knows that’s not what it’s about. He knows that it’s about how people tend to kind of just check out mentally when they’re on the final leg of their drive or at the end of their shift. Heading towards home or thinking about it. Their mind somewhere other than the road or the work they’re doing. 

But to him. 

He used to think that he got it. Of course people fucked up when they weren’t paying attention. Of course they made mistakes. Easy. Uninteresting. Filed away somewhere unimportant. 

Now. 

He’d had no idea, really, what any of this could be like. Cas. Jack. Sam. He’d never. He’d never had anything like this before, he didn’t know. How could he? 

Ten miles until the next hotel room, ten minutes before he can stop shooting this werewolf or digging this grave. What’s the difference? Hell, make it twenty. Thirty. A hundred. No matter the distance, no matter the time, he’d always hit the target, he’d always make the shot. One minute before. Thirty seconds. What’s the difference?

He didn’t get it. 

Now, though? 

The road in front of him bends slightly, it wavers. 

Now he feels like he’s always just ten minutes from the end of his shift or ten miles away from home. 

He fists his hands on the wheel and he feels it well up inside of him. 

This life he has that he doesn’t get to keep.

Christmas and birthdays and Cas’ hand discreetly on the small of his back when no one else is looking. Teaching Jack how to do an oil change. Learning about the geopolitical history of quinoa. 

All of these things that he can’t keep because—.

The walls of the walk-in freezer bow insidiously outward. Michael testing the cage. Testing, testing. Always testing. Finding that ten minutes from home feeling and pressing down on it. Looking for cracks. 

Dean steadies himself. 

He draws in a breath and lets it back out. 

And then he drives. 

It’d been a mild enough winter, but he still hunches his shoulders against the chill as he waits for the truck’s heater to kick on. Feels like the cold gets to him more now than it used to, aching muscles and stiff joints. He can’t imagine sleeping in the backseat on the side of the road anymore. Well. He sets his bare hands on the cold wheel. Of course he can. But. He shakes it off. It doesn’t matter. 

Winters are mild in Lebanon and the roads are clear, little drifts of snow settled on the sidewalks. He takes the familiar route towards the meeting, turns and stop lights, all on autopilot. It isn’t the closest hall to the bunker, but after a couple tentative months poking around (and one particularly close call) it had been the one he’d washed up in, doing his 90 meetings in 90 days, miserable and shaking in the weak morning sunlight. That six am meeting had saved his ass, back when he wasn’t sleeping and couldn’t really eat or hold a fucking pen, let along a goddamn gun. 

They’d had plenty of cases too (heaven and hell don’t rest long enough for you to catch your breath, nevermind getting sober) so at first Sam and Cas had switched off on who went out and who stayed in, and then Dean had told them both that he didn’t need a fucking babysitter and then of course he’d been left by himself in the empty bunker. Too many ghosts and no one to blame but himself. And this random meeting hall with its faded blue carpet and long, scarred wooden tables, scratched and initialed with the sharp side of a key or blunt end of a ballpoint. The signs hanging on the walls: Let Go, Let God. One Day at a Time. Easy Does It. The Meaning of Life is to Give Life Meaning. 

What a litany for scorn and derision. What happy, fucking idiots. But he was desperate, so he had stayed. And then other things. Things people said. Things he could’ve said himself: I don’t know what else to do, because what I do is drink. Then things he wished he could: Thank God I didn’t get what I deserved. 

It hadn’t happened all at once, the long, slow trudge. The six am and then the ten am and the noon. The two and the five. The six again and then the nine. Ten o’clock. Midnight. Staring sleepless up at his ceiling, just to get up the next day and do it all again. Too stubborn and too desperate to give up without a fight. Ready to pray with nobody listening. 

And then it had. Yielded. 

Then it had eased. 

Here in this ancient community hall, with its wall full of stained coffee mugs and the train going by every twenty minutes, rattling the walls. 

Except it—.

Dean pulls into the lot. He puts the truck in park. Headlights cutting bright through the thin, sudden fall of snow slowly blanketing the pavement. He pushes open the car door, hanging his body out into the cold night so he can get a better look at the meeting hall that. Isn’t there. 

There isn’t anything. Just an empty lot across the street, vacant and silent. Covered slowly in snow. Silent the way that winters sometimes are. Everything muffled and quiet. 

Dean stares at the lot, a chill running up his spine. The snow falls gently around him, thin flakes melting across his face. One catches in his eye-lashes and he blinks it away. Sliding slowly back into the car with the door shutting softly behind him. 

He fumbles his phone from the inside of his pocket, pulls it out and scrolls down to the first name prefaced with the little “A” emoji, dials and waits. The number comes up not in service. His ears have started to ring. He tries another and gets the same automated message. Again, and this time it’s a voice on the line but not the one he was expecting. Whoever has answered doesn’t know who he’s looking for. He apologizes and hangs up. 

And then he—there are at least thirty names in the column, all people who know his name. Who know his story. The guy he’d sat next to every day for his first three months, who’d caught him outside his first meeting, debating whether to go in, and agreed to meet him there every morning at the absolute ass-crack of dawn. The teenage girl who’d started out living in her car outside the meeting hall, whose wedding he’d gone to last fall. The one who always stole his cigarettes and brought elaborate, box-made cupcakes from the dollar store in questionable flavors. 

Dean’s sponsor. His first sponsee. The woman from Home Depot. The group of men he’d picked up from the sober house every Wednesday, when he’d been told to get a service position. Everyone from every potluck he’d ever been to, every painstaking business meeting he’s ever sat through. Every two am phone call or highschool graduation. Every milestone and every loss. The woman who’s casserole dish he still has back at the bunker. The guy who’d gone back out during his first year who had overdosed, who Dean had never been able to delete from his contacts. Just about everyone who knows him out in the real world. 

And they’re all—

He stares across at the empty lot for a long time. Until the snow has completely covered the windshield and his hands are cramped and cold on the wheel. Then he shakily shifts the gear out of park, pulls out of the lot, and drives back towards the bunker through the falling snow.

He gets as far as the nearest grocery store, then he pulls into the parking lot and cuts the engine. There’s a low buzzing in the back of his head that he can’t look at too closely. He flexes numb fingers on the handle of a shopping cart. He compares sale prices on different cheeses and realizes he’s already got a couple in the basket. He puts them back. 

The location of the store is about where he remembers it. But the layout feels off, and the name above the entrance is different than it should be. He walks up and down the long aisles. Then up again. He can’t find the brand of toothpaste they usually get. There’s a different milk alternative he doesn’t recognize. His hands are shaking.

He’s approaching the bunker, wheels gliding slow over the icy pavement. He’s thinking about what he always thinks about, how most accidents happen within ten miles from home. Ten minutes before a shift ends. 

And he knows it’s about getting careless or being on autopilot, but the wheels crunch through the thin layer of snow, and he thinks about being ten miles or ten minutes away from what you love, about becoming more and more vulnerable the closer you are to what you want. 

There’s an ache blooming deep in his chest, fire unfurling from the heart of an explosive. It feels like an accident. Like something has gone horrifically wrong and he’s just far enough away that he can’t do anything about it.

What you want. 

He pulls into the garage, foot easing down on the break as he rolls to a gradual stop.

The closer you are to what you want.

He sits for a minute with his hands on the wheel, drawing the familiar callous on the inside of his thumb over the steering column. 

The more vulnerable you are.  

John is still sitting at one of the small reading tables in the library when Dean comes in, with Sam sitting across from him. There’s a set chess board between them, but somehow Dean gets the feeling that they weren’t playing. 

“Hey!” Sam’s smile has still got that slightly manic edge to it. He half raises out of his chair when Dean comes in, and then his eyes skate back over to John, and he freezes in this awkward half-crouch, hovering a little over the seat of his chair, “how was your—” and his gaze goes back to John as he finishes, “...thing.” 

Dean says, “Come help me with groceries.”

Sam trails him out to the garage. His eyebrows shoot up when he sees the pile of snow-dusted reusable grocery bags in the truck bed. 

“Damn, dude. Do you think you got enough stuff?”

Dean says, “The hall’s gone.”

“What?”

Dean hefts one of the bags out of the back and passes it over to him. The weight keeps his hands from shaking.

“The meeting hall. My home group. It isn’t there anymore. It’s gone.”

Sam slings the bag easily over his shoulder and automatically reaches out for another. “So like it… moved? Or…”

“No,” Dean turns to grab another bag. And then “The whole building is gone.”

As he says it, he can hear the walls go out around him again. The echo of his own voice somehow wide and endless, like space and time have opened up beneath the roof of their spartan, industrial garage and might slowly start to suck him in. 

Sam is looking at him directly now, and (because he isn’t talking) Dean can see the worry in his face, a step behind the joke or platitude or cheap reassurance. This game they’re playing, where he isn’t dying, and Sam isn’t watching him.

Dean hands him another bag on autopilot.

“Everything was different with the grocery store too. Like the whole building had changed. The name. The layout. I didn’t stop to look too closely anywhere else but it seems like there were other places too. More stuff that’s changed in town. Probably everywhere. Maybe.”

Sam says, “Shit , ” very quietly. And then, “ it’s a fucking time paradox. ”

“What?” 

“A time paradox, it’s—” 

Dean rolls his eyes, “I know what a fucking time paradox is, asshole. Why do you look like that? What are you thinking?”

Sam’s eyes shift off to one side. 

“You’re thinking we fucked everything up bringing Dad back, aren’t you?” 

“I mean technically we didn’t—”

“Okay so you’re thinking I fucked everything up by—” 

Sam throws up his hands, “Fuck. Jesus . That's not what I meant. I just. That pearl has gotta have some pretty serious weight behind it, to do all this. Not just bringing Dad here but actually changing the timeline around him after he disappeared? That’s powerful shit. 

We’re talking the whole world, Dean. Hell we’re probably talking a whole alternative timeline. Like a separate dimension. If it can do all that then it can definitely—”

“Don’t.”

It’s too painful. Too much. Right on top of the list of worthless phone numbers, the still sharp sting of loss. 

This was their one chance. 

His one shot. 

And he blew it. 

Sam is still talking, like he’s working it out as he goes. “Maybe there’s another way? I know, just the one wish. But maybe if we could figure out how to reverse it? Send Dad back to 2003 and—” 

Dean says, automatic, “We are not sending Dad back.”

Sam rolls his eyes, “Fine,” he says, “sure—just. Hear me out.”

Dean feels grief rise up inside of him. He bares down on it. Letting the words come out harsh and low under his breath.

“Is that really what you want?”

Sam says, “Jesus Christ,” and starts unloading the truck. 

Dinner feels more and more like a ghost of itself, the longer they wait for Mary to call.

“Uh, so—” Sam starts, hunched over one of the little pre-packaged, heat-from-frozen meals that Dean keeps on hand in case of emergency, “when’s Cas getting back?”

If Dean could close his eyes forever, he would.

To his credit, Sam’s face looks like it’s heating up too, just a step too slow. He flicks a look towards John, then opens his mouth to add something else. Dean cuts him off at the pass. Voice as neutral as he can make it. 

“He didn’t say.”

And then he really does close his eyes because. Fuck.

“Right,” says Sam, “right yeah. He didn’t tell me either. When we talked. Earlier. Uh—.” 

Dean is going to have to kill him. He’s just going to have to kill him. 

John cuts into his unidentified portion of meat with quick, efficient strokes. He says, like he’s following a script. 

“Who exactly is this Cas?”

Dean shovels in a forkful of nondescript veggies.

“Uh,” Sam says, glancing over at him and then quickly away, “Cas is our friend. He lives here. Helps us with cases. That kind of thing.”

John is looking at Dean, gaze level. “You said he wasn’t a hunter.”

“Yeah,” Dean says faintly, he licks his lips. His own voice sounds very far away, a tape of himself played with the volume a notch too low, “because he’s an angel.”

Dead silence rings out over the table.  

Sam clears his throat. “Uh, pass the salt.”

Dean hands it wordlessly over. He chews his food, shoulders crowded forward around his plate. In a diner. In the Impala. Waiting for what John is about to say.

John says, “So how’d I get here?” 

Beside him, Sam’s posture changes, shoulders pulled down with relief. Like he’s bracing for something too.

“We’ve been working this case,” Dean begins. He runs his hand back through his hair; Micheal delicately peels back a corner of the freezer’s insulation. Listening. Dean steadies himself. He takes a breath, “It was an off-chance but. We’re in that, no stone unturned phase, so—” He blinks the lights in and out of focus. 

Sam wades in to help, “We got a tip about an artifact. This pearl actually. The lore—” Dean kicks him under the table. Sam kicks him back, “Well, basically we read that it’s able to grant a wish to whoever uses it so—” 

John finishes, flat and condemning, “You used it.”

There’s silence for a second. There’s tension in the air. Yes sir .

John says, very distinctly, “But why am I here?”

Sam opens his mouth. He looks back over at Dean. 

Dean looks down at his plate. Clearing his throat, he picks his fork back up. Gruff and unperturbed, a familiar performance. Just enough but not too much. 

“I guess what I really wanted was to have you back. So.”

John leans back in his chair. Dean is still looking at his plate, but he can feel John’s eyes on him. And, god, can he still see the way he used to look? Who he used to be? Half-formed and yielding. Freshly cut. 

He must be able to. 

Because for John it can’t have been that long since Dean was in front of him, not a child anymore, not quite a man. This half-born tangle of calculated and quickly growing skill, undercut by the desperate knot of his messy, boyish need. Half made for this world and half too soft for it. Not shaped for anything else. 

When he was still just a dull knife maybe. A tool, a blunt instrument. Someone to take the wheel on long drives for a couple of hours. A flare in the dark, an unloaded gun. 

If he had made this kind of mistake back then… 

John says, not grateful, not angry, not kind, “There’ll be a price for this.”

Dean (the gun, the blade, the hammer) says, “We’ve paid worse.”

After dinner, John installs himself in the library, “Dean,” he calls, “come have a drink with your old man.”

Dean’s eyes go to the bottle, caught in the warm glow from the overhead lights. 

He sees it like a reflection. Both of them hunkered over the dirty counter of some grungy dive bar, John laughing gold like the liquor glinting in his glass. Dean nursing a split lip against the mouth of his beer, grinning just enough to make the cut bleed. Loose-limbed on the barstool, heads bent close like conspirators, outlaws, the last men on Earth. 

He remembers drinking like that every night—that world-ending, last day alive type of drunk. Waking dry mouthed and shaking, booze still leaking out of his pours. Hangovers and long, nauseous drives. Waking every morning with his head pounding and gut wrenching. Lying awake each night staring up at the dark ceiling of a different motel, room spinning behind his eyelids thinking— why do I keep doing this? And then doing it again. 

Remembers being in a room surrounded by people who have no idea about the world he lives in, in a town he knows he’ll leave tomorrow. The number of some waitress he won’t call crumbled on a napkin in his pocket. John tipped back in the seat beside him, boots propped up on the rungs of his stool. How he’d be leaving all the same things behind that Dean would. 

Sometimes they’d meet hunters working alone and Dean would think, how lonely that must be. What an awful, miserable life. But not him. Not Dean. 

And then. 

How a bottle had looked just about the same in Dean’s hand as it had in John’s. And how there was always a bar or a cheap motel. Somebody else’s bed. He didn’t need another person to be an outlaw. He didn’t need anyone else to drink. 

But. 

How lonely that had been too. 

John tips his glass in his direction. His smile is warm. His eyes glint like whiskey. Dean stays where he is. Feet planted, throat working. Sam had started to put all that stuff away after Dean’d quit, but he’d told him not too. If he was gonna drink he was gonna drink. And he hadn’t. 

He starts to say something, then stops. And starts again, “Uh, I don’t actually…”

“Dean,” Sam cuts in like he hasn’t been listening, “why don’t you go get a room ready?”

Dean mouths a silent, thank you at him as he leaves the room, and Sam claps a hand on his shoulder as he passes. 

Dean lays awake that night, long after the others have gone to bed and the bunker has settled into silence. He stares up at the dim ceiling, and he counts up to a hundred and then back down again. First in English, then in Spanish, then Enochian. He tries for Latin and gets to fifty. He tries for Greek and gets to ten. He’s losing focus. He starts over. Then he does it again. 

Somewhere in the distance comes the metallic creak of the bunker door opening. Dean holds his breath until he hears the distinct click of feet descending the stairs. Of shoes on hardwood. 

He listens in the dark to the familiar sound of Cas hanging up his key without turning on the light. The scuff and click of his shoes on the doormat. Silence broken by the shuffle of bare feet, Cas’ soft curse as he bumps into the little table in the corner of the living room.

Dean slips silent out of bed and goes to meet him in the hallway.

He can’t tell what temperature the air in the bunker is, but Cas is flushed hot and breathing hard, and his skin tastes like salt. The soft light slanting in through the crack of their bedroom door catches each of them in turn. 

Dean thinks it’s like they’re fighting, only the way that Cas manhandles him up against the wall is carefully tender. Broad hand cupped around the base of Dean’s skull to keep his head from hitting too hard, forearm braced across his sternum. Dean’s got the light in his eyes for a second, and then the weight of Cas’ chest crushed up against him, and Dean’s got the taste of his skin on the back of his tongue, the burnt spark of a severed powerline. Crackled electricity and salt. 

Cas is already shoving Dean’s sleeves up past his wrists, running efficient fingers over his chest and down his sides. Checking him for damage the way that he might check him for wounds. Deft, blunt fingers working efficiently at layers and buttons. He catches Dean’s face in one hand, palm cupped to the square of his jaw, and levers his face down so that he can look from one eye to the other, turning his chin from side to side, weighing whatever he finds there between the palms of his hands. 

“I’m alright,” Dean tells him, “I’m okay.”

He watches Cas’ pupils dilate subtly, the movement of his breath from his open mouth. 

Cas takes a half-step back, and the light from the bedroom illuminates his outline. Thick stomach and muscled arms. The bulk of him beneath the trench coat. There’s a delicate fleck of blood across the front of his white button down. 

“You got hit.”

Cas says, hoarse without looking, “It isn’t mine.”

He grips at Dean’s biceps, then his forearms, and then slides his fingers down to his hands. Dean slots their calloused palms together.

They stay like this for a while, Dean with his back pressed against the wall, his hands pinned at his sides. Cas’ weight on his chest. The bunker is quiet and dark around them, interrupted only by the faint sliver of light from their bedroom, and the rise and fall of both of their breathing. 

Dean whispers into the darkness, “How was the hunt?”

Cas says, low, “That isn’t what I want to talk about.”

But he doesn’t talk at all. Instead he dips his head down, until his open mouth drags hot against Dean’s throat. Dean gasps a silent breath. Cas’ nose bumps against the underside of his jaw. The air around them smells like it’s about to rain. 

A sound comes muffled from down the hall, and Dean feels the sudden weight of Cas’ Angel Blade against his own wrist.

There’s an instant where they stare wordlessly at each other through the dark, heavy beat of Dean’s heart quick in his seizing chest. 

Then they’ve tumbled into their room with the door closed and locked behind them, and it’s Dean who’s got Cas’ back against it, and Dean who’s shoving roughly at his clothes. 

He kisses over the knot of scar tissue at Cas’ hip, knees throbbing sharply as he kneels down. He crushes the blunt line of his broken nose into the crease between Cas’ thigh and pelvis, breathing in sharp and turning to mouth at the bowl of his stomach, dragging his cheek through the familiar dark line of coarse hair cutting sharply towards his groin.

And then he’s clutching at the soft flesh of Cas’ muscled thighs, and Cas is cupping his rough hand to the square hinge of Dean’s jaw, and the ragged sounds of his breathing fills the quiet space of the room around them.  

Afterwards, Cas asks, “How did it happen?”

Lying next to him, Dean says, slowly, hesitating like the words have to queue up individually behind his teeth. 

“We found this… enchanted object. A pearl that’s supposed to grant your deepest wish, and we thought it might—”

But Cas’ hand has already tightened in his. “The cage,” he whispers, “Micheal. You thought it might work to exorcize him.”

Dean swallows up at the ceiling, eyes starting to sting. “I don’t know why it—” and then he has to stop talking. 

“Dean,” Cas says slowly, “I wasn’t there but… You and your father. I know you think that Michael is going to kill you. That this is going to be the end. I know that you don’t fully believe that we’ll be able to solve this. If this is your last night on Earth, so to speak, it makes sense that you’d want to resolve things with your father before—” and then he can’t speak anymore either. 

Dean swipes at his eyes, “It’s stupid,” he says, “It’s so stupid, I—” and then all of the breath goes out of him. He fists his free hand in the sheet, staring up at the ceiling above both of their heads, “Cas, I’m so fucking sorry. This was supposed to fix everything and I fucked it up and now I— we’re—”

And then he’s really crying, face turned to press wet into Cas’ chest. Cas breathing steady against the top of his head. 

“It’s okay,” he says, “it’s okay. You didn’t do anything wrong. It’s okay.”

Dean hits his closed fist against Cas’ broad chest, close enough it can’t land with much force.

Voice breaking, he says, “I’m never going to see you again.” 

Cas pulls away enough so that he can see his face.

“Dean,” he says seriously, “We’re going to figure this out.”

Dean stares back at him, trying to memorize everything that he can. The cage in his head is a fragile thing. Tenuous and brittle. A crack appears in the concrete just behind Cas’ head, splitting the wall down the center right between them. Dean blinks and looks away. 

A sound comes from somewhere down the hallway. They both twist around to stare at the door. Dean’s heart is pounding again. The sound gets louder for a second—footsteps, maybe. And then it fades back out into silence. They stay where they are. Not moving. Not speaking. Dean’s skin hot where it presses against Cas’. Cas with that faint electric tinge to him. The room is quiet. 

They wait in the silence, but the footsteps don’t come again. 

Dean clears his throat, but his voice comes quiet. Thick and disused. “It’s probably just Sam,” he says, “He must have been studying late,” he blows out a breath, “I know he thinks we can still fix this.”

“We can,” Cas says seriously. 

Dean doesn’t look at him. He licks his lips. His throat is dry. He still can’t meet Cas’ eyes. “Listen,” he begins, “I think we should—”

“You think I should go,” Cas surmises. 

Dean grimaces. He palms a hand over his mouth. “Sounds bad when you say it like that, it’s just, my dad. He doesn’t—”

Cas lays a hand on his shoulder, “It’s okay,” he says, and to Dean his voice sounds impossibly gentle, “I understand.”

Cas rises stiffly. Dean props himself up in the bed, watching as he collects his clothes and puts them on. Dean’s got the sheets pulled up around his chest. The room isn't cold, but he can feel himself start to shiver.

Once dressed, Cas pauses in the doorway. Hand on the frame he says, quiet. “If it does come to it. If we don’t find another way out with Michael. If you use the box—you know I’ll—” he breaks off. 

Dean stares back at him. Impossibly lost in their empty bed. The sheets must smell like Cas, but it’s been a long time since he was able to tell.

Cas gives him another long, searching look. And then he leaves. 

Chapter Text

The dream goes like this: he and Michael are in a bar.

It’s Dean’s bar. The one from his dream. With the cheesy, blocky-lettered sign hung on the back wall, the hanging red lights and electric blue-tint windows with their frosted glass broken up in squares. There’s a glowing neon quality to everything, the whole room caught in a gas-lit halo, oranges and reds diffusing quickly into dark wood and low ceilings. Shadows. 

The room never feels empty, not with the blurred impression of other patrons disappearing as soon as Dean turns to look at them, the clink of glasses being set on tables. Ghosts of water rings. Jumbled conversations and cut-off laughter, static played at the end of a tape, repeating itself. 

Michael and Dean at the end of the world. 

Sometimes Dean is the bartender, and Michael sits on the stool across from him, tie knotted perfectly, eyes shining ice blue.

There is always a bottle and there is always a glass. 

Sometimes, Dean reaches for the shelf behind the bar and his knuckles brush against the glass while he grabs for something else. 

Sometimes the tumbler materializes in his hand, already full. 

Once he switched it out for another drink and tried to serve that to Michael instead. Spent the rest of the dream running from large, black wasps with heavy bodies half his size. He can still hear the way they’d hit up against the doorframe and the walls as he’d fled, clumsy and ruthless in their pursuit. 

Twice, Michael had thrown the drink back in his face. 

The first time he did it out of anger, fed up and lashing out. The second time, almost pensively, like he was testing something. 

Dean had kept his mouth shut, lips seamed. The sharp smell of the liquor burning his lungs, breathing in slowly through his nose as it had trickled down his face.

And Michael hadn’t even looked angry, that time. Just considering.

And Dean had woken. 

Gasping for breath.

The next night he’d come into the dream with the scent of it already on him, and he’d swept every bottle off of the bar, sent them crashing to the floor in a shower of sharp glass that had become a swarm of humming, buzzing flies. They transformed as they fell into a single pale centipede that had tangled between his feet to find the exposed skin of his ankle, and buried its spade-like head into the meat of his leg as he had screamed.

When he opened his mouth he felt the creature crawling up the back of his throat. And Michael watching. His eyes on him. 

Dean remembers that it had taken him very long in that dream, to die.

Tonight, he doesn’t have that kind of time. 

Tonight, Michael is pouring. 

Dean watches from his own barstool, knuckles fisted white over his faded jeans. He can see the blurred outline of a woman seated beside him out of the corner of his eye, but she vanishes as he turns to look at her. The room glows in blood reds and electric blues. 

Michael puts the glass down in front of him. He says, “Drink.”

Michael and Dean in a bar. 

Michael and Dean at the end of the world.  

Michael telling Dean to drink. 

Dean. 

Staring straight ahead. Bartering for another day. Another night. The faint trickle of sand and closing mouth of the hourglass.

A line of sweat tracks its way down his neck, leaving a cold trail across his skin too specific to feel like a dream. The hair along his forearms lifts. 

Is he dreaming? He can never say for certain.

He wakes, eventually. 

It must be a dream. 

“I never liked your father,” Michael tells him, like he’s continuing a conversation they have already been having. He uses a bone white cloth to wipe down a spotless glass,“You know, he never fit quite right.” 

The glass tilts in his hand and when it catches the light, it reflects cities burning. 

Michael says, “Drink.”

Dean clears his throat. His mouth tastes like ash. “Aren’t you tired of this?” 

“Aren’t you?” Michael sets the glass down on the bar, and the city falls to ruin. “Drink.”

Dean steals himself. Low, even, heart beating through his chest down into the floor he says, “You know I’m not going to.”

“Fine,” Michael says, and everything goes dark. 

Dean opens his eyes.

The bar is gone. Michael is gone. 

Dean is standing in the charred remains of a burnt out forest, surrounded by towering shards of obsidian glass. They pierce the black clouds overhead, tall and tall and on and on, minerals scorched from the dirt beneath them, leaving endless wastes of sand so fine it turns to ash. 

He struggles desperately to move, boots sunk up to his ankles. 

There is smoke on the horizon, roiling thick into the sky. The trees, the spired glass, catch the light of something burning far off in the distance. Dean stumbles to find purchase, feet slipping over fine, black soot. The glass around him has begun to heat, glinting surface reflecting distant, fast approaching flames. He feels it on his hands, on his face. The dry, sucking heat; the sharp, acrid sting. 

He can’t see anything other than the clouds and smoke, the orange light reflected all around him. He can’t hear anything beyond the roll of the storm and the high, singing notes of unseen cracks running quick through the heating glass.

There’s a feeling to it, something tight in his stomach. A miss-stepped, dream-like knowing that somewhere, lost in the smoke and the fire there are people dying, people screaming. That bodies are falling in tens, then hundreds, then without count. 

He begins to move, grabbing blind to pull himself forward, bloodied fingers slipping over smooth, sharp surfaces, his palms cut down and down to violin-string tendon and white bone. 

The skin on the back of his hand begins to bubble. He can feel it start to peel away on his cheeks. 

He can see the fire. 

One lunge collapses and then the other as he drops to his flayed knees, gasping for air. 

He can see what's left of the city. 

The burnt-out skeleton framework of skyscrapers. The craters where the streets had been. 

Michael’s voice sounds out of the darkness all around him, vast and terrible as the endless, stretching sky . “I can keep doing this for the rest of your life.”

Dean struggles to speak, he struggles to move— 

He and Michael are sitting in a bar. 

Michael hands him something.

He looks down and it’s the first blade.

He looks down and it’s a hellhound’s open mouth, it’s snapping jaws.

He and Michael are sitting in a bar.

Chapter Text

John is already in the map room when Dean comes in the next morning, staring down at something on the table. The shadows beneath his eyes look darker today, their lines carved more sharply into him. 

Dean steels himself, then he sits beside him. 

“Hey Dad,” he says. His whole body feels tender. “How’d you sleep?”

John gives a soft grunt in the back of his throat. His eyes are fixed on the initials carved into the wood. The initials and both names. DW, SW, MW, JACK and, Dean’s stomach flips, CASTIEL. John taps a considering finger on the table. 

He says, calm as anything, “Who’s Jack?” 

Which is. Not the question Dean had been bracing for. His brain stalls out before it can send a coherent response down to his mouth. 

“Uh—” John is still looking at him, dark eyes expectant. Dean tries again, “Jack’s—”

“My son,” Cas is standing in the doorway, blue eyes set and broad shoulders squared. The spread of his chest beneath his white button-down wide as the sail of a ship. The sturdy mast of his body, unfaltering in the doorway, “Hello, Mr. Winchester.”

And it’s a good thing Dean is already sitting. ‘Cause it’s like all the air has sucked out of the room. 

John gives Cas an assessing look. “You must be Castiel,” he says, tone peeled back to show his teeth, expression strangely level. 

He hasn’t shaved yet today.

Cas steps further into the room. He isn’t wearing the trench coat. His tie is centered and knotted carefully at his collar. There is no longer blood on his shirt. 

“That’s right,” he says.

The muscles of Dean’s face have started to tingle, blood draining from his head to the core of his body, the meat of his thighs. Fight or flight. Ready to run. He tastes smoke on the back of his throat, but he knows it isn’t there. 

Cas takes another step forward. 

What does John see when he looks at him? 

The strip of tanned skin peeking out above his collar, the line along the back of his neck where he says he doesn’t need sunscreen. 

The dark spot on his cuff, damp where it caught under the faucet.

He doesn’t look like a monster. 

But neither does Dean.

John stands, slow. He holds out a hand. Calloused like Dean’s hands are calloused. Scarred the same way that Dean’s hands are scarred. There’s the smell of him in the air too. Earthy and dark, slightly sour around the edges. The room feels suddenly choked with it. Claustrophobic. 

Cas probably smells like the fabric softener they buy in bulk at Costco, but so does Dean so he can’t tell.

John says, toneless, “I hear you’ve been driving my car.” 

It is very possible that Dean has stopped breathing. It is very possible that he’s been struck by lightning. 

There’s something worse than an edge to John’s voice. Like he’s got a blade in his hand and an incantation on his tongue. Holy water. Christo.  

But somehow Dean knows without a shadow of a doubt the test isn’t for Cas. 

A sick, creeping sensation is starting to unfurl low in the pit of his stomach. He’s got that feeling suddenly, clear as crystal, that John did not wake up early this morning; he’s still awake from the night before.

The musky, lived-in smell of him. The faint ghost of alcohol on his breath. Dark eyes tight and veined with red, the way his skin seems stretched too thin, sallow and pulling against the outline of his skull. 

Dean has seen him exactly like this so many times before he can’t believe he didn’t catch it earlier. Sleepless and starving, waiting up in some shitty motel room, wearing the carpets thin. 

Without breaking eye contact, without flinching, Cas says, “Yes.” 

And then Dean is blushing for a whole other reason. He’s dropping his gaze and fiddling with the hem of his sleeve because, Jesus Christ. 

He wills his face not to flush, for John to keep looking at Cas instead of looking at him. And his heart beats in his chest like it’s singing. Untamed. 

John draws his hand away from Cas’. He takes back his seat at the head of the table. 

“Too far to fly?” 

A question inside of a question. A test. 

Cas does look away at that, halfway towards Dean and then off into empty space. 

“I… can’t.” He says stiffly, “Not anymore.” 

Dean’s voice sounds rusty to his own ears when he speaks, drawing John’s attention away. The head of the snake. 

“None of the angels can,” he says. 

John watches him like he’s said something else. 

“I see,” he says. And then his eyes move just briefly between where Dean is sitting across from him at the table, to where Cas is standing framed by the door, “Looks like I’ve got a lot to catch up on.” 

Dean gives a jerky, half-abated nod. From his peripheral vision, he watches Cas take a seat.

John studies them both for a moment longer. Then he leans back in his chair, voice rich with an irony that does not reach his cold, dark eyes. “And how did you two meet?”

And it’s a blow. An undercut. A cheap shot. 

Cas says, without looking at him, “I was tasked to raise Dean Winchester from Hell.”

John’s eyebrows hitch up slightly. He looks to Dean, a question, and Dean opens his mouth to lay it all out for him. Why he went to Hell. 

The deal for Sam. 

And his soul. 

And running out of time. 

The hellhounds carving into him. The way his breath had left his body. Thinking, maybe—. And then waking up. And knowing, no . Chains all through him. Screaming out into a sucking, searing darkness. Crackled thrum of distant lightning, smell of burning flesh. 

John asks, “How’d you die?”

Like he doesn’t need another answer. Like he already knows. 

“I—” Dean starts. He can’t find the words. 

Cas says, with finality, “He didn’t.” Dean looks at him. He can see that John is looking at him too, “Sam did.” 

Cas squares his shoulders. He clears his throat. His voice comes out husky. Deep as it ever is, he explains, “Dean made a deal for Sam’s soul, he was taken to Hell in his place. It was a trap. He wouldn’t have been sent there otherwise,” and then he does look at Dean, for just a fraction of a second. And Dean feels that, too. 

The shock of blue, blue eyes. A spark in the darkness. Thinking, maybe. Thinking, oh. A light flicking on. 

Dean swallows, it comes out quicker after that. He gives the report. Skimming over the details of how Sam died. The demons, the special children. Mary. Just an ordinary hunt gone bad. An easy mistake. Nothing to see here. 

When he’s finished, John asks, “Who made a deal for you?”

“I—” the weight of it wells up inside him. A deal for him? He should be so fucking lucky. Not saved to be Michael’s perfect vessel. Not saved to jump start the Apocalypse, destroy the world. Just saved. 

Cas says, “I did.” The lights above their heads flicker slightly, off and on just lightning quick. It is possible that John doesn’t catch it. “I saved Dean Winchester from Hell. God commanded it.” 

He doesn’t say, and it cost me everything . He doesn’t say, and I’d do it again.

Like a stray dog bearing its teeth, John says, “What are you still doing down here?”

Cas doesn’t look at Dean, but Dean can tell it takes effort.

“I… fell,” he says slowly, “Afterwards. There was a civil war. In Heaven. We all did.”

John says, “Is that so?”

Sam says, “Did y’all make coffee?” 

Dean turns around and finds him completely filling up the doorway, hair all wild from sleep, knuckles digging into his eyes. 

Heart pounding in his chest Dean says, “You make it.”

Sam yawns. He pulls his arms up into a stretch and his elbows knock into the doorframe.

“—dunno how to use the french press.” 

Dean rolls his eyes. His legs are shaking as he pulls himself up from the table. 

“You literally do,” he tells Sam, “I have literally shown you a hundred times.” 

Sam drops his arms back down at his sides. He rolls out his shoulders.

“Show me again,” he says, and clears out of the doorway to make space for Dean to pass.

In the kitchen, the coffee is ground and measured. The kettle is boiling. 

Dean says, “You know how to use the french press.”

“I know how to use the french press,” Sam confirms. He thunks himself down on one of the barstools and starts to bite at the elastics around his wrist. 

Dean watches him work the band free, inelegantly gather his tangled hair, and loop it back into one of those half-ponytail, half-bun things. 

He says, “You can make coffee.” 

Sam shrugs, “You make it.”

From the other room, there’s the sound of a chair scraping back, heavy, half-stumbling footsteps moving away down the hall.  

There is something wistful and strange and grateful in the back of Dean’s head. “Yeah okay,” he says, “I'll make it.” 

Sam raps his knuckles on the counter. “Good,” he says, “because we’ve got a case to solve.” 

Dean picks up the kettle, “He’ll come around.”

Sam rolls his eyes. He’s getting too comfortable with that. 

“Not Dad ,” he says, like Dean is some kind of idiot, “Michael. The pearl didn’t work. You don’t want to try to get it to work—”

“ Sam.”

“—so we gotta find another way of trapping him that isn’t,” he blows out a breath, and Dean can see the way that the bit that they're doing slips for a second, “dropping you into the ocean in a box.” 

“I told you—” 

“ Dean— ” Dean turns, and Sam is sitting at the counter, looking up at him the way he’s done all his life. Kinda pissed and sort of impatient. Waiting for Dean to feed him. 

Dean gets a knot in his throat. “Yeah,” he says, “yeah, okay. Just let me get this started, alright?” 

Sam sits back. He swipes the heel of his hand quickly across his eyes. There’s a hitch to his voice as he mutters, “I hate the fucking french press.” 

“It's okay,” Dean tells him, “I’ll make it.”

Sam makes a clogged, sort of snotty sound, which they manfully ignore. Dean raises his chin towards the doorway. 

“Go check to see that Dad hasn’t murdered Cas, yeah?”

On cue, Sam says, “Why would he murder Cas?” 

Like they’re back to doing their standup routine. 

Dean rolls his eyes. “I guess we’ll never know,” he says, “unless you go check. ”

Sam gets up and lumbers off towards the map room. Dean touches his finger lightly to the center of his chest, until he’s able to take in a full breath. 

Sam comes back after a few minutes, trailing Cas behind him. Dean has a couple of omelets going on the stove. 

He isn’t really hungry, but he needs something to do with his hands. 

Sam sits back down on the barstool, and Cas lingers for a second in the doorway, before coming over to pour himself a cup of coffee. His shoulder bumps up against Dean’s as he passes. Dean inconspicuously snags the hem of his sleeve between two fingers.

Without looking up from his phone, Sam says, “I want oat milk in mine.”

“We don’t have oat milk,” Dean tells him. He lets go of Cas’ sleeve, Cas brings another mug down out of the cupboard for Sam, “I got you this fancy, alternate timeline plant-milk instead.”

Sam picks up his head. He squints over at the label (he does not need glasses). “What is that?” 

Dean shakes the carton again, “It’s new,” he says, “the ‘Dad vanishes from 2003’ special.”

Sam makes a face. “What’s wrong with oat milk?”

Dean turns fully towards him, bracing his hip up against the stove. “You really want to have to say that you shifted realities to an alternate universe and didn’t try their totally unique, extra special type of plant milk?”

Sam huffs, “ No ,” he says sullenly. 

Dean pours a healthy measure into Sam’s coffee in victory and passes it over. Sam takes a precautionary sip. And then he pulls back his head and stares down into his mug with a whispered, “ Son of a bitch. ”

Dean’s carefully scraping up the edge of an omelet so he can check how browned it is on the bottom. 

“That good?”

Fervently, without hesitation, Sam says, “I think this might be the better timeline.”

Dean turns towards Cas, still at his side. Low under his breath he says, “How’s my Dad?”

Cas’ face does something complicated. “He seems…” he starts, and then glances over at Sam for confirmation. 

Sam says, “He’s crashed out.” He takes another sip from his mug, looking back down into it in fascination. His voice doesn’t change when he adds, “he’s back in one of the bedrooms,” but Dean doesn’t miss the implication: Where’s Dad. “I think time travel really took it out of him.”

Dean presses his lips together. He gives a noncommittal hum, sliding the spatula carefully under Sam’s omelet to flip it. (It is Sam’s omelet because it is purposefully both whites and yokes.)

Cas adds, low, “He thinks that something must have happened to Mary, because she isn’t answering your calls.”

Sam and Dean exchange a look over this. Sam’s eyebrows are raised. Dean plates the food. 

“Yeah well I guess he wouldn’t know that that’s—” and then he trails off before he can finish. Status quo. They all already know. 

Sam takes his plate. He shovels a few bites into his mouth, and then he looks up at Dean with wide eyes. 

“Holy shit these are good.”

Dean eases himself down onto the stool beside him, and cautiously tries his own omelet. It’s definitely better than any he’s had before. 

Sam’s got his phone out again, scrolling through something. “Fuck, what else is different about this timeline?”

Dean passes his plate over to Cas. Cas takes a tiny bite, chews consideringly, and then pushes the plate back over to Dean.

Sam puts his phone down. 

“Okay,” he says, “Okay, let’s get moving on this actually. I’m gonna look at that later. We’ve got shit to do.”

“Great,” Dean tells him, “we’ll start on stuff about time travel.”

Sam raises his head, pointing a finger at Dean. “Uh uh,” he says, “No. You will start on anything that might be related to getting Michael out of your fucking head. ”

Dean rolls his eyes, “We’ve already covered everything we’ve got,” he says, “If there was an answer in that library, we would have found it.”

“Tough shit,” Sam tells him. He gets up from the counter, phone in one hand and plate in the other, “I’ve got a lead I’m gonna follow up on, Cas—make sure he fucking does this.”

“He’s not the boss of me,” Dean grumbles, turning towards the sink. 

“Uh huh,” Sam says, already on his way out the door. 

The kitchen falls into silence. Dean washing the dishes, Cas leaning back against the counter beside him. Hands in the pockets of his slacks. 

After a minute, Dean says, “That went, uh.” He pulls his hands out of the soapy water to brace them on either side of the sink. He feels like he might have just outrun an avalanche or escaped a sinking ship. All of the adrenaline running out of his body leaving him shaky and sick, weak-kneed. Cas is watching him.

The tips of Dean's fingers bleached-white and wrinkled.

He picks up the frying pan again, even though he’s already washed it once, “That went okay, actually. All things considered.”

“Dean,” Cas says, voice low. 

Dean brings a hand up to his forehand. Water drips back down into the sink. Soap bubbles against his skin.

“Christ,” he says, and his voice is shaky too, unsteady and brittle like he’s already used most of it up, “I can’t believe you met my Dad.”

“Dean,” Cas says again. 

Dean gives a weak laugh. “And he asked us how we met — Jesus Christ, he assumed I’d go to Hell . Fuck. ”

His hands come back down to either side of the sink, white knuckled, lips pressed together. The corners of his eyes are stinging. Water pours from the tap. 

“He knows that I’m—” and then he breaks off. He can’t finish. 

Cas says, one last time, “Dean.”

Dean turns on him, “What?” 

He turns and Cas is looking at him. Still looking at him, standing up against the counter, looking at Dean with the front of his flannel soaked through, with soap in his hair. 

Cas says, “Come here.”

“I’m fine.”

“Uh huh,” Cas tells him, and then his hands are in Dean’s hair and Dean has the back of Cas’ shirt fisted tight in two damp handfuls. 

Cas says, with finality, “Fuck John Winchester.”

Dean doesn’t quite laugh, but it sounds like it, air escaping his chest. His lungs deflating. 

Hoarse, he says, “It’s not as easy as that.”

He can feel Cas’ arms tighten around him. He can feel his heartbeat through his shirt. He says again, his voice almost nothing at all, “It’s not as easy as that for me.”

Water runs from the tap behind him, down and down, splashing against the stainless steel basin of the sink, a tiny storm in an industrialized kitchen. The combined smell of their laundry detergent. Cas with his hands in Dean’s hair. 

Slowly, almost gently, Cas makes a fist. And then he carefully twists his fingers in Dean’s hair and pulls. Not hard. Just hard enough for Dean to feel it. Hard enough to tip his head back. 

Quietly, against his skin, Cas says, “I am not the boss of you.”

Dean swallows, “Yeah,” he says, voice scraped out, “okay.”

“Good.” Cas tells him, “We’ve got reading to do.”

Dean texts Claire, Is my mom with you?

Her response comes after a few minutes, yee

Dean rolls his eyes. He types, Is she okay?

It takes a few minutes, but then he gets the ‘100’ emoji, and half a second later, three fire emojis. He rolls his eyes. He’s not sure if Claire’s crush on Mary is for real, or exaggerated for his benefit. And he’s not exactly sure which one of those he prefers.

Can you tell her to call me, it’s important  

He gets a response a couple of hours later when he’s elbow deep in books they’ve already combed through. Thumbs up emoji. Then, How’s your better half?

Dean rolls his eyes. He says you’re grounded, he types. 

Claire says, Liar , and nothing else about Mary. 

Dean looks up at Cas, quietly reading across the table. 

He scoots to the very edge of his chair, kicks his foot out until he finds Cas’ ankle. Cas’ eyes snap to him, intent. Dean mouths, Claire says hi , and for a second they sit in the stillness of that. The shadow of a smile softens the tense line of Cas’ mouth. He’s got his suit jacket off, the white collar of his button down unfastened. Sometime between now and the last time Dean looked up from his reading, he pulled his tie loose. 

They haven’t spread the whole library across the map table, but not for lack of trying. 

Cas’ got an ancient scroll laid carefully out in front of him, corners weighed down by a fleet of empty coffee mugs. Dean can’t read the title upside down, but there’s an illustration about halfway down the page that he recognizes. He blows out a breath. The stale air of the bunker feels flat and close against his skin. Heavy but without any heat to it. Thick. He bites at his lip. He stares at Cas’ square fingers. The slight irritation around his cuticles, even though Cas swears he doesn’t pick at them. 

Two different clocks tick out of time with each other. 

Cas sighs. He begins to roll the scroll back up. The hanging light above his head picks out the gray hair growing in at his temples as he reaches for the next book. 

There is a stillness in the room, like every particle of air has become aware of its presence. 

Dean feels tuned to Cas’ movements, hyper aware of every shift of his weight on the chair, how he leans in to get a closer look at what he's reading. His mouth as he brings his thumb up to wet it and turns the page. The imagined heat of his skin.

He feels lit up by it, like the cells on the side of his body facing Cas are more alive than the ones that aren’t. 

Dean swallows, and Cas’ eyes come up to his face and then down to track the movement. 

Sweat prickles under his collar.

Dean steels himself.

His body yearns. 

Under the cover of the table he slides his foot carefully out so that it knocks again into Cas’, and then he moves it further, slightly up Cas’ ankle. The toe of his boot catches on the hem of his slacks. Cas’ eyes are very dark, watching him. Mouth slightly open, breathing even like he’s considering something . It makes Dean’s cheeks heat. Self-consciously, he starts to pull back. Cas leans forward. Very intentionally, his lips frame the word, don’t.

Dean can see it in him, that same yearning. The heat of his desire. The wanting of it. 

All that he is, tuned to Cas, knowing Cas is tuned to him too. 

Carefully, deliberately, he inches out again and drags the side of his foot up Cas’ calf, careful to keep the heavy tread of his boot angled away from Cas’ suit. 

He’s lost track at this point of where everyone else is in the bunker. Sam had come in a couple of hours ago with a lead that had turned out to be nothing, and had left again shortly after. John is—. He slides his foot back over to Cas’. Somewhere in the back of his mind, under the thrum and buzz of anxiety and the persistent knocking that is Michael, he wonders what the end game to all of this is.

What the most plausible, least conspicuous reason he could find to kick off his boots. Maybe, if—

“Dean?” Sam’s voice just about breaks the silence in two, already coming closer as he says, “I think I found—”

Dean yanks himself away from Cas, heart hammering fast in his chest. Sam comes around the corner with his laptop in one hand, a giant cup of coffee in the other, and his hair pulled back into the ugliest messy bun Dean has ever seen. It is a sight which mercifully quells some of whatever had been welling up inside of him, and pushes the rest down into something more manageable. 

“Here,” he says, standing up from his chair so that he can shepard Sam back towards the kitchen, “show me in here.” Sam starts to frown, so Dean hooks a finger over his shoulder towards Cas, “He’s gotta study.”

Sam huffs an indigent breath, but lets himself be prodded towards the door. But then he turn in the fucking in the doorway, back to Cas to say, “Need anything?”

With his eyes still locked on Dean, Cas very intentionally shakes his head. No.

“You found yourself on fucking Facebook?”

“Dude, it’s 2019,” Sam tells him, like that means anything. He pulls open the laptop and narrows his eyes. 

“You need glasses,” Dean tells him. 

“I don’t!” Sam protests, and squints at the screen some more, clicking over to the right tab so that he can point at the profile picture, “check it out.”

Dean leans over his shoulder. “So I guess you don’t hunt anymore?”

“Actually,” says Sam, “I’m not sure that’s true, see?” He squints at the screen, “It says I’m the graduating class of 2010, which means that it either took me five years to get through law school, or that I took at least two years off after my undergrad. 

And besides that—it seems like most of the cases I’ve taken are usually about wrongful death or sudden disappearances so… I’m thinking it might be a cover, actually? Or else maybe the cases are legit but like. I don’t know maybe there’s a—”

Dean looks at him, unconvinced. “You’re saying you’re like, what? A ghost lawyer?” 

“Would that be the craziest thing we’ve ever seen?”

They turn back to the screen, Dean muttering, “I guess you make a fucking point,” under his breath.

“See?” Sam says. He clicks on one of the photos, “That’s definitely the Impala. And I’m pretty sure that’s you in the background. I know you can’t see your face but—”

Now it’s Dean’s turn to squint. He tries to click on the photo, but nothing happens. 

Sam shakes his head. “It’s not tagged or anything, but it’s definitely—” 

Dean pulls the laptop closer to himself. He opens a new window and types his own name into the search bar. 

The results come quick. A couple different mug shots and a fairly extensive list of federal crimes. His heart sinks a little. He doesn’t know what he’d been—

“Hang on.”

The first two aliases he tries don’t yield any relevant results, but the third has a link to another social media platform and—

“I have fucking Instagram?”

“Oh my god.” Sam shoves at his shoulder “You totally do! This is totally you.”

Dean shoves him back. “Shut up.”

He scrolls down through the feed, Sam giggling in the chair beside him. There aren’t any photos of his face, or any full-body shots of Baby (apparently being a wanted fugitive will do that), but the account is undeniably Dean’s. 

There’s a couple photos of different sunsets very clearly taken through the Impala’s windshield. Different shots of diner special’s boards, close ups of burgers or stacks of pancakes. A picture towards the top of the account of a hand—Dean’s hand—different scars and a couple rings that he recognizes but doesn’t have anymore, holding a ten-year coin. Nondescript linoleum floor in the background. 

And there’s. There’s some shitty stuff like a streetlight in the rain. The ‘do not disturb’ sign hanging from a hotel door. A cup of coffee next to a tattered paperback. Then. A giant redwood tree. A picture of the Grand Canyon. Of the arches in Moab. Of sand dunes in Colorado. Of the ocean. 

Dean feels something in his throat go tight. He scrolls past images of empty highways, the brightly colored insides of some cheesy motel with an overactive “woodland” theme, long swaths of sandy deserts, stretches of red rocks, rows of corn. 

There’s a couple of group shots too. Nothing that shows anyone’s faces which is… interesting. But, a row of shattered bottles lined up across a fence labeled “target practice,” with three shadows stretched across the grass. A random corner of Bobby’s old scrapyard. A pie sitting hot in the center of a table with four place settings. A smoky campfire in the woods titled, some asshole forgot the tent , with five indistinct silhouettes. At least four different shots with shitty jokes about salt or silver. A blurry photo geotagged, Montana, and captioned, “Y’all here?” 

“Dude,” says Sam, “Are you… are you live blogging different cases? Do you have friends?”

“I have friends,” Dean says, defensive. And then he remembers, he doesn’t. (Anymore).

He clicks on another photo, an angled shot of an open tailgate taken from the back of a pickup truck with the caption, date night and the stargazing emoji. There’s a quilted blue blanket spread out in the truck bed, and one of Dean’s biker boots is in frame, kicked off and laying sideways. Sitting next to it is an unfamiliar pair of black cowboy boots, squared off and lined up with the bed of the truck. They look at least a size bigger than he wears. And they’re—

Dean stares at it for a full ten seconds, mouth dry and heart pounding. Then he fumbles out and swiftly shuts the laptop. An awkward silence settles in between them. He doesn’t look at Sam.

“So,” Sam says, after a beat. He brings a hand up to the back of his head as if scratching an itch, seems to encounter his hair, and drops his hand back down into his lap. “This is a… Problem, right?”

“What?’ Dean asks, blankly. 

Sam gestures to the laptop, sitting closed on the table between them. “These guys,” he says, “us. The time paradox we created by pulling Dad out of the past and dropping him in the future.”

“...Right,” says Dean, “yeah. Time paradox. The time paradox is probably bad.” 

He feels thrown off. Unbalanced. Like he’s missed a step. His heart is still going in his chest, but it feels weirdly hollow, too. He keeps seeing the different images in his mind’s eye, keeps flicking through them like a roll of film. Staring up at the undeveloped images to try and get a better picture. 

The sunsets, the open road, the Grand Canyon. Those five silhouettes in the mud and dark, in front of a fire. A geotag for the state of Montana. Someone else’s boots kicked over next to his and he’s thinking. About a different life. A different version of himself. 

He tunes back in and Sam is talking again, “—but I don’t think we can just count on the universe responding well to two copies of each of us running around. I think eventually something’s gonna snap. And once it does it might be big. We’re gonna have to. We’re gonna have to come up with a plan.”

He looks away as he says the last bit.

Dean says, “We can’t send him back without seeing Mom.” 

Sam sighs. “Okay well actually we could, but.” He takes a beat, “uh, there’s more.”

“More what?”

“More differences, more changes to this timeline. Good changes, mostly.”

“Hit me.”

“Uh, okay,” says Sam, he pulls up a couple of articles on the laptop, “so apparently climate change is getting better? Like I don’t know, they saved the fucking bees and started taxing billionaires or something, I can’t figure out exactly how but it’s definitely—and then I looked more stuff up too, like bad shit that has happened in our timeline or has been happening and—it’s not like it’s all different, some of that stuff did happen here but like. But mostly it’s. The government isn’t even a two party system anymore.”

“What?”

“Yeah it’s three parties. Like, officially. Three different candidates. And the third one’s winning.” Sam looks up from the laptop, “What happened here?”

Dean’s jaw works. He goes with, “You led with being a fucking ghost lawyer?” Because what else is he going to say? 

Sam says, defensive, “It’s an objectively cool job.”

Dean makes his hand into a phone, “Oh hello, the ice caps are no longer melting, but that’s a footnote compared to Sam Winchester: Attorney at—”

Sam shoves him. And then he rocks out of the way before Dean can shove him back. “I’m gonna see if I can call Rowena. Go find Cas.”

“Fine,” Dean raises his hands, “fine, go call your girlfriend. Leave me here to—”

Sam rolls his hands. “Go find your—” and then he coughs, “Go find Cas.”

Dean shuts up and gets the hell out of dodge.  

Cas intercepts him in the hallway. 

Dean’s heart picks up a beat. Pulse going quick at his temples. He’s got a flash of something, an idea. Pushing Cas until he pushes back. Because he’s there. And his eyes are blue. And Dean’s got Montana running through his head on loop. And he’s going to die.  

But Cas doesn’t even say anything. He just walks him back against the wall and, very deliberately, presses his forearm across Dean’s windpipe. 

Dean’s mouth gasps open. Challenge dying on his lips. 

Cas says, rough and low, almost tender in his ear, “This is what you give to me.”

Dean’s pulse is loud in his veins, like it was back in that alley. Rushed and desperate and Cas roaring, I gave everything for you . A stirring spark of something in the center of his chest. Black out. 

The rest of it had been a haze. A confusion. A mirage of blood and lust. Desire burning low in his veins. The apocalypse, looming. Michael, set to use him as the match that would set the world on fire. 

What is desire? If not the thing that drives you. What is pain?

Up close in Cas’ face, shouting, “Don’t talk to me like I don’t have a destiny. Like I’m not supposed to save the world!” 

And Cas, angry as Dean had ever seen him, saying, “You aren’t an empty shell, Dean. You aren’t meat. You aren’t a gun.”

The way Dean could have spit on the ground at his feet at that. The way he’d sneered, “Yeah. Just point me at it, right?”

Now? Michael in his bones, a clock ticking, ticking down. Still an unspent shell, an armed explosive. Dynamite. 

Cas holds a hand to his throat the way you could hold the trigger of a gun. And Dean can remember him saying, almost low enough he thought that heaven wouldn’t hear, you'll save the world because you want to. Not because of—

The snarl on Dean’s lips as he’d crowded in too close to him, half hoping Cas’d hit him, half hoping that he’d kiss him again, saying what about your plan, huh?

That pin-prick, pin-drop moment of silence before Cas had met his eyes, defiant, and said, our plan is not to save humanity. It sinking in. 

He hadn’t ever looked directly at it. He hadn’t had to. This thing with Cas. He’d just bled in different graveyards and fought from one last cause to another. They’d pointed him at it. And he’d shot. Again and again. 

Now he looks. Now he sees. The slight flicker of Cas’ expression as Dean draws in a breath against the press of his hand. The heat of its weight at his throat. Cas letting him breathe. 

He has words for this, now. 

He understands. 

Cas runs his thumb along his jaw. Dean feels that same spark in him, the same way he’d felt back in that alley all those years ago. He is dynamite and he’s a hammer and he’s a gun. He’s a match. Michael is going to use him to destroy the world. Cas’ face is close enough that Dean can count his eyelashes. They breathe the same air. 

He is so far from everything he wants. He’s close enough to touch it. The Grand Canyon and movie nights with someone who’s shoes are bigger than his. A normal hunt in with people waiting for him. Three shadows in the grass. Four place settings at the table. Cas.

There’s noise from down the hallway. A shuffled sound and a door closing and Sam calling, “Guys, I think you’d better—” 

And then Mary slams in through the front door, blond hair snarled back in a messy fishtail, blood matted in her bangs and streaked down the side of her face.

“Guys,” she calls out, stomping her boots off on the doormat, “I saw your call come in but that last vamp smashed up my phone before I could check the message what’s—” She comes up short, hands on the railing, staring down at the foyer. 

From this angle, Dean can see the exact moment her expression changes, the exact moment John comes around Sam and Mary sees him. The exact moment that he sees her. Because for a second the veil seems to lift off of him. The dark expression he’s worn since he got here drains from his face like it wasn’t ever there. And for just a second, he looks just the way he used to in Dean’s memories. Not so hazy anymore, with John right there, looking up at Mary, smiling. 

Mary is staring down at them, hands still on the railing. “What’s…” 

Sam clears his throat into the sudden silence, “We did all the tests,” he tells her, “It’s really him.”

Mary is squinting at John, not exactly like she’s seen a ghost. Her eyes go from him to Dean, then back to John, “I don’t—”

John’s voice is thick with unshed tears, “Mary,” he breathes. 

Mary’s eyes go wide, recognition suddenly dawning. She lets out a softly whispered, “Holy shit .” 

Mary doesn’t so much run to John as descend the stairs steadily in his direction. John’s eyes are bright, his face suddenly young and unlined, transformed. He’s looking at nothing but Mary. Mary is looking from him to Dean, to Sam then Cas, taking them all in. 

Dean wonders if she looks the way she used to, but of course she does. 

Mary’s hair is windswept and her cheeks are red. She’s wearing a thick leather jacket that Claire had once described as, “butch in the best way possible,” over an old gray and black checkered flannel of Dean’s. There’s blood congealing across her chest too. She isn’t wearing her ring. 

John looks—. Dean has spent his entire life trying to get this look out of John. Unburdened. Uncomplicated. His eyes bright, his strings cut. He seems exactly the right size for his body, exactly the right size for the room. He is looking at Mary and for a moment he seems like he could be any man in the world. No longer a martyr, not even a ghost. 

Mary is looking at him like she doesn’t know what to say. 

“John,” she begins, stilted.  

John takes a shaky step forward and wraps his arms around her, pressing his labored breathing close into the curl of her hair. There is a thick kind of tension in the air. One of Mary’s hands rises to rest against John’s shoulder, and then it falls back to her side. 

When he pulls away, Mary does not move to follow him. She stares instead at the thin smear of blood left on the neck of his t-shirt. Dean can just see the slight tremor of her fingers. The shallow rise and fall of her chest.  

John slaps his hands against his thighs. He clears his throat thickly.

Mary is still staring at him. Sam intercepts her with a light touch to her elbow.

“Uh,” he says softly, “Why don’t you go get cleaned up?”

Mary glances down at his hand. “Right,” she says, “I’ll need—”

“Just grab something from my room,” Dean tells her. He steps all the way into the foyer, “You can leave anything with bloodstains on the bathroom floor. I’ll take care of it later.”

“Right,” she says again, softer. And then she blinks like she’s just seeing him, “Thank you.” 

Her eyes move past Dean, over his shoulder and she says, “Castiel.” 

Cas steps forward, coming up to flank Dean. He gives a well-practiced, slightly stiff smile. “Hello Mary.”

Mary nods. “How’s Jack?” 

Cas smiles for real, stepping onto this common ground. “Good,” he says, “he talks about you.” 

Mary shakes her head, rueful, and the light that has been missing from her eyes finally turns back on, “I’ve been meaning to get back to them,” she says, “things have been crazy lately. They’re not—” 

“No,” Cas finishes, cutting her off, “Visiting Donna actually.” Neither of them look at John. “Dean says you were with Claire?”

Mary laughs, “That kid’s a pistol,” she tells him, “takes after you.”

“I'm sure she doesn’t,” Cas says, but he’s smiling too. 

Mary shakes her head, “She keeps trying to teach me Tiktok.”

Cas nods, knowingly. “She’s trying to break Dean’s spirit.”

“ Hey, ” Dean interjects. 

He can feel John watching them, arms crossed loosely over his chest, mouth set in an easy, considering line. Cas says something else to Mary, and Mary laughs and it sounds. 

Dean didn’t think he’d ever hear that sound again. 

His eyes go to John then, and he looks hit by it. Like all the wind has been knocked out of him. Like he’s barely standing. For a surreal minute their shared quest is standing before them in a bloodied leather jacket with her head thrown back and the light caught in her hair. 

Dean can feel the sun on his face, he can feel cool tile beneath his feet. He can feel a prickling on the back of his neck like a thousand unseen eyes are trained in his direction.

Mary says, “I’m gonna change.” 

Dean  thinks he’s bought himself an hour at least to cook, but Mary comes into the kitchen about twenty minutes after he’s installed himself at the counter.   

Mary does that trick where she uses her back teeth to pop the top off of her beer that always makes Dean flinch. Leveling the bottle in his direction, she says, “I am not planning to be helpful.”

Dean snorts, “There goes my whole plan then.”

Mary takes a pointed sip. “Don’t get smart with me.”

After a minute she says, “So he’s really…”

Dean looks up to see her peeling at the label on the bottle. “Back?” 

“Yeah,” a pause, “Sam filled me in.”

“About Michael?”

She looks up abruptly, “You haven’t called me.” 

“I’ve called you.”

“You didn’t tell me it was this serious.”

Dean snorts. “Okay, well I’ve called you.”

“You didn’t—”

“What did you think it was?”

“I thought you were figuring it out.”

“Uh huh,” he goes back to chopping. 

“ Dean. ” 

“I figured it out, Sam just won’t let—” the knife comes down closer than he ment it to, nicking one of his fingers, “fucking ow!”

“Here,” Mary says automatic, reaching for him, “let me—” 

Dean pulls his hand away. “Cas’ll get it,” he tells her, “later. I’ll have him… he’ll get it. It’s fine.” He turns towards the sink and flicks on the faucet. Water sluices washed-out red into the basin. 

Mary hovers at his elbow, uncertain. “I’ll get him,” she says slowly, “now. I can—”

“It’s fine,” Dean tells her, “it’s fine. See? It’s not even that bad.” 

He turns to reach for one of the cupboards, and then he has to turn back and brace himself up against the sink, nauseous wave of deja vu washing over him. Sam’s blood on his hands. It’s not even that bad. 

He’s gotta put the moment back together in pieces, and when he does Mary is studying him. 

“It is bad,” she decides. “Michael. What’s happening to you. It’s getting worse.” 

Dean pries himself away from the sink, reaching around in one of the cupboards for the first aid kit he’s got stashed somewhere.

“Oh yeah?” He mutters, “what exactly is happening to me?”

They lapse into silence.

Mary breaks it. Stilted. Awkward. “I know I haven’t been around very much lately…”

Dean waves her off, “It’s fine Mom, we told you that we’d tell you if we found something.” 

“I thought you’d tell me if it got worse too.”

“I'm handling it.”

Dean busies himself dicing onions for a few minutes, but when he looks up Mary is still standing beside the fridge. 

Dean pauses in his task.

“Why are you still in here?”

Mary fits the lip of the bottle against her own, eyes trained somewhere in the distance. 

“I just…” she says, and doesn’t finish the sentence, eyes going distant again. 

She’s not really drinking her beer, just holding it up to her mouth periodically, and then setting it back down on the counter beside her. Dean wants to take it from her, but he doesn’t trust himself. So he pulls the dishcloth off from over his shoulder and holds it out to her. Mary starts a little, and then after a moment she accepts it, and drapes it over her own shoulder, the same way that he’d had it. 

“Uh uh,” he tells her, pointing down at the counter, “that.”

Mary’s eyes follow the movement. She looks genuinely surprised to see the sheen of alcohol across the surface of the counter. Dean makes a wiping movement at her with his free hand, and she rolls her eyes and swipes at the counter until it is passably dry.

“Hey, seriously,” Dean says, “go back out there. I got this.”

Mary’s expression is difficult to read. But he still doesn’t know her all that well. She stops in the doorway, hand on the frame. 

“Did he ever hurt you?”

Dean feels a cold, jarring sensation run down the length of his spine, “What?”

Mary says, low but focused, “I know that he wasn’t always a good father after I died, I know that he mistreated you and your brother. But was he cruel to you, did he hurt you?”

Dean rolls his eyes. Cutting a long slice through the plastic wrap on a package of ground beef, he dumps it into a bowl with the onions. 

“Can we please not fucking do this right now?

“Dean.” 

“Seriously, I need to pull something edible together last minute and I actually do need to focus so if you could just—”

“Dean.”

He stops. Breathing hard. Ground beef up to his wrists. Eyes stinging from the onions. 

Mary says, “I haven’t asked you about your childhood before. I didn’t think that…” she gestures at the other room, taking everything in, “but now I am asking. What was he like?”

Dean’s got a lump in the back of his throat. The ground meat is cold between his fingers. He says, “He was my dad.” 

Mary watches him with his own eyes, green and serious. Finally she says, “Okay.”

Dean lets out a breath.

Mary says, “I’ll let you finish in here.”

She stops with a hand on the doorframe. Half-turning towards him to point at the bandaged cut on his finger.

“It’s good that Castiel can fix that.”

Dean says, blankly, “Yeah.”

He can never tell if she knows.

Mary nods. 

She knocks her fist against the door, and leaves. 

They’re seated at the table when John says, “Mary, this looks wonderful.”

Mary says, “I didn't make it.”

Dean clears his throat, “Alright,” he says, rough, “we’ve got burgers, and I did canned green beans for a vegetable.”

Sam makes a face at him, quickly aborted. 

Dean’s eyes roll, on reflex, “Don't give me that look. You’re the one who keeps saying we’re on a tight schedule.”

John says generously, “It must be tough when you’re all out on cases. I bet you’re tired, Mary.”

Mary says, even, “Dean’s a great cook.”

Cas’ cell rings. All of their eyes shift over towards it, following the sound. 

Cas frowns. He extracts the phone carefully from the pocket of his slacks, checking the screen, brows drawing further together as he reads the name. And then he looks back up at Dean.

“Jack,” Dean surmises. 

Cas nods, “I’m sorry, but I should—” 

Dean waves him off, “Go,” he says, “It’s fine.”

Cas stands, pushing his chair back, “Please excuse me.”

“Yeah yeah,” Dean tells him, “say hi for us, alright?” 

“Of course.” 

Mary is standing too, “Mind if I tag along? 

Cas looks equal parts touched and caught off guard. He composes himself quickly.

“Of course,” he says gravely, that same hint of formality creeping back into his voice, “please.”

“Based.” Mary takes another swig of her beer, and then she leans down and grabs her plate from the table, sparing a look towards Dean, “Thanks for cooking, Baby.”

“Yeah,” Dean says, automatic. He turns to watch her leave, and then looks back across the table at Sam. 

“What the fuck is ‘based’?”

Sam takes a measured sip of his beer. “It’s the opposite of cringe,” he says sagely. 

“Right,” Dean agrees. 

They both pretend they know what that means. 

John has his eyes on the door, the spot where Mary disappeared.

“They’re close,” he observes. 

“Uh, yeah,” Dean concedes. He takes a bite of his burger, chewing for a minute. 

Sam cuts in, “Mom and Jack, they’ve spent a lot of time together,” he toys with his napkin, twists it up into a little spiral, and then lets it unfurl. “We all got separated once on a hunt and they were cut off together for… A while. It took us longer than we wanted to find them. They went through some shit.”

Dean traces the set of John’s shoulders, watching for his disapproval. Unprovoked, he offers, “I think they get along with each other too. Since Mom is still getting the hang of things and Jack is, uh. New. To all of this too. Hunting, I mean. They understand each other.” 

“I see,” John says. He returns to his food. “How old is he?” 

“Jack?” They exchange a glance, “Seventeen.”

“Pretty old to be new to this.”

“He had a sheltered childhood.”

“Hmm.” John hums, disapproving. He’s got a thin smear of ketchup across the broad side of one of his thumbs, and when he takes a bite of his burger it oozes out from the side of the bun.

“You said you’ve dealt with time travel before?” 

Dean glances up, thrown off, “What?” 

John nods in his direction, teeth flashing white beneath the hanging orange light, “Sam told me.”

“Right,” Dean hunches over his own plate, making a show out of the easy spread of his elbows on the table. Biting and chewing and swallowing before saying, “Went back to collect phoenix ashes once for a case we were on. Met Samuel Colt, actually.”

John leans back in his seat at that, wiping a hand across his jeans. Impressed, in spite of everything.

“No shit.” 

“Yeah,” Dean tells him, there’s a grin trying to stretch out his face, in spite of everything too. It tugs open his mouth, keeps him talking. “Shit.”

Some of the life has come back to John’s eyes. All at once there’s a softness to his face, a warm orange glow as if the light emanating from the hanging bulbs above their heads is actually coming from him instead.

And then all of a sudden, he’s here. Dean blinks and there’s his dad, sitting across the table from him. His expression easy. His eyes clear, face lifting in the start of a smile, leaning forward slightly in his chair saying low under his breath, “ Son of a bitch. ”

And then he just listens. Just watches Dean talk his way through the case, play by play. 

He finds himself drawing it out, adding in details, adding in flare, anything to keep the story going. To keep the light on him. There’s an old, familiar tug pulling at the center of his ribcage. Like something got a hand up there and is aiming to take him apart piece by piece, bone by bone.

The rest of the table has fallen off, fallen silent. It’s like there’s a halo around him, a glow, this soft circle of orange light where he talks and John listens. 

Dean could say just about anything right now.

He moves cautiously at first, like a skater on ice, feeling it out, trying to test for cracks. And then more bold, in broader circles. Around and around and around. Like something knocked loose in him. A top spun on a table. 

And John listens. 

He leans in, “You ever jump forward?”

Dean’s eyes flick quick to Sam on the other side of the table. Outside of the halo, outside of the circle of light. 

“Yeah,” he licks his lips, throat dry, “Once.” Gun in a thigh holster, Sam in a bone-white suit. 

John whistles, low. The ice holds. 

“Son of a bitch,” he says again, like the whole world is a joke shared between them, “Son of a bitch.”

Outside of the circle of light, he can see Sam giving him one of those wide-eyed, deer-headlights looks. The tense tick of his jaw is lost in shadows, but Dean knows it’s there. He can see the light around John, and he can see the shadow next to Sam’s mouth, the absence of the place where his frown must be.

Tentative, pressing, he says, “We met Henry Winchester.”

The light shutters out.

“What?” says his father.

Dean is plunged through the ice.

“He used a spell to find us, he was being chased by a demon.”

John is sat back in his chair now, and his face is cold. “My father walked out on me,” he says, “he wasn’t a hunter.”

“He didn’t. He came here and he died.”

John says again, “He wasn't a hunter.”

Anger.

The water feels like it will kill him at first, but it never does. It’s always John’s expression.

Sam cuts in, “He was a Man of Letters.”

John lets out a hollow, mean bark of a laugh, “A what?”

Sam’s voice doesn’t waver. “They were a group of scholars who researched and archived the supernatural. They built this place.”

John’s whole face has drawn together, his expression closed off.

“Hang on, no. I know that. That secret society bullshit he was a part of. That wasn’t special. That wasn’t real. Just something to make him feel important. It wasn’t real.”

“Except it was,” Sam presses, the slow heat of an old rebellion coming into his voice. Dean can hear it in him, the anger and impatience. Built up and built up and coming out now at the first sign of a fight, “Henry Winchester came here from 1957, he was killed by a Knight of Hell.” 

John snorts, derisive. Disbelieving. 

Sam’s expression is fixed. The edge of his anger dull and rusted in the muted orange light, a spark waiting to catch. 

“He gave us the key to the bunker. He died to protect it. He wasn’t—”

“ Sam ,” Dean cuts in, “Give him a minute, will you?” 

He’s got John in his peripheral, face drawn but for the spots of color high on his cheeks. That flush along his jawbone. The shaky, unbridled look of him. The heavy, uneven sounds of his breath.

Sam’s breathing heavy too, and for a second that’s all there is. The harsh, discordant rhythm of their breath and the thin shell of silence.

Sam cracks it like an egg. Easy. Careless. Mean.

“He wasn’t who you thought he was.”

“ Sam —” Dean starts again. 

Sam tosses his napkin to the table, “Forget it,” and then he’s pushing back his chair with a sharp screech, “I’m not hungry.”

Dean catches up with him in the kitchen, catching him by the elbow.

“That wasn’t fair.” 

Sam turns quick, on cue. “Who’s he getting pissed at, huh? His dad’s not even here, he’s fucking dead. So guess what? He’s mad at you. It’s bullshit.” 

Dean says, reviving his old role, “It’s a lot to process.”

Sam rolls his eyes. “Oh boo hoo. We’re up to our necks in it here and he—”

“He doesn’t know that.”

It seems to knock something loose in him. Sam brings his hand up to rub at his eyes, at the little ‘v’ in the middle of his forehead. A shaky breath escapes between them.

When he speaks again, he just sounds tired. “Yeah well. How are we supposed to talk to him about any of this stuff if he can’t just be cool for five fucking minutes?”

“It's not exactly something he can just be cool about, is it?” 

“Whatever,” Sam tells him, bratty and unreasonable.

Dean pushes, “I’m serious! You’re always on my case about me being on his side, but then you go make me defend him. Ease up.”

“I'm not making you do shit.” 

It’s Dean's turn to roll his eyes, “Oh, so I'm just supposed to let you throw a tantrum because the guy needs more than two seconds to sit with the news that his father didn’t actually walk out on him?”

“No, you’re supposed to have a problem with him talking to you like that when you haven’t fucking done anything to deserve it. ”

Dean says, “Like how you’re talking to me right now, you mean?”

Which gets him. 

There’s a pause as they both take it in. Sam takes a breath. Then he says, with conviction, “Adults do not talk to each other like this. Not about the important stuff.”

“Please,” Dean scoffs, “We‘re at each other’s throats about important shit all the time.” 

“Yeah well,” Sam mutters, “we also hit each other a lot.”

Dean laughs. “Name one fucking Apocalypse we’ve handled using “I” statements.”

Sam looks somewhat abashed, but he keeps pressing his point. “That’s different, okay? We fight, but we like, fight , you know? We get into it. We get through it.” Pause. “And you hit back.”

Dean raises his eyebrows, “Ouch,” he observes.

Sam shakes his head. “Sorry,” he says, “Sorry. But you know what I mean. I may not like where you’re coming from, but at least I know where that is. And it’s not. Weird and one sided where one of us doesn’t even know why the other’s pissed.

With Dad. It’s like he’s never heard a single goddamn thing I’ve ever said. And that’s fine , okay? It’s fine. Whatever. I’ve dealt with it. I’ll deal. But,” his voice goes a little hoarse, “we could really use his help here.”

And Dean can see it in his eyes now, this desperate glimpse at the undercurrent beneath it all. For a second he’s back on his knees on a dusty street in a deserted town, feeling Sam bleed out against him, telling him it isn’t that bad. Time like blood running through his hands. 

“Yeah,” he says, and then they just stand across from each other for a beat. Knowing without speaking until Sam clears his throat,

“I mean,” he says, looking away, “What's the point of any of it? His fucking quest for vengeance, learning all the shit he did and dragging us along behind him. For what? What did any of it matter. If he can’t help us now?” He takes a deep breath, “How’s he supposed to do that if we can't even tell him what’s going on?” 

There’s the creaking sound of the door opening, and then Mary shoulders through, carrying her dishes. 

“You boys alright in here?”

“We’re fine,” Dean nods towards the sink, “I’ll be right out. You can put those there.”

Sam huffs a heavy breath. He shakes his head, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Whatever.” 

“ Sam, ” Dean starts, but Sam shakes him off. 

“It’s fine,” he says, “I’m fine. This is,” deep breath, “ fine. ” He exhales slowly, palming a hand over his face. Dean isn’t sure he’s ever seen him look this tired. “I’m gonna get back to it. I’ve got some shit I want to double check.”

Dean watches as he pushes out of the room. He turns back to Mary, loitering next to the sink. “You got anything you wanna add?”

Mary drops her plates on the counter, “Nope,” she says. 

And then she leaves too.

Dean. What does Dean do? He does the dishes. He wipes down the counters. He puts the condiments away.

When he comes out of the kitchen, he finds Mary in the dark of the library, her face underlit by the light of Cas’ phone. 

Dean hangs back, half a step outside the door, lost in the shadows. Jack’s face fills the screen. Mary is talking, her free hand moving. Light. Easy. The kind of smile he’s never seen on her lighting up her face just as much as the wash of stark blue light. 

“I'm telling you this thing was huge. Teeth the size of my fucking arm. Head on it like a shovel. Mars, you remember Mars? Ze got it cornered. Took six of us just to take it down. It got me here, see?” 

She twists around, pulling back the collar of her shirt to show the edge of a thick bandage covering her shoulder. 

Jack’s voice, “Alex showed me three different tricks for getting blood rid of bloodstains! And Jody is letting me practice doing her nails.”

“You and that fucking dip powder kit…”

“It makes your nails strong!” Jack insists, he makes a claw motion with his hand, “Like talons! And Dean says when I get good enough I can do his.” 

“No he doesn’t.” 

“Okay well Cas said once I get good enough I could ask Dean if—”

“You get that sigil I sent you?”

“Yeah lemme me check it says—Mary Winchester is a…”

“I'm hanging up on you.” 

“Nooooooooo!”

Mary’s phone beeps. She glances down at it. “Shit. No for real, I’ve gotta go. Love you.”

“Okie,” Jack tells her cheerfully, “bye! Love you!” 

“Mwah,” Mary tells him distractedly, and hangs up Cas’ phone. 

She frowns down at her phone, reading a message, and then starts typing something out. Dean watches her. Lump in his throat. Eyes tight. 

Mary’s shoulders are relaxed. Careless. Easy. Her face still soft and without tension. 

He turns away.  

“Alright, uh, Mom. I’ve got that same guest room made up for you and, Da—”

John cuts in, “Hang on Dean, why doesn’t your mother have a room here?”

Dean pulls up short. He stares between them for a second, throat working, “Uh.”

Mary says, “Because I don’t live here.”

An awkward silence echoes deft between them. Dean opens his mouth, then closes it again. He starts to speak just as Mary does. They both look at each other, and then she steps quickly forward on tiptoe and kisses him on the cheek. 

“Thanks for dinner Baby, but I gotta split. I left the guys at that bar down the street— not the nice one—and we’ve still got another nest to clear out before the sun comes up.”

“Okay,” says Dean, automatically. 

“But I will be back tomorrow—I already told them they’d have to run this next leg with Donna when I got your call because—well, I thought you’d caught a break actually in that,” her eyes go to John, but not all the way, “case you’ve been working so—I’ll be back. Tomorrow.” 

Mary squeezes his shoulder, maybe a little rougher than she meant to. 

“And you’re gonna be—” she breaks off, staring up into his face like the cage might be visible through his eyes, “you’re gonna be fine, right? Until then? Because Sam said you had some crazy fucking plan but obviously you’re good and fine and not crazy and will be here when I get back— okay ?”

Dean huffs a surprised laugh, “Okay,” he says, “yeah. I’ll be here.”

“Good,” says Mary. She gives his cheek a firm pat, “That’s my boy.” 

Dean blinks and swallows, and then she’s already stepped away, shouldering her bag and her gun and treading lightly up the steps to the door of the bunker, and gone. There’s the sound of the door opening and then closing, and then nothing. 

Dean clears his throat into the swell of silence. His eyes sting. He clears it again. 

By the time he can look, John is still standing where he had been in the door of the hallway, staring up after Mary with a haunted expression that Dean recognizes. He waits for him to ask what Mary had been talking about. For him to turn to Dean and ask if he really is okay.

John repeats, quieter this time. “She doesn’t have a room.”

Dean says, again, “She doesn’t live here.”

At first when things had started with Cas, back in the day, Dean could rationalize it because, in a confused and twisted way, he’d kind of hated him. (Fuck Heaven, fuck his destiny. Fuck Cas in particular.) The sex was hot, and he tried not to think about it. 

And then Cas had gone and given everything for him. And that violence was still there, that hunger between them. But Cas was hunted and he’d rebelled, he’d slaughtered his brothers and bathed in blood, and he had done it— all of it— for Dean. Not for a cheap fuck or as a divine experiment. 

And suddenly Dean wasn’t just. A pretty mouth or an easy lay.  

Dean was a cause to follow. 

And they were going to save the world. 

The bunker feels quiet tonight, bigger. Like it might have doubled in size to make up for all of the empty space between them. Dean walks the familiar passages, footsteps echoing. John has gone… somewhere. Disappeared after Mary left. What else is new. He’s pretty sure Sam is in his room. Cas is—Cas is standing outside of their bedroom, waiting for him. 

Dean approaches without speaking. Cas steps forward, takes him carefully by the collar of his shirt, and draws him through the open door. 

Dean moves to make something of it, hand on Cas’ collar, back foot braced to take his weight, but Cas. 

Gives. 

It can’t even be said that he does it easily or without a fight, because he just moves with Dean as Dean moves towards him, pulling him back towards the bed with one hand on his belt and the other at his hip. He guides them down, until he’s lying back on the bed with Dean straddling him.

He leans up slightly so that he can work the buttons of Dean’s flannel, and as he parts the fabric he says, so quiet it is almost lost between them, “You can have me .” 

Dean shivers. The hair on his stomach pricks in the faint chill of the room. Cas’ hands are beneath his t-shirt, framing his torso. Fingers hot as he slowly pulls Dean forward against him, and then rocks him back again. 

Despite the cold, Dean reaches up and tugs off his shirt. He’s got heat building at the back of his temples, rushing in his ears, unshed blood.

Jeans still on. Chest and back bare in the darkness, he looks down at Cas. And Cas looks up at him. 

And then, very deliberately, he repeats what he had done in the hallway. Brings his cupped palm to Dean’s throat and carefully cuts off his airway. 

And everything goes. It just goes quiet. 

It had been a fight, their first time. It had been on the brink of the end of the world, close up in each other’s faces, seconds away from throwing punches. 

Dean had spit something acidic at Cas, something cheap with a bite to it, and then he’d seen the moment when Cas’ eyes had dropped to follow the shape of the words. 

And then they hadn’t talked about it.

There had been a ruthless kind of brutality to it. Cas, dishonorable in his desertion, his touch fierce and deferential.

Dean, wild with rage and choked by pain and grief— freedom is a length of rope and God wants you to hang yourself —let down when he didn’t bleed. 

They’d fucked the same way they always fought. 

Messy. Desperate. Worshipful. Down on his knees in the dirt, tasting blood and taking sacrament.

And then they’d built a life out from it. 

Slowly, over time. Painfully. Piece by piece. 

Because every time Cas had touched him, after that. Dean had felt that exact same way. 

Desperate. Messy. 

Worshiped. 

Cas threw him up against an alley wall, he beat his face bloody, but he touched him like he was something righteous. And whenever his hands were on him, Dean believed. 

He was a man. He was a weapon. But he was something else, too. 

The way Cas touches him now, palm cupped reverently to his throat, hips rolling in slow, even thrusts. Drag of denim on denim. Taste of salt in the air.

It’s different than it was before. 

It’s the same. 

The world is still ending and he is still drowning and Cas still kisses him like he has finally put a name to his desire. 

He cants his hips up and Dean moves with him, an inhale caught sharp in the back of his throat. The room around them grown nondescript and hazy in the dark. 

Cas’ grace begins to pool faintly from his open mouth, a liquid spill of blue, white light that collects at the corners of his eyes. Runs down his cheeks. Shines from his nail beds. 

There’s a faint halo gathering behind his head. A permeable electric charge which turns the air around them sharp and distinctive. 

Dean can almost taste it. 

Cas’ hand at his throat, the complex war of noise inside him momentarily silenced. 

He grinds himself down and Cas rolls up to meet him. 

On beat with his heart. Dean whispers, “Stop being so soft with me.”

Cas’ grip on his throat is firm, but he touches his face like glass. “No.”

Dean’s eyes are lulled shut. Open to watch Cas’ face as he rolls his hips forward, closed as he pulls back and tips his head.

A sound escapes him. Something low and aching, echoed back over years of hard wins and sore losses.

He says breathless, “Don’t gotta go so easy on me.”

Cas shifts his grip, thumb coming up to track a line across Dean’s jaw. 

He says, soft. “I have to be easy on me.”

Cas’ grace shines like moonlight, soft against his skin. 

Chapter Text

That night when he dreams, he and Cas are standing on a wide, flat pavilion, looking out over nothing. 

Dean flutters his eyes open, chin lifting upward, as though a heavy weight has suddenly fallen off of him. The ground beneath his feet is stone. A cool breeze blows across his face.

He can feel Cas in profile beside him, staring out into the gray-white sky. 

It seems to stretch out around them infinitely, growing soft and hazy at the edges. Dean expects to see a horizon line, but he squints his eyes and the sky remains wide and endless, illuminated only by lightning arching indistinctly in the distance, briefly lighting either steel-white clouds or gauzy gray smoke. Pale and fine enough that if there is a fire somewhere, it has long since burnt out. 

The air smells neither like ash or electricity. It feels. Clean. 

His mouth is dry, as if he hasn’t spoken in some time. 

“This can’t last forever.”

But even as he says it, he feels certain that it can. Him and Cas standing shoulder to shoulder at the top of the world, with this pale abyss stretching out all around them.

It feels like standing at the peak of a mountain, but he can’t see the ground. 

Turning slowly, he takes in the pavilion. A flat, pale plateau of either very light marble or fine stone. It is so broad that the air above it appears hazy, like looking across a vast body of water. 

There are columns in the distance, rising through the thin mist of clouds, but they don’t seem to be going anywhere. A few are broken off at the middle in the way of a ruined colonnade. But the cuts are clean. 

At the pavilion’s center stands a small table with a cup of clear water sitting untouched atop it. 

Dean blinks. He thinks it’s water. But then he blinks again and he isn’t certain. It could be smoke. A thread of lightning suspended in glass. The liquid—whatever is in the glass—shifts. It glows faintly, twisting over itself, swirling and becoming and unbecoming again.

He watches whatever it is lap against the lip of the glass, and then he watches it slowly begin to spill over the rim, a slow-motion tumble of faint blue light. His mouth opens without him telling it to, his lips part. 

He hears Cas’ voice, coming from somewhere at his shoulder. 

“We make it last.”

Dean can’t feel himself walking, but the dais is slowly approaching him, a subtle shift in perspective until it is fifty yards, then twenty, then ten yards away. And then it is right in front of him, and he is standing over it, gazing down into the blue-white tumble, the tiny storm cupped at the center of the table. Lighting arches distantly in the gray-white sky, and is mirrored back inside the glass. A tiny spark. He feels his hand begin to raise at his side. 

Cas turns to him. 

He speaks for the first time in the dream. 

He says.

“Wake up.”

A jumble of confused sounds and distorted images. Dark room cut through by the pale outline of a square window and cheap motel curtains. Muted glow from the television turned on low, the discordant notes of an unfamiliar advertisement playing on a repeated glitch. 

There is a high, metallic scream— 

And everything shatters. 

Cas’ voice, again from just beside him, “ Wake up!”

He’s awake, isn't he? He feels awake. 

The room is gray and hazy. Almost fevered. Like he’s been asleep for days and can’t seem to pull himself out of it. A confused mire of heat and something else. Quicksand. Dragging him back down.

There’s a radiator blowing too hot somewhere close by. A low tick tick whirr and thready keening noise emitting from an unidentified electronic. 

Clumsy, heavy, he tries to push himself out of the bed, and then he realizes he isn’t standing and thinks he must be dreaming again.

His fingers search for the knife under his pillow, but his hand won’t move.

And then he breaks the surface.

Hard. 

Rough brick and rough hands. Slick hilt of the knife gripped tight in his palm. Arm pinned at his side, body pressed tight up against the rough wall of a dark alley. Gasoline-spill smell of garbage and rain. Blood, oil, water clumping his eyelashes together. Scent of copper. Rust in the back of his throat. 

He lashes out, blind, streetlight flaring to life from the corner of his eyes, bulb popping in a shower of techno-color sparks. 

A blow lands and he cries out in lust or in pain. 

Hard brick. Soft sheets. 

The streetlight. 

Dark, then light, then— 

Cas has him on his back, pushing him down into the mattress. He’s got a hand braced on one of Dean’s shoulders, knee planted in the center of Dean’s chest, weight bearing down. 

Cas says again, low and harsh and breathless. A divine host and fallen soldier. 

“ Wake. Up. ”

That does it.

Dean comes finally, suddenly, awake. The familiar outline of their shadowed room coming sharply into focus. Cas’ face inches above him, breathing thick and pupils blown. Fear in his eyes. 

He turns his head.

And then he sees why Cas has only got one hand on him. Because the other is gripped at his own thigh, a few inches above the hilt of the demon blade.

Dean stares. Blood bubbles up around the base of the knife, matting the hair on Cas’ thigh, slicking down the muscle to the sheet below. Voice dragged from the pit of his chest he whispers, “What the fuck?”

Cas says, without looking, “It’s not that bad.”

There’s a fading halo behind his head that suggests the lights may have just switched on and then off again. 

Dean can feel the wet creep of blood soaking through the sheets at the small of his back. 

“ Cas ,” he whispers. His voice feels thin between his teeth, like it might snap clean in half if he let it.

Cas grimaces and begins to shift himself slowly, easing his weight carefully to the side until he’s able to bring his knee off of Dean’s chest. The wound at his thigh pulses in response.

Dean says, on autopilot, “Don’t pull it out.”

He feels numb. Like all his skin has just been peeled off, and he’s about a half-second away from feeling the sting.

Cas says, low and thick and blessedly a little bitchy, “I’m not a complete idiot.”

He shifts again, then has to steady himself with a clumsy hand braced on the mattress.

“Wait,” Dean tells him, “Hang on.”

His training is taking over, body acting on instinct, already groping around at the side of the bed, searching for last night’s jeans. He finds them and yanks them up, shucking off the belt and passing it over. Cas’ hand slick and sticky as he takes it. 

He fumbles the belt around his thigh, several inches above the knife’s hilt. Blood wells up around the blade, and the inscriptions carved into the metal spark as it touches them. 

Dean flexes his fingers. Blood flecks his wrist. 

Slowly, like he's still dreaming, he says, “Cas, did I….”

Cas says again, “It’s not that bad.”

He sinches the belt quickly into place. Sharp exhale of breath, snick of the buckle as it fastens. 

Dean positions himself carefully at his side. “Ready?” 

Cas nods, grim. 

Before he’s able to think too hard about it, Dean grabs the hilt and yanks it free. Blood wells immediately from the wound, running hot and fast down the length of Cas’ thigh. 

The scene seems to run though Dean's mind too, like there's a tap left on somewhere. This rushing, muted hum that pours from his head to his chest to the pit of his stomach. Dizzy, even though he isn’t the one bleeding. 

He looks on, knuckles white, heartbeat loud and distant in his ears. 

Cas’ eyes close for half a second, and then the light of his grace shines out from the palms of his hands. The wound closes slowly and inelegantly before them. Sealing shut and then peeling open. Sweat gleams on Cas’ brow, in the shallow indent above his lips. His skin fuses and unfuses, stitched together and then torn apart again. 

And then slowly. Painstakingly, Dean watches as the dark spill of his blood turns to shining white light, and then watches the light fade out into the darkness. The room becomes quiet. 

And then Dean is quiet. 

And then he says, “Did I stab you?”

Cas shifts beside him, close in the darkness. His voice very low. “I hope you stabbed me,” he says. Flat, even. Dean can hear him moving on the bed next to him, stretching out, pulling the belt free from his leg, tossing it back to the floor. And then he says again, much quieter, “I hope you stabbed me.”

The sheets beneath Dean's hands are damp with Cas’ blood. The ceiling above his head ripples very faintly out of the corner of his eye. 

Dean sets his jaw. He draws in a breath he has to swallow back down. He’s numb all through his body, except for the place where a tear slides down from his eye to his chin and then into his lap. 

So that’s still his. He can feel that that’s still his. 

He can’t tell how his voice sounds, if it still sounds like him. It's like it echoes out of him, like it could just be something he's said before, delayed. Low into the awful dark.

“This has never happened before.”

 He can’t remember. He doesn't know.

He feels Cas shift on the bed beside him, the weight his body has on the mattress. And then he feels him reach out slowly and take his hand. The calloused skin of his palm and his grave, familiar voice. Very, very quiet as he says, “I know.”

They strip the bed down to the plastic mattress cover, and then Cas bundles that up too, tossing everything into the corner of the room with a soft groan. He lays back down on the bare mattress, moving slow like his muscles are cramping. Dean hovers over him, uncertain. He shifts forward on the balls of his feet, and then sways back, before deciding. 

“I’ll go sleep on the couch.”

Cas says, eyes still closed, “Don’t be an idiot.” He rolls over a little, sliding to the side to make space for Dean. The blood from his body tracks wetly onto the mattress. Without opening his eyes, Cas says, “We’re never getting these stains out.”

Dean lays carefully down beside him, movements slow. Halting. He rests his head in the hollow between Cas’ chest and shoulder, slides his hands shakily out over his belly to wrap around his hip. Soft, dark hair brushing across the underside of his wrist. 

Voice still shaky he says, “I think Jack just learned some new tricks for that, actually.”

“Mmm,” Cas rumbles, “children really are the future, I see.” 

Dean twists up to look at him, the room in shadows. “You’re okay?” he whispers. 

In the dark, Cas’ dry, wide palm cups around the bulk of Dean’s shoulder, covering the place where he once burned his grace into his skin.

He says, soft, “I’m okay.”

This thing that had started between them, way back at the beginning. The sex, the lust, the wanting; carnal knowledge torn from each other's bodies. It had gone on for so long that Dean had thought it would go on forever. Why shouldn’t it? He was the end of the world; Cas was the one who had brought him there. 

It had gone on for so long. And then it had ended abruptly, without warning.

It happened the first time one of them had died. Cas getting blown to pieces in that graveyard; Dean’s face bloodied, kneeling on the ground. 

And afterwards. The wounds on his face knitting back together, two of Cas’ fingers pressed to his temple. Easy, almost casual. Routine. 

Cas had touched him and there had been a change to it, something Dean did not expect but something he recognized. That same cold calculation between them once more, a screen pulling closed. Cas firmly back on the other side. Dean, in the graveyard, kneeling. 

And then it hadn’t happened again for years afterwards, even as Cas’ divinity was pulled and flayed away. An endless string of hands on shoulders and under armpits, hauling him up, pushing him forward, those same fingertips to his temples again and again. A blow landing.

Cas.

It was like that first death, that first time, had taken something from him. Put him back together with all of his pieces, except the one that wanted Dean. 

Or—not that, exactly. But every time Cas had touched him afterwards, he’d also pulled away. 

They didn’t talk about it. 

Dean. He’d assumed that Cas hadn’t remembered any of it. The memories of them fucking blown away in that explosion. Too unholy to be put back together with the rest of him. And he had accepted it, swallowed it down. Of course he had. Of course. 

Every atom of Cas. Every molecule, hand crafted. 

But sometimes he’d catch him looking at him and think, maybe.

The breaking point wasn’t death. It had been when Dean had lived, that last time, when neither of them had thought that he was going to. When he hadn’t killed Amara, and the bomb forged from his soul hadn’t gone off. 

Cas had grabbed onto him in the bunker afterwards, in front of Mary, and Dean had known suddenly, clearly, by the way that he had held him, that for all these years Cas had remembered. That he’d known.

Mary alive, the world saved. Cas with his arms wrapped around him, his eyes suddenly unguarded, clear down to the very bottom of him. He had known. 

They knew each other, again. 

This same mattress. Two and a half years ago. Chests aching and hearts searing, remembering, remembering. The last time they had done this. Young bodies and tangled feelings pushed down and locked away. Bridges burned to embers. Final chances taken. Wanting without speaking, not putting words to it, the only rule they hadn’t broken between them back then. Struck like match to paper, Cas’ hand in Dean’s hair and the flare of his grace in his eyes as he came. 

They’d been young in the way that feels old, feels endless, until all of a sudden you’ve spent the last decade looking over at the person beside you in the passenger seat, just as they’re looking away. 

Seven years. 

Settled into themselves, bodies older. Chests and shoulders filled out, stomachs soft. Years of laughing and fighting and sunburns. The lattice of crow’s feet at the corners of Cas’ eyes, the thick column of his neck, the gray coming in along his temples. Holding his face different now, muscles relaxing and shifting on reflex. Laying together in Dean’s bed in the heart of the bunker. Everything quiet in the dark, soft creep of dawn around them. 

Cas had cradled Dean’s face in his hands, and he had kissed him the way that Dean had been wanting Cas to kiss him for the last seven years. Slow and quiet, and then raw and desperate. Messy. Worshipful. Who said they had an absent God? 

Afterwards, lying in the shared mess of their sweat, Dean had said only, “Why?”

Cas’ jaw had worked, gaze fixed on the ceiling, and then he said. Very very softly, like it might break whatever boundary that remained, “It meant too much to me,” and the meaning of that between them, I couldn’t let myself be that close to you and have you pull away. 

Dean, thinking of Lisa and the end of the world, the sound of wings and an empty passenger seat. Purgatory and the crypt, another night bloodied and down on his knees said, “I wanted you” and meant, I didn’t leave.

Now. 

Dean doesn’t speak. But he thinks again, his head resting on Cas’ chest, ear placed above his heart, this can’t last forever. 

Beside him in the darkness, scent of his blood still between them, Cas says, “I still have hope.” 

He falls asleep again to a dream of a broad cathedral with tall stained glass windows each depicting a different tableau of Cas. 

The light shines down bright across his upturned face, indigo, scarlet, gold. 

He touches careful fingers to the glass. 

Chapter Text

Dean’s eyes blink slowly open to see Cas’ face a few inches from his own. There isn’t any natural light in their bedroom, but there’s an early morning quality to the air. Something quiet about it, Cas sleeping and Dean awake, watching him in the semi-darkness. The rise and fall of his chest. The thin streak of blood from his mouth to his hairline. 

Last night’s dream lingers between them. The view that was not a view, Cas’ hands on his chest, a blue wash of light, and the glow from the bulb overhead fading out just as his eyes had opened.

He remembers coming abruptly awake, struggling under Cas’ weight. Remembers the blood soaked through the sheets still balled in the corner. The knife. 

And he also remembers standing briefly by the side of the bed, looking down at Cas as he slept. 

Though that may have been a dream again, too.

He watches Cas, still sleeping. The soft, steady sounds of his slow deep breathing. The rise and fall of his chest. And that thin, faint glow around his outline, like all the air particles can tell where they’re touching him. Super-charged. 

The thing is. It was never supposed to end up like this for them. Way, way back in the beginning, when this thing between them was just getting started. 

How could he have known? 

Sparks falling down all around him. Glass shattering. A terrible voice in the stretching darkness. A light flicking on. 

Cas opens his eyes. 

Low, like the heat held between their bodies, he says,“I fell asleep.”

Dean says, “Shit.”

The bunker is quiet around them, but he’s got a bad feeling that— 

Cas says, without moving, “It’s late.”

“ Fuck ,” Dean whispers, “You think my dad is—”

“Awake,” Cas finishes, “Yes.”

He reaches out to touch the collar of Dean’s t-shirt where it's darkened with sweat. In the low, flat way of his he says, “You had a nightmare.”

Dean nods, slow. His throat feels rough and thick from sleep. In the back of his mind, Cas is beside him in the low dark hours of the night, shaking him awake, a fading halo of diffusing light partially obscuring the view of the blade in his thigh. But he’s also sleeping next to Dean as he looks on, chest rising and falling, undisturbed. He’s kissing Dean’s mouth until they both fall back asleep.

Dean feels as if he can’t remember which of these are a dream and which is a memory. It’s becoming hazy for him, in the way of waking, slipping through his fingers like sand—like a spill of—something. Blue? He glances at the bedside table for a glass of water but finds it empty. 

Cas shifts in the bed beside him. His fingers play along the collar of Dean’s shirt, touch light at his throat. The room is just cold enough that his fingers feel hot on Dean’s skin, slightly chilled.

Dean says, “How do you want to play this?”

Just as Cas says, “I’ll let you—”

“Yeah,” Dean tells him. He lets out a shaky breath and pushes himself up. “Right, okay. I’ll head him off. You just—”

“Dean,” Cas says quietly, “Wait.”

Dean turns back to him. Cas shifts up on his elbow to cup a hand around the back of Dean’s neck.

His mouth tastes like it’s been twelve hours since he brushed his teeth. It tastes like copper and like a strike point. It tastes like Dean.

Dean is—. To say that he is lost in it is an understatement. He feels caught in the close heat of the moment. Cas’ thumb brushing over the indent at the base of his skull. The catch of stubble between them. The smell of sweat and dollar store deodorant. 

Amber and cedarwood. 

His feet are cold on the concrete floor, the air chilled around him, his body still warmed-through from lying beside Cas on the bare mattress. And it feels. 

Cas shifts up and he leans down and it feels—

He doesn’t think anyone else has a love like this. 

How the hell was he supposed to guess that this was coming?

All that time waiting. 

And he was going to be found.

Cas pulls back, slowly, carefully, and Dean’s heart is beating so fucking fast because he thinks he might finally—he thinks he’s gonna—  

“Good luck,” Cas tells him. 

The moment breaks.

John is sitting at the table when Dean comes in. 

Dean knows he went to bed last night—or he thinks he did—after Mary left the bunker. But he can’t tell if he slept.

He got used to John staying up like this when they hunted together. But it still feels—. There’s something about it that’s unsettling. It had been worse when it was just the two of them, on the road. No school night schedule to bullshit around, no morning routines. After Sam took off, they hadn’t had a reason to maintain any kind of long term home base. They didn’t need to stay in one spot, wasn’t any point in hunkering down and hauling ass back and forth between some crappy rental or long-term motel when they could just live out of the car and move from case to case. 

But losing that tether, physically for John, emotionally for Dean, had cost them.  

It felt like it started slow at first, just the normal cycles he was used to. Up and down. Spin the wheel, roll the dice. But then it had shifted—little by little and then all at once—until the way he used to live sometimes was the way he lived all the time. Like he’d blinked and then there it was, this new life. 

Lights on at all hours, John pacing. Packing all their shit up in the middle of the night to run after some lead he’d pieced together while Dean had caught up on a couple hours of badly needed sleep. Days blending into nights. Red-streaked tail lights on the highway. Morning at two am. Midnight at noon. Sam off in California somewhere. Breakfast from neon-lit gas stations.

Sometimes Dean kept pace with John, and then they’d both be at it. Lightning-sharp and wired. Chasing ghosts.  

Other times he’d crash early, spend a couple groggy, disoriented days in some crappy, overheated motel with the curtains drawn across the windows. Heat building slow and steady until it abruptly grew insufferable. Caught in that sweaty, eyes-not-quite-shut lull between sleep and waking. Dreaming behind his eyelids. Seeing stars. 

But he always came out of it. And John would palm a hand around the back of his skull and bitch at him for wasting daylight. Dean, shrugging back into his leather jacket, ready for the fight.

It got so he’d be damn grateful to see a bottle in John’s hand, anything to take the edge off. Bring him down to that sweet spot. Not so low he couldn’t function, but low enough to keep Dean’s life from spinning off its axis. Low enough to keep them stopping regularly for food and sleep. How long had he lived like that? Tuned to John Winchester like a compass. Setting him like a clock. 

And how it had felt like all his strings had been cut, after. Once they’d started working separate cases. Dean had felt it like a hole in his chest. This blank, empty space where that pull had always been. Driving back roads without any sense of direction, following a map that always felt incomplete. 

Today, John’s got a certain look about him. His cheeks sallow. A spark to his eyes. It’s very possible he has been awake since Mary left.

Which should be. Fine. As long as he slept the night before he got here. They should be okay. 

From experience Dean knows that one day is fine, two days is pushing it and three days is. Well. He doesn’t want it to get to three days. 

There might actually be a god other than Chuck, because the bunker door opens just as Dean rounds the corner, and Sam comes in, cheeks flushed and breathing heavy. Whatever Dean is telegraphing must be pretty bad, because Sam barely glances down at him before he’s tromping down from the crow’s nest with a cheerful,

“Hey team,” his voice is easy, but there’s a line of tension still tight around his eyes. Also it’s Tuesday which, from years of living close quarters, and Sam’s insistence that he participate in his hobbies, Dean knows for a fact is not leg day. 

“Hello Sam,” Cas says, coming in from the hall. His face is washed and his clothes are clean. Sam drops a friendly hand to his shoulder. Cas gives a faint smile. 

John is frowning at Sam’s top knot. 

“You training for a marathon or something?” 

Sam blows out a breath, “Ha,” he says, “I wish.” 

Sam swings his foot up onto one of the chairs and begins to pull at his laces. Dean quickly does a little breathing exercise in the back of his head to stop himself from reaching out and kicking at Sam’s dirty tennis-shoes. 

Instead he says, “How many miles today?”

Sam turns around and offers him a muted grin, “Four,” he says, “and I’m not hearing that clicking noise from my knee anymore.”

“That’s wonderful,” Cas murmurs, low. 

Sam finishes untying one shoe and moves to the other. Then he’s just stood there in his socks with nothing to do with his hands. A low line of tension simmers between them. 

Dean clears his throat, “So,” he says, “Breakfast?” Because, fuck it. Cat’s already out of the bag, and if John Winchester wants to keep interrogating him, he can do it over pancakes. 

Sam looks up at him, hopeful, “Will you make my post-workout protein shake for me?”

“Your post-workout shake is fucking gross,” Dean tells him, “yes.”

He pushes himself up from the table. Then he makes himself say, voice casual, “Cas, buddy, you want anything?”

Cas’ lips flex slightly. Dean can see it out of the corner of his eyes. 

“Coffee, please.”

Dean raps his knuckles on the table. “Right,” he says, “coming up.”

He hangs up in the doorway, voice still level, tone even. 

“Dad, what about you?”

“Sure,” says John. 

Dean retreats to the kitchen. He texts Mary as the coffee brews. The jeans she grabbed from his room last night must be the ones he’d bought recently, because this pair rides low beneath his belly and digs into the flesh of his hips. He pulls distractedly at the hem of his faded henley, studying the line of messages on the screen of his phone. There’s a little read receipt at the bottom of his last message. Mary hasn’t responded. He texts her again. 

Cas gets two different flavored syrups in his coffee, plus this fancy, seasonal creamer that he and Jack had hoarded possessively over the holidays. Sam gets the gross protein supplement blended together with oat milk, and a dollop of some kind of organic nut butter that Dean buys for him specially whenever he drives out of his way to the local co-op, instead of stopping at their usual supermarket. It’s the kind you grind fresh yourself in store. This week is maybe, cashew? He hadn’t written it down.

John takes his coffee black. 

Dean’s thumb trails nervously over his phone in his back pocket. The jeans fit tight across his ass too, and he’s gotta fight the urge to double check that his ringer is on. The ringer is on. He’ll hear it when Mary calls. Mary will call.

It’s a bit of a trick carrying everything back in without spilling. He’s overfilled Sam’s shake on autopilot, and Cas is still using a novelty mug Jack picked out for him over Christmas—this ridiculous two-tiered snowman with a spindly handle that is realistically more decorative than functional. He can feel his shirt riding up in the back as he shoulders out of the kitchen, hands too full to tug it down. 

John is seated closest to the door, so Dean passes his coffee over to him first, and then he’s able to get a firmer grip on Cas’ mug so that he can hand it off without spilling or dropping anything. Cas accepts it gravely, and Dean has a ridiculous moment of staring at the line of his mouth through the pale curl of steam rising between them, and then ducking his head to pretend he isn’t. 

Sometimes it still sneaks up on him, that he’s allowed to look at Cas. He’d gotten it down to an art, after all those years. Timing the exact moment when he needed to turn away. The careful practice of not noticing. The way that Cas’ big hands cradle the mug, one on the side and one on the bottom. How the steam skips as he blows across the surface.

Dean has been an expert of not wanting his whole life. Of not wanting this. 

Cas’ dark hair is swept back from his forehead, but a lock of it comes loose when he leans forward to inhale the steam rising from the mug. His hands are tanned and broad. There’s a faint pale band of skin around his left ring finger. Dean knows how he tastes. He’s holding a novelty snowman mug. 

Aware of John’s presence behind him, Dean lets his eyes follow the line of Cas’ wrist up to his shoulder and down his torso, checking for any remaining signs of injury from the night before. 

The jacket Cas is wearing is a newer one, different from what he’s normally got on under the trench-coat. The fabric looks softer and its color is richer, bringing out both the distinct blue of Cas’ eyes and the dark fall of his lashes. Cas tips his mug to drink. It tilts his chin up so that he’s profiled in a sharp line. He sets it down on the table and Dean watches the shadow of his teeth. The slight sheen on his open mouth. His hand where it drops from the mug to rest in his lap. 

Dean tracks the movement, the way Cas’ legs are spread beneath the table, how his dress socks peak out between the gap of his shoes and slacks. He doesn’t appear to be favoring the place where he was stabbed, but Dean’s eyes hang there for a beat. The generous cut of his slacks around the curve of his thighs. The broad strain of his chest and stomach. 

He’s got a memory of tearing open Cas’ shirt for the first time since they were young, after years of memorizing exactly how it fit him. Dragging his cheek across his belly, pressing his mouth to coarse, dark hair, just starting to gray. The sound of the buttons clattering across the floor. How he’d gasped a desperate inhale against Cas’ skin and it had felt like the first real breath he’d drawn in years. Like all the color had come flooding sharp back into his world. The sound and taste and smell of him. Cas’ hand in his hair as Dean’s fingers wrapped around his hips, pressing down to find the give in his flesh, these softer, uncalloused places he’d been stealing glances at for years. The guilty and coveted secret thrill of seeing somewhere the world had not worn up against him. The hinge between his thumb and forefinger. The underside of his wrist. 

Distently, Dean can hear that someone is talking again. But all he can think about is Cas’ white button down, and watching the different ways it had fit him over the years, thinking about it so much as it happened that it would become a memory even when he was looking right at him. How he wore it loose at first and a little awkward, and then more comfortably as he had grown into his life and his skin. Building muscle, filling out, beginning to eat. And still these softer, unseen places. Not so much glimpsed as imagined. The upper inside of his thigh, the divet of his hips. The places he’d outgrown his skin, vined in white stretch-marks, re-accommodating him.  

These finer things. The human places. The ones that made him seem almost attainable. 

Didn’t Dean have softness too? Hadn’t he grown himself from something yielding? Didn’t his body remember? 

Weren’t there places in them both that weren’t weapons? Places that were simply human, or almost. 

Cas was an angel. He had told himself that Cas was an angel. But his body changed and Dean had thought, maybe.

A thrum of heat builds at the base of his skull. Something starting deep and insistent in the pit of his stomach. 

Cas’ hand is resting on top of his thigh, fingers spread heavy on the fabric of his slacks. His thumb rests right along his inseam. Dean can feel his own breathing begin to shallow, feel the conscious act of swallowing, of wetting his lips. 

Cas shifts in his chair, the conversation around them running static-blank and indistinct. 

Dean raises his eyes to Cas’ face, and finds that Cas is already staring back at him. At the place where his henley has pulled up over his stomach and the too-tight waistband of his jeans cuts into the soft flesh of his hips. There’s a spark there. Something hungry. As he watches, Cas drags his eyes up to Dean’s face. Unimpeded by the usual bulk of the trenchcoat, Cas’ legs spread wider.

Dean coughs and looks away, face heating, over towards Sam who’s been carefully not watching them, just keeping his eyes trained in their general direction. The table blocks the most incriminating part of the scene, but Dean’s racing heart kicks up another notch anyways. He makes a what face at Sam, who rolls his eyes and does a gimme hand motion towards the dangerously full glass in Dean’s free hand. 

Dean thunks it down on the table in front of him, ignoring the heat in his face and the feeling on the back of his neck of Cas watching him.

“You gotta eat something solid too,” he threatens Sam automatically, “otherwise I’m gonna spit in this.”

Sam leans forward with his elbows on the table, slurping directly from the rim of the glass, “Sooooooooo fair.”

Dean tosses a straw generally in his direction. “I mean it,” he says, “trans fats. I got that nitrate-free, zero-hormones, grass-fed bullshit.”

“Fuck yeah,” Sam mutters, still drinking. He gropes around inelegantly for the straw, and sends it skittering off of the table. 

Cas retrieves it for him, and Sam takes it blithely, giving it a perfunctory wipe down on the sleeve of his Under Armor before plunking it into his glass. 

Dean wrinkles his nose, trying to keep his voice normal as he says, “I know that you’re just doing that to fuck with me, but literally, who is the real victim here?” and Sam, mouth full says, 

“The environment.”

Cas laughs, and he didn’t use to do that before. 

He didn’t even smile, really. Squinting his eyes, tilting his head. More animal than man. Something more than that. Ethereal. Ruthless. Untouchable. 

And then that had changed too. And it had kept changing.  

How Dean had felt like each new detail, each new thing he knew, was going to kill him. The smell of Cas’ body as his grace had waxed and waned. The sound of his laugh. How hot his skin felt, hands brushing against hands. Elbows touching. The way he began to order at restaurants, trailing one square finger down along the menu. The grave way he asked about the special of the day and the quick brutality with which he killed, the crack of spinal columns and sizzle of grace-burned skin. 

And then all of that changing, and changing, and continuing to change. The same way that Dean had. Growing into new habits and out of old ones. The way that his grip shifted on his knife, the way it stayed the same on his gun. How his body started to ache in certain places and soften in others. He dug more graves, he buried more bodies. His shoulders broadened and his stomach thickened and calluses grew over the blistered skin of his palms. And Cas—the thing they’d had and lost between them—no longer a fresh wound, digging in the dirt beside him, smelling like the rain that had just fallen and Dean’s deodorant. 

It clutches in his chest. A thousand days and fragmented moments, the same grave dug again and again. The same laugh and smile and song played on the radio, Cas leaning over him to angle the vent of the air conditioning towards the passenger seat, his shirt pulling up over his stomach, pointing out road signs as they passed.

Voice tight in his throat, Dean says, “I’m gonna check on the laundry.”

He feels Cas’ eyes on him as he walks through the door. Hears John say, “Didn’t know angels drank coffee.”

And Cas respond, “Only the fallen ones.”

The laundry room is on the other side of the bunker, tucked out of the way down an under-used hallway, and he might hold his breath until he gets there. 

It’s feeling more and more like time is folding in on itself, skipping over the in-between places and routes he’s walked hundreds of times. These final hours he has, cut to pieces and shuffled around. The gaps left behind. The creak of the door to the laundry room, hung out of balance in its frame, the row of industrial-style washers and dryers and heavy metal shelving. The background scent of dryer lint and sharp ever-green smell of burning. 

A thin layer of dust rises from the shelves. He watches it turn to a fine white mist in the shine of the fluorescents. Hears something like waves behind him. But he doesn’t turn. 

Time stretches again, then condenses back down. He’s got his back to one of the dryers, the weight of his body pressed against it. His hands hang loose at his sides. The dryer is running behind him. He catches a few of his fingers still moving.

Cas stands in the doorway, one hand resting on the handle, silhouetted by the flicker of orange-yellow lights from the hallway, half in and half out of the room. 

Are you alright?

Dean can’t tell if Cas has actually said it, or if it’s just what he’s going to say.

He thinks, I need you , but he can’t tell if he speaks either.

After Cas had lost his wings. Before the bunker, when they were still on the road. Dean had spent so long memorizing it he doesn’t think he’ll ever forget what it was like, sitting side by side in laundromats and the cab of the Impala. Breathing deep and then holding his breath. Convinced that it was going to kill him, having known the rough, desperate undersides of him. This storm he held at the back of his mouth, wanting.

And then Cas had changed. And Dean had changed. And he’d remember. 

Waking from a nightmare to Cas on his bed, what were you dreaming about? The backseat of the Impala, its windows fogged, buckle digging into the small of his back. 

He’d remember the angry, frantic lock of their bodies, and then the brief, stolen moment of the aftermath. Cas’ chest pressed to the crest of Dean’s spine, the smell of his sweat and the feel of his breath against the back of Dean’s neck. 

He’d remember and Cas would be in front of him, running his finger down the sticky laminate of a daily special’s menu. And there would be a moment where he’d feel something flutter in the pit of his stomach, where the storm would almost burst out of his chest, looking at Cas’ hands and wondering how, if they touched him now, they might be gentle. 

And then he’d make himself forget again. 

Seven years.  

Standing beneath sterile, late-night fluorescents in front of fleets of empty washing machines, pressing his face into the collar of Cas’ trench coat.

Dean opens his mouth. He says, “I want—”  

Cas crosses the room to kneel in front of him, yanking at the button of his fly, tugging at the zipper to shove his hands inside the waistband of his jeans. Brutal. Ruthless. Yielding. Reverent. The heat of his mouth. The sound caught in the back of Dean’s throat. His hand caught in Cas’ hair. Cas pulling him forward, hauling at the backs of his thighs, the meat of his ass. 

The bruises that had blossomed there, Cas taking him apart in the rough, black night. Dean on his back, his neck arched. Scratchy motel sheets and shadows as the corners of his eyes. Cas pinning him down without needing to breathe. The way his mouth would still be raw, afterwards, as he’d pulled himself back into his button-down. The crumpled disregard of the trench-coat and tie, discarded vestments re-adorned. His dark eyes and red mouth. The blue-dark sharpness of his eyes, edge of his desire tempered just enough to remember he was holy.

Watching Dean from across the room.

Dean. Standing just inches away from him, his eyes fluttering down, mouthing off about personal space. The heat of Cas’ gaze as it fixed upon him. The rough, angry, desperate hope so bright in his chest he could taste it. Salt on the back of his tongue. Ozone. 

Then, after. 

For seven years. Cas took him apart. He put him back together. And he had been gentle. And he had been kind. He’d smelled like a storm in a laundromat. And Dean had wanted. And it had felt like a memory.

After. Before. After. Now. 

Dean’s hips trapped against the dryer. The rough shake and tumble of the machine at his back. Cas kneeling before him, desire unconcealed. Running his hands over the backs of Dean’s thighs. Blue-white light beginning to spark behind his eyelids. More and more a man. Less a God.

Dean is in a barn. He’s in the back of the Impala. He’s realizing that they may not have time for this to become a memory. 

He’s in a forest, wet dew beading across his skin. Then he’s back under Cas’ hands, Cas mouth on him, a sound building at the base of his throat. The gathering rumble of building thunder, escaping his throat in a low, deep groan. A man on his knees. 

Dean thinking— we’re running out of time. Clutching at the dryer at his back, tangling his fingers in Cas’ hair. Fighting to keep himself held together, instead of splitting apart at the seams.

And if this is it. Their home stretch. The end of their line. If this is all the time they have—he grips Cas’ face, cradles it in his hands, runs his fingers over his scalp. Fists his hands in his hair. 

If this is it. Furtive and messy in their laundry room, with the dryer going at his back, the frantic rhythm of it knocking at the row of bottles on the shelf above it. If it smells the same way it always had—their detergent and Cas’ sweat, crushing his mouth to the collar of the trench coat, empty, stark linoleum and stale cigarette smoke; Cas in the close heat of the passenger seat—quarters spread out across a dozen washing machines, sunrise bleeding out across the sky—Dean alone beneath the red glow of a neon open sign. Standing in the exact center of the dead of night, the exact center of the earth, the last man alive, his mouth to the collar of Cas’ coat, breathing in. 

Dean’s—if this is the last time. If this is it. 

He feels his hand tighten in Cas’ hair.

And then he's grabbing at the back of Cas’ collar, dragging at his shirt, hauling him up by the shoulders. He feels the bump and sway of the dryer behind him. The starchy fabric of Cas’ button down beneath his hands. A million highways recede from the corners of his eyes. He drags Cas to his feet and Cas surges to meet him, his hands slide roughly behind Dean’s thighs, lifting him up on top of the dryer, shoving his legs apart. 

Something crashes down from the shelf behind them. Cas’ arm is tight around Dean’s waist, pulling him in close against him. 

Palm out, voice rough, he says, “Spit.”

There is a fire burning hot in Dean’s chest. Smoke caught in the back of his throat. His eyes are on Cas’ mouth, red and wild, open on a short inhale. Breathing out. He hollows his cheeks, his tongue working against the back of his teeth, watching Cas watch him. The dark flicker of his hooded eyes. 

He bends his head forward and spits into Cas’ palm. 

Cas drops his hand between them, fisting it around Dean’s dick. He drops his head to Dean’s shoulder, a low, beseeching groan pressed into the curve of his neck. His hot, open mouth and ragged breath. Saying, Dean , and then his name again in another language. Something strange and guttural on his tongue, like the lungs of this body were not built around this sound. Cas drawing it up from his own chest. Dean.  

His skin is hot under Dean’s hands. The clumsy groove of his belt as Dean tugs it loose, the cracked ridge of scar tissue beneath Dean’s fingers, cutting through the coarse hair on Cas’ stomach, spreading over his pelvis and up across his chest. Jagged and still black in places. Carved into him. Dean’s hand fit to the curve of his hip. His heart wild in his throat. Peeling Cas’ shirt up over his stomach to find his flesh black and cracking, and Dean standing over him. Remembering. How deep the cut had been. Covering Cas’ fatal stomach wound, stepping away without meeting his gaze, telling him, I've had worse. Cas’ eyes, moving between Mary to find Dean, knowing you—

Cas’ scars. His bruises. His blood on Dean’s hands. The fine slice of an angel blade left along the barrel of his ribs. An old brand—a banishing sigil—stamped across his abdomen with a line cut through the middle. The branching network of raised veins across his chest plate—a spell that had taken but hadn’t quite stuck. The tender skin carefully re-grown along his collar bone. Holy oil set on fire. Dean’s necklace, hung out of sight beneath the collar of his shirt. 

Cas groans again, his hand tight and slick with Dean's spit. 

Dean is close, just at the edge. His eyes fluttered shut and head tipped back, his hands mapping the scars across Cas’ skin, throat working—and he feels the shift. The subtle hitch and catch of Cas’ breathing, the hum of static building in the room. The fluorescent bulbs above their heads flicker with the rhythm of Cas’ hand as a loose fan of fabric softener sheets begin to shift and rise into the air. Dean sees a static charge spark between them. He feels the hair stand up across his arms. 

“ Dean ,” Cas rasps. The lights have flashed once above their heads, and they do it again. Cas twists his wrist and Dean bites the sound he makes off at the base. The darkness is lasting longer now, briefly interrupted by the pulse of flaring filaments.

“ Dean, I— ” Cas says again. His voice is a scorch across the earth. A lightning strike. It’s been the best part of my life, knowing you, I—

Dean knows. He knows when you say this. Right at the end.

He clamps a hand over Cas’ mouth. Electricity crackles above and all around them. 

“Quiet,” he rasps, “we’ve gotta, ah , we’ve gotta be—”

Cas groans again. He bites at Dean’s palm, a sharp shock of clear, white pain. Teeth breaking skin. A relief of electric blue sparks.

One of the fluorescents blows out messy above their heads, shatter of glass falling to the concrete floor. Dean throws his head back. He sees the lights across the backs of his eyelids. 

Before. Now. After. Now.

After.

Cas’ breath, hot along the calluses of Dean's palm. His mouth still open. He raises his eyes to Dean's face, and Dean can see his own youth there, looking back at him. 

His soft, untested skin. The blond tips of his eyelashes.

Drawing back a blunt fist, the knife plunged deep into Cas’ chest. A hard laugh and thanks for that. Sparks falling. 

His hand clapped on Cas’ shoulder, Cas’ tie half-undone around his neck and the stars spilling out above their heads across the wide, black sky, I haven’t laughed like that in—I prayed to you Cas, every night. 

And then he sees something else.

The half-dreamt ideas of another ten or thirty years together. A house somewhere. A room with windows. Looking back at the hardened, brutal present saying, remember when—thank god we didn’t—I was so sure we weren't going to—

Cas’ hair going gray to silver. His head resting against his pillow, blinking his eyes open. Waking up and falling asleep. Over and over, again and again. Looking across at Dean. Dean looking back at him. 

His own face reflected there, skin getting soft again. His scars fading. 

This can’t be the moment where they say it. This can’t be the end. 

The lights overhead settle and dim. The dryer sheets flutter to the floor.

At length, Cas asks, “Will the spell wear off? Is it permanent?” 

“I don’t know,” Dean says. He eases himself off of the dryer. A stiff ache starting in the low middle of his back. 

There’s a light in Cas’ eyes, a softness. “Sam’s worried about you.”

Dean does up his belt, “Sam's gonna put this down on his resume as community service,” he bitches, without meeting Cas’ eyes, “just watch.”

Cas hooks a finger through Dean’s belt loop, coaxing him closer. Voice still a little rough in the back of his throat, he asks, “So what am I doing?” 

Salt in the air. 

“Har har.”

Cas’ mouth softens, and then the smile fades. “So he’s here for…”

John.

Dean sighs, the bitter-sharp ache of his lungs deflating. He stops adjusting his clothes. 

“Maybe a few days?” The dryer shifts over to its next setting. Its cycle slowing, “Maybe a while?” Cas is looking at him, eyes blue-gray and serious. Dean wipes a hand over the bottom of his face, “You better call Jody, ask her if Jack can stay with her longer.”

Cas says, “I already did.”

“Okay,” Dean tells him. He braces a hand on top of the dryer, easing some of the weight off of his knees, “Okay cool. Just in case we—”

The door handle turns. 

And then it opens.

John is there, standing in the doorway, “Smells like you blew a fuse in here.” 

Dean’s hand slips. 

Cas says, “I’ll let you finish.”

He passes John in the doorway and for a second they are stood shoulder to shoulder. Cas’ cheeks are still slightly flushed, his eyes bright, and it only adds to the illusion that he is alive and John isn’t.  

John looks like he notices too, and doesn’t like it. 

And then it’s just them. Dean and his dad. Standing together in the laundry room, the low rumble of the machines and a basket of half folded clothes between them. 

It’s instinct that keeps Dean’s hands busy.

John looks around, taking in the neat lines of stain removers, fabric softeners, and detergent. The scattered pile of dryer sheets and faint shimmer of glass. The little table in the corner with its stack of empty laundry baskets and the labeled hampers beside it. Sam. Jack. Mary. Cas. Dean. The fuse box. 

He says, “I’m sure your mom appreciates the help.”

Dean looks down at what he’s folding—a blood-stained button down. It might be Mary’s. Or it might be his. It could be both of theirs. Either. His brain clicks for a second, caught like a record with a scratch. 

“Uh,” he says, “well she hates the laundromat so…”

John’s face is considering. He says, without his expression changing, “I wanted you to have a family.”

The statement hangs in the air like the spent electricity between them. Dean can feel the words crackle. He hunches further over the laundry basket.

“I—” Christ, what is he supposed to say? “I have—” 

John says, “It can’t be just the two of you. You and Sam in this empty bunker. I wanted something more for you, Dean.” 

And there’s a line to it, a flatness. Blunt enough that it can’t cut cleanly through him. It leaves a wavering line of red behind, a faint halo in the corner of his vision.  

John says, “You need more than this.” 

Dean says, “What I've got is—” and then he swallows because, fuck it. “It isn’t just the two of us. I’ve got a family.” He stops again. Draws in a shaky breath, “‘Cause Mom is here and—” and he makes himself say it, “Jack and… Cas.”

“Right,” John says, and his voice is still flat. A knife at Dean’s throat. His hands steady, “The angel and his son.”

Dean keeps his eyes on the laundry, his hands moving. There’s a faint, static tingle starting up on either side of his temples, and he doesn’t think it’s Michael that’s making his head pound like that. But he’s already started, so he keeps going. Movements steady, voice even. 

“We’ve got other people too. A couple hunters and their kids, people we’ve saved. Folks who saved us.” 

John says, “Claire.”

Even. Like a fact he’s checking. 

And Dean doesn’t flinch. He does not flinch. He keeps his head bent. “Cas’ kid.” 

John raises an eyebrow at this and Dean can tell that it's taken him off guard.

Dean clears his throat. “Foster. But she’s living up with friends of ours in Sioux Falls. Or I guess—hunting with Mom sometimes? She aged out of the system.” 

John says, “Jack?” 

Dean says, “Adopted.” 

He doesn’t look at his father when he says it, but he doesn’t not look at him either. Because John Winchester isn’t stupid. It was his pride and temper that had made him a mediocre hunter. It was this particular type of sharp, persistent curiosity that had kept them alive. He’d always been smart enough that they could afford to go hungry. 

John leans back against the washing machine, right in the spot that Cas had been standing. Dean can’t tell if he’s still holding the knife. “No heavenly custody battle on that one?”

Dean keeps his eyes lowered without being averted. He keeps his hands steady. “Found him on a case. A few years back. He’s still adjusting.”

“Mary?” 

“She’s adjusting too.” 

John’s lips thin at that, Dean can tell that he can tell that he’s ducking the question. 

“They’re close.”

“Uh,” Dean says, “Yeah. Like Sam said, we all got separated on a hunt once, and Mom and Jack ended up stuck together. Took us a couple of months to get them back. They’re. I mean I think Jack’s a little obsessed with her. And you know Mom—she doesn’t really have anyone else who understands what—” and then he catches himself. Finishes, “I don’t think she has a lot of friends.” 

And it works because it’s true. 

Mary and Jack might be close because they both know what it’s like to wake up in a world that doesn’t belong to them. 

Claire might hunt with Mary regularly. 

Mary might not have a lot of friends. 

He doesn’t know. 

He turns away, back towards the dryer. He feels John take a step towards him in the close space. Dean glances up, the blade is back. A knife at his throat. 

“Son,” there’s a hand heavy on his shoulder. John’s dark eyes—Sam’s eyes—are serious, and his voice is low, “we have to talk about this.”

Dean’s breath catches in his throat. His pulse stops. 

John says, “We both know I can’t stay here.” 

“What?” 

“I have to go back. I have to find the thing that killed your mother. 

Dean blinks, staring into his face, searching. “Mom’s right here Dad, she’s fine.”

John is shaking his head, “If I don’t go back then we never know what happened.”

Dean puts down the socks he’s holding. He looks at his father, standing beneath the fluorescents, shadows under his eyes. “We know what happened,” he says quietly, “it was a demon. Mary, she—” and then he stops. The deal, Azazel, the demon blood. Sam. 

“A demon…” John repeats, slow. 

“Yeah, Dad. You figure it out.”

John is quiet for a second. Dean, waiting. Watching for the moment when it hits him. 

John says, “So if I disappear from 2003 then her case never gets solved.” And what he means is, I never get to kill it.

Something shutters between them. The knife driving home. 

Mary. His quest. Another highway. Another town. Knowing no one, never being known. Because why should that be any fucking different, now? What’s Dean expecting to have changed? 

Nothing. 

“Dad,” he says, “just stay. Just for a little while.”

John is frowning. Unconvinced. Unimpressed.

Dean clears his throat. He starts folding the socks again. Makes his voice hard, his tone uncaring. “If it really is a time paradox then it doesn’t matter when we send you back. You’ll end up in the same spot anyways. We can wait.”

“Hmm.” John says, and nothing else. 

Dean watches him turn and open the door. 

He says again, “I’ve got a family.”

John says, hand on the doorknob, “You’ve got time.”

“So, breakfast?”

Sam huffs out an exasperated breath, not looking up from his notebook. 

“Dude, you were gone for like an hour, we already ate.”

Dean takes the seat across from him, easing himself down as his muscles spasms. So, sex on the washing machine, bad for his lower back. Noted. 

“Yeah well, you ever done laundry?”

“Once at Stanford,” Sam shoots back, “didn’t care for it.” He lowers his voice, “Listen, I uh. I called Rowena.”

Dean twists in his chair a little, trying to work out some of the tension. 

“Didn’t you talk to her yesterday? I thought you said she didn't have anything.”

Sam looks down at his notebook. He sucks his tongue back against his teeth with a soft clicking noise. “She didn’t. Yesterday. Today was, uh. Personal.”

Dean's head snaps around. There's a red flush creeping up the back of Sam’s neck all the way to his ears. He looks increasingly miserable. A grin starts to spread itself across Dean's face.

“Hold up,” he says, “hang on—I thought you were seeing Eileen.”

Sam hunkers further down over his notebook. “I uh. I am seeing Eileen.”

Dean leans back in his chair, indignant, “Well does Rowena know that?”

Miserably Sam says, “Yes.”

“ Does Eileen? ” 

Sam stares at the ceiling for a beat. “How about we stop talking about this?”

“Ha!” Dean crows. He makes a swipe for the journal, but Sam pulls it out of reach. “Better not let Dad find out you’re dating a witch!”

“That’s not all,” Sam grumbles. 

Dean catches the look. “What?” 

“Nothing we don’t already know, but. She said it’s not good, for both timelines to exist like this. Throws off the balance. Cosmically, or whatever.”

“Well excuse me,” says Dean, making a show out of raising his hands, “not all of us can be one of the Sanderson sisters.”

Sam chuckles. “I think she really would hex you if she heard you call her that.” Dean opens his mouth, but Sam holds up a hand, “I know she didn’t have anything for us last time. But,” he twists around, looking over his shoulder, then says, “there might be something.”

“What?”

Sam looks nervous, “Okay don’t be mad…”

“What,” Dean asks, hypocritically, “You fuck all over the bunker or something?”

Sam rolls his eyes, “We did not fuck all over the bunker,” he says. Then he looks down. “Um. She is teaching me witchcraft, though.”

“Huh,” Dean says. He leans back in his chair.

Sam looks up at him, imploring. “Don’t be mad,” he says again. 

Dean considers him. “So,” he says slowly. Sam winces a little, hunching further down in his seat. “Do you know your star sign? Can you read my tarot cards?” 

Sam’s eyes snap from imploring back to annoyed. “You’re such a dick,” he grumbles, shoulders relaxing. 

“Hang on, wait,” Dean tells him, with barely concealed glee, “Wait wait wait—if you’re Willow then does that make me Buffy? And then Cas would be, uh…”

“Angel,” Sam finishes, like he’s some kind of idiot, and then they both pretend he hasn’t said it.  

“So,” Dean clears his throat, “what have you and your other girlfriend been working on?”

Sam seizes on it, “Right,” he says, “Yeah. Okay, so we started on some anti-possession stuff that last time Lucifer got out of the cage—after he,” and then he breathes in, sharp. Which is, huh. “Killed her. Rowena.” 

Dean nods, something turning over and over in the back of his head.

“Right,” Sam says again, “Okay. Well obviously there’s already a lot of stuff like this out there, anti-possession sigils, but it’s for demons, mostly. Other monsters. There’s almost nothing for angels, because of the whole consent thing, and definitely nothing for arch angels. So nothing for—”

Dean’s heart is beating suddenly, loud. 

“Lucifer.” Michael. 

“Right,” Sam says. He looks up, towards the ceiling, then back down at Dean.

Dean says, “There’s a catch.”

“The spell we worked out, the sigil. It isn’t meant to be used by someone who’s already being possessed. I’ve asked but—”

“If it’s a risk I say we take it.”

Sam rolls his eyes, “Okay, very macho, you win at masculinity, but the thing is, if it fails— best case, it fucks you up real, real bad. Worst case, it kills you, and Michael gets free.”

Dean sits back in his chair, exasperated. “Well then what fucking good is it?”

Sam rolls his eyes, “I literally cannot stress how much we were not working with this specific situation in mind.”

“It works though, for Lucifer?”

Sam is staring again at the ceiling, “We don’t know,” he admits, “there hasn’t been a—look, forget it, okay? That’s not what this is—Rowena doesn’t have anything for Michael. But I have asked her if she would be able to modify the original spell so it can do something different. Instead of keeping an angel out. See if it might work for keeping one in. Something to act as fortification, to make it harder for him to get to you. It won’t last forever, but she says she’ll try. I think she can do it.”

Dean blows out a breath. “Okay,” he says, “okay. That’s good, right?”

Sam shrugs, line of tension behind his eyes. “It’s something.”

Dean knocks on the table between them, “Right,” he says, “okay. I’ll keep looking.”

Sam says, “I do have another lead.”

“Man,” Dean tells him, “you are really burying those today.”

Sam says, “I found Donatello. The one from this timeline.”

All the humor drops out of him. Dean leans forward again, elbows on the table. “Fuck, good call. Okay, what’s he thinking?”

“Literally nothing,” Sam says, “didn’t have a fucking clue what I was talking about. Think he might have tried to call the cops after I hung up.”

“Okay, well— ”

“So I found Kevin.”

Dean’s blood runs suddenly cold. Kevin slumped against the wall of the bunker. Eyes burnt from their sockets. “What?”

“In the phone book.” 

“You found Kevin Tran, prophet of the fucking lord, in the phone book?” 

“No man, I found his mom in the phone book. Then I ran both their names. I guess Kevin moved back in with her after Harvard. It looks like he's working for the government or something.”

Dean’s voice feels quiet in his chest. “What did he say?” 

Sam pulls his phone out of his pocket. “Let’s find out.”

The line rings.

And then Kevin Tran, prophet of the fucking Lord, honor’s student and Harvard graduate, answers. “Dean?” He says, “Oh thank god. Something’s happened, I’ve been—” then he stops. There’s a beat of silence. Then, in an entirely different voice, Kevin asks, “You’re them, aren’t you? The other ones, from the other timeline.” 

“Uh, yeah,” Dean says, “Hi… Kevin.”

“ Christ, ” Kevin swears, “You should not be fucking calling me! We’ve gotta keep the timelines as separate as we can until we figure this out,” there’s a crackly, static kind of rustle from the other end of the phone line, and then Kevin’s voice comes on a little clearer, “Bobby and I have been—”

“Bobby’s alive?” 

Silence. 

“You cannot fucking tell me this stuff. I can’t learn too much about your lives, and you can’t learn too much about mine, otherwise—Christ. Didn’t I tell you this already?” 

Dean exchanges a look with Sam. “We haven’t called you.”

Kevin does the auditory equivalent of rolling his eyes. “Not me me. Other me. Kevin Prime or whatever.” They’re silent, exchanging looks. Then Kevin says, “Oh.” He takes in a breath. “Okay. Um.” To his credit, he rallies, barreling into the next sentence like he isn’t giving himself too much time to think about it all.

“Point is, we already know each other. I know you in this timeline. You know… Dead Me. So whatever we learn about each other will contradict our realities which could destabilize the timeline—our respective timelines, theoretically.”

Kevin’s voice gets quiet again, like he’s holding the phone away from his mouth, “Shit, this is gonna be harder than I thought. Where are you?”

“The bunker.”

“Huh. Still?” 

“Yeah. What do you mean, still?”

“Nevermind, nevermind. Just. Stay there, okay? The other you’s are—well, they aren’t in Kansas. So that should be fine. I don’t think you should get too close to each other.”

There’s a shuffling sound, and when Kevin comes back on. His voice is clearer, “You know what? Actually have Carlos—” and then he stops. 

Dean says, “Who's Carlos?”

“Uh,” Kevin says, and then to himself, “Shit, this is bad,” back to Dean, “it’s not important.”

Dean, frustrated. “It must be pretty important if you think he lives with us.”

It seems suddenly very serious to him that he gets this questions answered. 

There’s a pause, then Kevin confirms, a little softer this time. “He doesn’t live with you?”

“Nah man, it's just me, Sam, Jack and Cas.”

“Cas…?” Another pause then. “Tiel. Castiel.”

Dean rolls his eyes, “Yeah, him.”

Dead silence. Then,

“THE FUCKING ANGEL????” 

Dean has to hold the phone away from his face. 

Kevin is back. 

“Christ,” he says, “okay okay—lemme just—”

Dean has an idea, suddenly. A question. 

He struggles to think of how to phrase it, without giving too much away. “Can you run a name for us? Jack Kline.”

A pause. Faint click of a keyboard. Kevin comes back on the line. 

“Nope,” he says, “Nada.”

Sam and Dean exchange a look.

“Okay,” Dean scrubs a hand back through his hair “Uh. Try Kelly. Kelly Kline.”

More typing.  

“Okay yeah, I found her. She’s a… republican senator out of DC. Got elected on a pretty intense pro-life platform, yikes.”

“She married? Kids?”

“Yup. Husband’s name is Mark, and they’ve got twin girls. Ashleigh and Hannah. That first one's spelled with a gh, not a y, by the way.” A pause, “Does, uh. Kelly live with you?”

Dean scowls. “ No ,” He says. Sam is staring past his head at the opposite wall, tongue between his teeth. Dean glaces over at him. “Okay, listen, Kevin—”

Sam cuts in, “Do you still have the Angel tablet?”

“The what?”

“The…” Sam looks to Dean, who does a little what? face at him, “Uh. Angel… tablet.” 

Silence. 

“You don’t know what that is, do you?”

“ No ,” says Kevin, “ and I do not fucking want to. Just—look. Try not to fuck anything up, okay? I’m gonna figure this out. Hit me up if you find anything, but also like, don’t.”

The line goes dead. Dean’s phone screen times out and turns off. They sit in silence for a minute, staring at it. 

“Okay,” Sam claps his hands “So that’s our move, right? Try to find the Angel Tablet in this timeline. See if we can use it on Michael?”

There’s a faint tingling at the base of Dean’s skull, an electric pulse on either side of his temples. He shuts his eyes for a second, breathing deep, and when he opens them again Sam is still watching him, expectant. “Look,” he says slowly, “I’m not arguing, okay? It’s just—how? How are we supposed to find it if we can’t talk to anyone who might know us already? We don’t even—” He stops, collecting himself.

Sam barrels forward, his dark eyes sharp. “You can’t just give up. This is the first real lead we’ve had since—” And then he stops too. John Winchester. Sam sighs. He knocks his fingers against the top of the table, tapping out a short, distracted rhythm. “I know it feels like a long shot, but personally I’m not cool with just waiting for Dad to drive you crazy. We’ve gotta try something. We’re trying this.”

“Fine.” Dean tells him. His head aches. Sam nods decisively, and then his eyes shift back over to the computer screen, his frown deepening. “Why are you making that face?”

Sam sighs again. He types a few characters into the search bar, and then back-spaces until it’s clear. “I just… Kevin. Bobby.” Alive. “What happened here that stopped them both from dying? What happened to reverse fucking climate change I mean, seriously , why does Dad disappearing from 2003 make this much of a difference? What about him is so important that—”

Dean says, “It changes us, dude.” Sam looks over at him. “How many times have we saved the world, right? Or tried to. I don’t know… maybe in this timeline we just do it different. Better. And each time we do it different or better, it makes the next time not so bad.”

“That’s… plausible,” Sam says. He looks dubious. 

“What?”

Sam shrugs. “I just don’t think Dad disappearing in 2003 changes that much for me. I mean, if anything there’s less closure, right? If the last time I see him we’re fighting about me leaving for school. And then if he doesn’t go missing in 2005, then do you even come to Stanford to get me?”

“I don’t know,” Dean says. He looks away. “Maybe I come get you in 2003. Or maybe we re-connect some other way.”

“It doesn’t make—”

Dean says, “It changes me.”

Sam softens. They sit in a careful silence neither of them seems to know how to break. 

Then Sam says, “You asked about Jack?”

“Yeah,” Dean says, gruff.

“Why?”

“You heard how he talked about Cas— didn’t really sound like the paternal type. It got me thinking. If Jack was never born, does that mean Lucifer never got out of the cage?”

Sam whispers, “ Son of a bitch .”

“So,” Dean continues, “That’s at least one apocalypse averted, right? And then if—”

“Amara,” Sam says, “We let Lucifer out of the cage to fight Amara.”

“And we needed to fight Amara because I took the Mark of Cain so we could beat Abaddon. And Abaddon—”

“Followed Henry Winchester here from the past.”

“Right,” Dean says. “So what if. What if, in this timeline, we figure out a different way to beat her? Then I don't take the Mark, we never have to go up against Cain. Amara is never released. That's at least another two Apocalypses we never have to try to stop. Who knows how many else.”

“You think we broke the cycle somewhere?” 

“God I hope so,” Dean tells him, “saved the world and it stayed saved? That’s what we’re always trying to do. What if here we pulled it off?”

Sam thinks for a minute. Then he says, “Okay, yeah. Let’s try to find the Angel Tablet. See what it might tell us about Michael.” He frowns. “Do you think Cas might have any idea where it is?”

“How should I know?” Dean tells him. 

Sam rolls his eyes, “I guess you gotta fucking ask him.” He stands to stretch, mind clearly moving on their next step already. Over his shoulder he says, “We tell Kevin about Dad after we track it down.”

“Yeah,” Dean says, “After.”

Dean finds John in the library later that night. He hesitates in the doorway, uncertain of what John’s mood will be. 

He stands just the way he had with Mary, half a step outside the door. At an angle where he can see without being seen. 

John’s face is shrouded in darkness, the room illuminated only by the light cast off from the hallway. Dean puts together the outline of things. The reflection off the bottle in John’s hand, and the one off the glass picture frame in his lap. 

Dean can’t make out the photo. 

“Dad?” 

John brings the bottle to his mouth. He swallows inelegantly. Light reflects off the sheen of liquor as it runs down his chin. 

“Dean.”

Dean pulls the door open further. He crosses the threshold. He steps out of the light. 

The room comes into focus as his eyes adjust. Books left stacked in haphazard piles across side-tables and surfaces. Some with sticky notes or old recites marking off important passages. Sam’s forgotten coffee mug, sitting cold and half empty on the floor beside one of the armchairs. 

John.

Dean takes another step forward. He can see the picture now too. Not clearly, but enough to know which one it is; a staged photo of the men of letters from 1957, with Henry Winchester in the middle. 

That kind of drunk. 

John strangles the bottle, he takes another swig. Voice only slightly slurred as he says, “You’re doing right by that boy, raising him up. Not letting him get chewed up by,” he gestures expansively at the books surrounding them, “this.”

Philosophical, then. 

Dean nods, slow. He takes a careful step closer into the room. 

He doesn’t watch John’s eyes, he watches his hands. Wide and wrapped around the arm of the chair, the neck of the bottle. 

When he was a kid, Dean remembers thinking his dad’s hands had got to be just about the biggest in the world. Square palms, rough knuckles. The way the span of them felt like they could cradle the whole world, grip the sky in his fist and take it down. 

Abruptly, John says, “What was he like?” 

His eyes come up from the photo, tracking the men of letters symbol carved across the room. Above the doorway and the high, arched ceiling. Stamped on the covers of books and across their spines. Half-remembered ghost from him childhood, given bones. A question without an answer.

Once, on a bad hunt, a bad drunk when Dean was about eleven or twelve, John had tipped over from sullen to angry to something else. Unexpected, unfamiliar. His voice no longer hard but instead purpled at the edges, a bruise coming through the darkness, and he’d said something about the size of his own father's hands; biggest he'd ever seen. 

And Dean had stared at John’s hands where they were spread wide on the steering wheel, just like he does now. His broad, split fingers thick with callouses. 

He thought they might be giants, these men who came before him. The hands of his grandfather shrinking improbably down to his own. Child-sized and still clumsy on the grip of a shotgun. 

John had told him once, years later, that he’d found a pair of his father’s shoes after he vanished. Putting them on to find they were at least two sizes too big. Off-handed and bad-tempered, a hard-edged joke said in passing that Dean had caught and held on to, turning over and over in the semi-dark of their motel room. 

And he’d thought about how his father, tallest man he knew, roughest hands, had had a giant for a father too. And it had thrown him. Off kilter. The brute and strength of these men, watered down through generations. Their impossible size dwindling into his awkward, lanky shoulders. His gangly limbs and wide set eyes. Mary’s eyes. The blond tips of his full lashes and the cupid’s bow of his mouth. The slender too-smooth edges of him. 

But then Sam had grown into a brick wall, and Dean’s hands had gotten plenty big anyways.

Not the same way that John’s had, but big enough. 

No one would think he had come from giants, but maybe it was better this way. To be man-sized. His knuckles split, his hands scarred, weathered skin on his palms, the blue snaking vein across the backs of them. Fingers still strangely elegant somehow, despite it all. The neat square of his short nails. That empty space on his ring finger where he keeps thinking, maybe.

How had he forgotten this? This thing he was supposed to grow into. Thin slices of their family history parsed sparsely out over a decade, and then the missed-stepped gut-lurch of meeting Henry Winchester and finding him. Smaller than he had expected.

He hadn’t been a giant. Maybe none of them were. 

Maybe John was the last breath of a dying breed, the great Winchester bloodline extinguished right when it had got to Dean.

Maybe it was better to be man-sized. 

What was Henry Winchester like?

Dean says, “He wasn’t here for very long.”

John nods, miles away, “That kid, Jack.”

Jack’s hands. Soft, smooth. Still a little child-like even though he never got to be one. Just about half a size shorter than Dean’s. Quick. Funny. Kind. 

“You teaching him how to handle himself?” 

And Dean, as if he’s ever known the trick to that, answers, “Yes Sir.”

“Well,” John says, voice slurred. He looks back down at the picture in his lap. At his father the giant. Stood shoulder to shoulder and equal height with the men around him. A giant and a man and a giant again. Painted over and pieced together from disjointed years of memory. He says bitterly, “that’s something.”

He looks up at Dean, squinting against the light coming in from the hallway. “Do I die in 2003? Do I stay gone?”

“No,” Dean tells him point blank, hollow. 

John nods like he’s heard but he hasn’t. He goes back to looking at the photo. 

Dean leaves. 

Sam has left the research laptop out in the War Room. It’s easy to find. Marked by a towering stack of books and fleet of empty coffee cups. 

Do I die in 2003? Do I stay gone?

Heart pounding, Dean crosses over to the computer and hurriedly opens a new window. He has to wait a second for everything to load, and then he’s clicking over to the search history, and scrolling down to his own Instagram profile. Or. Well, not his, but. The page loads in increments, but it’s still something of a jumpscare once it does. He averts his eyes from the main feed, instead clicking over to the list of accounts he (the other one) follows. 

It isn’t a huge number, but it’s higher than he would have thought. A couple hundred accounts, many of them built the same way his is, without pictures of faces or any identifying details of vehicles. He scrolls up and down distractedly at first, fingers of his free hand tapping on the table. Honestly, this guy’s account—Carlos’—could be any one of these faceless profiles. But. He’s kind of hoping—he’d like to see a face. 

He finds the right one almost by accident. At first he finds Sam’s—which, okay. Gotta circle back to that. And then he. There’s a picture of Dean a few rows down on the grid. Not his face but, it’s definitely him. And beside him, someone else standing close with their hand on his elbow. 

He clicks on the tag, and then he’s looking at the profile of a dark haired, brown-eyed man in a gray denim jacket and black carharts. His profile has the initials C.W. in the bio line, and also there’s just. Something about him. Dean looks closer. The slightly weak jaw, the dark eyes. The way his mouth quirks up at the corners, like he’s just heard something funny and is trying not to laugh. The silver starting to show in his beard.

There’s a tattoo peeking over the collar of his shirt, lettering of some kind that could be Latin, and another across his hand that’s definitely an anti-possession sigil. Something else spelled out across his knuckles, but Dean can only see the a and the n .

He’s got a spiked, silver stud pierced through the bridge of his nose, and glasses that he must wear for driving or for reading, because they’re in some shots but not in others. His clothes are plain and look lived in. Mostly blacks and grays with conspicuous tears carefully mended. Practical. He’s got a line of studs down one of his earlobes. Another tattoo on his wrist.

Sometimes his nails are painted. Sometimes his sleeves are rolled up, sometimes his jacket stripped off. There’s more tattoos. A couple scars down his forearms. A few strands of silver shot through his hair in the right light. The kind of build you get from labor more than exercise. He’s almost always smiling. 

Dean scrolls down further. He sees a shot of the Grand Canyon. A red wood forest at sunrise. A cheap motel. And then there’s. Then he’s standing beside Carlos with his arm slung around his shoulders, face turned just far enough from the camera to not be quite visible, pressing a kiss into his neck. Carlos has a smear of something dark across his forehead, and Dean’s got what’s either mud or blood in his hair, and what he’s pretty sure is an axe handle in his hand. The picture quality is a little grainy, caught in the beam of a flash-light coming from somewhere off camera. Carlos’ got the light in his eyes, and Dean’s got it—

It hits him like a truck. Like a blow to the head. There’s a silver band on his finger, glinting in the light. And Carlos has—Neither of Carlos’ hands are in frame.  

He scrolls down further. 

And then it’s— 

Carlos in a suit, clean-shaven, with his dark hair swept gracefully back. The shine of light through a champagne glass. His own silhouette in front of a mirror, body blocking the reflection of his face. Fireworks set off in a dark field. Sam and Bobby in matching suits, the scrapyard in the background lit by dozens of strands of fairy lights and hanging lanterns. A table laden with homemade dishes. A square plastic bin labeled “coat check,” piled high with miscellaneous weapons. A truly hideous three-tiered cake. A ring. 

And Carlos is. Dean sits back in his chair. There’s a breath caught in his chest that he can’t quite catch. That means that Carlos isn’t his boyfriend. The library echoes silent all around him. Dean wets his lips. Very quietly, he tries the word husband out on his tongue. He remembers Kevin saying, he doesn’t live with you?

He scrolls down further. A couple more wedding photos. Some guests he doesn’t recognize, and then—There’s Jo, laughing in a suit the same cut as Sam’s, arm wrapped around the waist of Bela Talbot. Bela’s wearing an elegant sheath dress and a deep, blood red lipstick. Jo’s got the same shade of red on her bottom lip only, and a little smudged across her cheek. She’s grinning into the camera like she knows whoever’s behind it. She’s got laugh lines. 

Dean can’t breathe. He can’t keep looking. He scrolls back up. The page buffers for a second, and then a new photo appears on the grid. A blurry shot of a socked foot sticking out from the edge of a blanket, TV in the background paused on opening credits. It's captioned, Movie Night , and time stamped a couple minutes ago. 

Dean shuts the laptop. 

Cas is in their bedroom, reading. Propped up against the headboard. 

Dean comes in and sits on the bed beside him. Cas closes the book. He reaches out and rests a hand on his knee. 

Voice shaking, Dean says, “I’m married in this timeline,” he blinks, and then he swallows. “I’ve got a husband.”

Cas nods, “I see,” he says, and nothing else. 

Dean laughs. It feels impossible. Ridiculous. 

“I’m married, and it’s just some guy. “

Cas says, “Why wouldn’t he be?”

Dean runs a hand back through his hair. 

“It’s like—you know the way they train like, tigers or elephants at the circus?”

Cas’s mouth twists, as if he knows where this is going. Dean stares straight ahead, gaze fixed. 

“I saw this program about it once. The trainers use fire or I don’t know, spears or something when they’re younger. Electricity. And it keeps them in their cages. And then eventually when they get older, they take the cage away. And the fire and whatever else. But the animals stay in their places. It’s like the cage is still there, even though the violence is gone.

“It’s like I built this box around my life. Things I could have and couldn’t. Things I could do. And it always. The fucking thing is that I really felt like I was out of it,” he cuts himself off, stares down at his scarred and calloused hands, “But if I’m so free then why are we in here?” 

“I had a wedding, Cas. And I can’t even book us a shared room. And the worst part is I don’t even know exactly why. If you asked me I don’t think I could even tell you. There’s just some things I do and some things I don’t—like I’ve just accepted that everything is gonna be different for me than other people. And then. Here’s this other me with this. Normal fucking life and this normal fucking husband who’s just some fucking guy and,” he sucks in a breath, “yeah, sure he’s still—I’m still a hunter—but I also had a backyard wedding. I’ve got a fucking Instagram. Like, Christ.” 

He leans back on the bed, eyes on the ceiling, “What do you mean I’m just posting about killing vampires and kissing dudes on the internet?”

“Well,” Cas says pragmatically, after a minute, “we don’t really kill a lot of vampires anymore.”

Dean huffs a bitter laugh. A dozen different apocalypses flash in front of his eyes. 

“Yeah,” he says, “I guess not.”

He draws in a shaky breath. Exhales. When he speaks again it’s softer than he meant it to be. 

“I just didn’t know that. I didn’t know how much difference a couple of years would make for me. I knew that I’d be different, figured I could have made things better sooner. Saved the world so that it stuck. But I didn’t know how much my life would change if he—” and then he does stop talking. 

Cas sighs. Dean feels him lay down beside him. The mattress settles. Cas lays his cheek against Dean’s chest. He rocks a little there, getting comfortable. Turning his face to press a kiss into the sliver of skin exposed by the open buttons of his shirt.

Dean shivers. He feels his heart start to calm. A steady, beat, beat, beat, beneath the weight of Cas’ head against his shoulder. 

“Oh by the way—I think you’re some kind of war criminal in this timeline.”

Cas’ answering chuckle is low and rich. Tilting his face to Dean’s, mouth open and laughing he says, “Just this one?”

Chapter Text

Dean dreams again. He’s back with Michael, sitting across the bar with a shot glass between them. 

Michael says, “Drink.”

The room is calm today, routine. A handful of patrons spread out along the bar, a few seated together around raised round tables, talking quietly. 

Music plays softly somewhere in the background. 

Dean waits for this to change. For the scene to tip. The lights to flicker. But they don’t. 

Even Michael seems serene, one hand resting atop the bar, a pristine white cloth draped for effect across his shoulder. 

He looks like Dean. He always looks like Dean, but today he looks even more Dean-like than usual. Faint white scar cutting into his hairline. Grass-green eyes, sun-blond lashes. A slight curve to his full-bottomed, cupid-bowed lips. 

Placid. Relaxed. 

His high cheekbones perfectly high. Jaw squared, neck thick, chest broad beneath the stretch of his pristine white shirt. There’s color in his cheeks. A light in his eyes. 

He moves and there’s that shift to it, a predator casually marking its prey. Careful eyes and canted hips, muscles flexed in deadly elegance. 

His eyes on Dean, grass-green.

Dean pushes the shot back towards him. There’s dirt under his nails. 

“No.”

Michael doesn’t push it back. He fingers the glass, light caught in the whiskey. Dean’s blunt fingers. His brutal hands. 

There’s a mirror behind the bar, and Dean catches his own reflection. Smudged glass and filmy eyes. The lines carved into his face. Not hard, like Michael’s, cut marble and laugh lines. 

Soft. 

Like freshly-shaped clay.

A man dug from the bed of a river with dirt under his nails. 

He drags his gaze away from his own reflection, back to Michael.  

“Why are you doing this?” The words come out translucent. Smoke. Dean coughs. He clears his throat, nodding to take in the empty room; the doors to the kitchen with its chained and padlocked walk-in, “You’re not even out here, you’re still trapped in there.”

With his steady voice and his steady gaze and Dean’s eyes, his square hand on the bar and the shot glass before him, Michael says, “Am I?”

Chapter Text

Dean is half undressed with his leg thrown over Cas’ shoulder and two fingers up his ass when he hears the door of the bunker open in the distance.

“Dean?” Mary calls, “I bought groceries.”

“ Fuck fuck fuck! ”

Dean smacks at Cas’ shoulder, until he raises his head, staring back at Dean with the unfaltering eyes of a soldier. 

Dean’s flat on his back, spread out on an infirmary table, bare-chested and breathing hard, one leg still tangled in his jeans, the medical supplies they’d gone to inventory scattered on the floor around them. 

Cas is shirtless, his slacks open at the front, Dean’s weight resting on his shoulder so his ass is hoisted in the air. Cas’ mouth looks like he’s just been doing something obscene because. Well. 

For a second they stare at each other in wide-eyed, silent horror. Dean’s heartbeat is in his ears and he’s thinking, it’s okay, no one ever comes in here, it’s okay no one ever comes in here—

And then Sam’s voice, “Oh yeah, I think they went to go check on…”

Dean scrambles up, shoving Cas back. He grabs for his shirt, comes up with a roll of bandages and tosses it aside. The voices are getting closer. Cas is pulling up his slacks, hand wiped across his face, one hand fumbling at his belt. 

Dean yanks at his jeans, turning in a panicked circle. Their shirts are balled in the corner beside one of his shoes but not the other. Dean grabs for them. He pulls his on and throws Cas’ over to him. Cas tosses over his shoe, and Dean shoves it on. 

He barrels out into the hallway, still buttoning his shirt, and slams almost directly into Sam just as he’s coming around the corner. Dean backpedals.

Eyes over Dean’s shoulder, Sam says, “Wow Cas, you fly here or something?” Cas gives Sam a look that appears to be quelling, because he raises his hands, saying, “Okay, damn, nevermind.” Then he looks back at Dean, tone light, “Mom’s here, in case you want to change.”

“I’m fine,” Dean grumbles. He tries to shoulder past him but Sam reaches out and snags him by the collar.

“Uh, no,” he says, with meaning, “ you want to change.”

Dean looks down. At Cas’ button down. The white one he always wears beneath his trench coat. The one Dean is currently wearing, clearly a size too big in the shoulders, one of the buttons fastened hastily through the wrong hole. 

He very much does not look behind him, where Cas must definitely be wearing his flannel. 

Sam retracts slowly.

“I’ll just give you guys a—” he says, and then he leaves without finishing. 

Dean says, “ Shit ,” under his breath. 

Somewhere, hypothetically, Dean knows that Sam knows about him. About Cas. But they very much do not discuss it. 

By the time it had finally happened—him and Cas— it’d felt like it was too late to just come out and tell him. What was he even supposed to say anyways? By the way, Cas and I fucked seven years ago and now we’re fucking again. Also I’m probably in love with him. No I don’t want to talk about it.

It’s not that it matters, it shouldn’t matter—but Sam acts like he doesn’t know, and Dean doesn’t tell him. 

He feels Cas’ hand on the small of his back, Cas’ voice low in the dark hallway. “Are you okay?”

Dean shakes it off, “Yeah,” he says, “yeah I’m fine lets just…” Cas is already unbuttoning the flannel, fingers steady. He shrugs it off and offers it over to Dean, “Yeah,” Dean tells him, “hang on a minute.” 

“Let me—” Cas starts. Dean waves him off. And then he sighs and holds up his hands, giving Cas access. Cas steps forward and works the top button carefully free. Dean can probably do the rest, but he lets Cas finish. Lets him slide his broad, rough hands lightly over his bare chest and along the barrel of his stomach to rest for a second at the notch between his belly and his hips. The space between them heats briefly, and then Cas steps away. 

Mary is standing at the bottom of the stairs when they come into the foyer, snow in her hair and a grocery bag in each hand. 

Dean does his best to keep his breathing measured, his steps certain, “Hey Mom,” he can hear Cas coming in behind him, but he doesn’t look back, “thought you were planning to come by later.”

Sam’s smile has become noticeably. Fixed. 

“Here,” Cas says, stepping towards Mary, “Let me help you with—” he reaches a hand out for the bags, then visibly falters. 

Dean jumps forward, “Ah here, I’ve got—”

Mary gives them both a look. “I can carry my own groceries, guys.”

John stumbles in from the library. Red eyed, still wearing yesterday’s clothes. Dean can tell from across the room that he must smell like a distillery, because Sam’s nose wrinkles as he passes and Mary looks. Well, actually he can’t really tell. But she doesn’t move forward to greet him. Dean doesn’t either, which leaves the whole room in an awkward standstill. 

Dean holds his breath. He watches John’s eyes skate over Sam to Mary, then up to Dean, still standing at her shoulder. And then, in excruciatingly slow motion, John looks over at Cas. And then back at Dean. Frozen in place. John’s lip curls. He lets out a disbelieving huff of breath. Dean’s feet are rooted to the spot. 

Mary hefts a grocery bag, “Dean,” she says, “why don’t you come show me where these go?” 

Dean mutters, “Oh thank fucking god,” and goes to help her.

Mary’s groceries are: six frozen burritos, a paper box of gas station cinnamon rolls, and a twelve pack of something with an unintelligible name.

Dean stares down at them for a full sixty seconds, his brain blue-screening. Then he lets out a sigh and says, “Well, at least one of these is sorta right,” and pivots around to preheat the oven. 

Mary leans back against the counter. She’d left most of her clothes behind her first night at the bunker, and since she didn't show up yesterday, they’re still folded in the laundry room where Dean left them. Today she’s wearing the pair of Dean’s jeans she lifted from his room, and the kind of cheap black tank top that comes in a three pack at the drugstore. Dean thinks he recognizes the hoodie she’s got tied around her waist as an old one of Sam’s. Her hair is damp, and her eyes are shadowed. He can see a faint smudge of black liner beneath the bottom of her lash-line. 

As he watches, Mary sags a little against the counter. She rubs at her temples. Then she closes her eyes and covers her face with one hand. 

“Mom,” he says, suddenly alarmed, “Are you okay?”

Mary pulls her hand away from her face. She inhales sharply through her nose. Dean gets a better look at her. 

“Hang on,” he says “Are you—hungover?”

Mary says, with quiet dignity, “Mind your business.”

Dean rolls his eyes. He turns back to the assortment of “groceries” on the counter, stares at them for a second longer, and then brings the bag over to the fridge. He deposits the burritos in the freezer, and sets the cinnamon rolls next to the oven so he can warm them up. When he turns around, Mary is still leaning against the counter, her head in her hands.

Dean hoists the twelve pack in her direction. “What the fuck is this?”

Without raising her head, Mary says, “I thought they looked fun.”

“They look like they’re one bad frat party away from being outlawed across all fifty States of America.”

Mary taps the base of her neck, just above her collar bone. “You look like you lost a fight with a curling iron.”

Dean glances towards the spot she’s pointing at, and finds that his collar has pulled down enough to reveal the top outline of a bruise is starting to show on the  skin of his neck, just below his tan line. 

He tugs it back into place, face heating. “Mind your business.” 

Mary says, “Deal. You’re cooking, right?”

“Mmmhmm.” Dean shoulders her over lightly, so he can pull the griddle down from its shelf and plug in the cord.

Mary lets herself be jostled. “Awesome. You can be my favorite today.”

Dean takes a carton of eggs out of the fridge and sets it on the counter. He grabs the milk and the flour and the rest of the stuff he needs for pancake batter. He gets a pan out for the bacon, and then he looks it all over, debating. 

He’s got syrup and strawberry preserves for the pancakes, and there’s still half a block of gouda in the fridge for the eggs, plus Mary’s cinnamon rolls. But he wants something else savory to round it out. He taps his index finger against his thigh as he thinks, carefully regulating the buzz of anxiety burning hot in his chest. 

He can’t crack the cage in his mind if he’s coordinating cooking times. He can’t burn down the world if he’s focussing on making breakfast. 

He glances over at Mary, still propped against the counter, “What sounds good?” he asks. Mary’s face is set in a way that highly suggests her answer is: death.  Dean turns back to the pantry. He scans the shelves, mentally thumbing through a frankly limitless rolodex of inspiration for the best hangover food and says, “hash browns?”

Mary says, with a very genuine layer of bloodlust, “I would fucking kill for hash browns.”

“Awesome,” Dean tells her. He slaps his hands on his thighs, and grabs a couple of potatoes. 

It takes some coordination, but he whisks together the cheese and the eggs with some veggies, starts the first batch of bacon, and mixes together the pancake batter while Mary sips at her coffee and slowly, pathetically grates the potatoes. 

They’re quiet for a while, just the hiss and pop of the oil and the steady drip drip drip of the coffee maker. Mary’s phone goes off a few times, but she doesn’t answer it.

At length, Dean breaks the silence. “So,” he says, elephant in the room, “how is it seeing Dad?” 

The unspoken, like this . Clogs the air between them.

Mary’s hand slows. “It’s… weird.” She decides.

“Oh,” Dean says. He starts to flip the bacon. Clears his throat, “Weird how?”

Mary sighs, “I don’t know how to explain it.”

“Try,” Dean tells her. 

She starts to grate again. 

“I loved your father when I was young,” she says, “but sometimes I couldn’t remember exactly why. It was like,” she stops, “I knew that we were in love—that we had this beautiful love story. But there were pieces of it that would just be. Missing.” She takes a minute, rubbing at her temples, “Like, I remember what a whirlwind it was when we got engaged, but I can’t remember exactly how he proposed. Or—I know I’d had a boyfriend right before we dated, but I can’t remember why we broke up, or what had happened to him.

“And then there were all these little things too. Like sometimes I would remember cooking us dinner, but I wouldn’t remember having eaten it. Just that the dishwasher was running and that I wasn’t hungry anymore. It wasn’t—” she breaks off, clicking her nails against the countertop. Someone has given her an incredibly ugly, glittery-purple manicure, “Bad. But it was. A life I didn’t recognize. A house and a mortgage. Clothes I couldn’t remember buying. Sometimes I would look at John and think, why did I marry you? And I would never really know the answer. He was handsome and he could be very smart or charming if he wanted to be, but sometimes I’d think about the guy that I’d been dating just before him and wonder—hey he was fun, whatever happened to him? And then it would be like I’d get sucked back under the current of it all and I’d forget again.”

Dean swallows. It reminds him a little of his own life, back when he was still headed in a direction with divine intent. The feeling of walking one way, but missing a step. Pre-determined.

Mary says, “After Sam was born it was like a veil lifted. I loved John and I loved you boys, but it was different. Muted, somehow. Like all the colors were less vibrant and all of those little moments that I could never remember before, all the day-to-day pieces, snapped back into focus and I was watching my life play out in front of me, and I didn’t always like what I saw. I cared again. That he’d fought in this war I didn’t believe in, that he spent so much time shut down in front of the T.V. How he didn’t play with you unless he was having a good spell, which happened less and less often.

“And it turned out that those moments. The simple stuff. That’s what mattered. Not the love story. But that space between finishing dinner and doing the fucking dishes, or like—” she pauses, knocking the grater against the counter so the little strips of potato fall to the cutting board. “It was the little stuff. How he handled driving in shitty traffic. What he was like with you when he was tired. How he talked to me if he’d had a bad day.”

Hungry, angry, lonely, tired.

Dean’s throat is tight. He sets the spatula down. Mary sighs. Her eyes are distant. Far away. 

“The thing about John,” she says, “is when he was good he was fucking great. And when he wasn’t it was like—like a light had just snapped off, and you were desperate to get it to turn it back on,” she looks down at her hands. The scarred knuckles, the shitty manicure, “Sometimes that felt like love. But it never felt the way that it had before Sam was born.”

Dean thinks about John behind the wheel of the Impala after a couple of bad, sleepless nights. But he also thinks about Cas standing in front of the sink with dish-soap up to his elbows, pretending he’s never read a certain book or seen a certain movie, just to get a rise out of him. Dean fully knowing but falling for it anyways. Describing narrative beats and b-plots in avid detail, while Cas washes and he dries, their shoulders bumping. 

He picks up the spatula. 

Mary’s phone chimes again. Dean watches as she digs her phone out of the pocket of her (his) jeans, checks the texts, and then puts it back without answering. 

He raises his eyebrows,“You need to get that?”

Mary shakes her head, “It’s Derek,” she says, “I’ll text him later.”

Dean turns back to the stove. “Are you sure? He’s messaged you like, three times since you’ve been here.”

Mary hums, noncommittal. She goes back to grating potatoes. 

Dean flips the first pancake. A little underdone. He turns up the heat a little. “This case you’re working, is it—”

Mary says, “It isn’t about the case.”

Dean looks at her. The messy, still-wet hair and yesterday’s clothes. The drug-store tank top a couples sizes too large. He turns back to the griddle, “Isn’t he like, twenty-five?” he says. 

Mary says, “Twenty-six.”

“Isn’t that a little young for you?”

Mary says, “That doesn’t sound like minding your business.”

Dean glances back over at her, then something clicks in his brain. Twenty-six is too young for him. For Mary, it’s a three year age difference. After a minute he asks, “Is Derek fun?”

“Derek is very fun."

Dean mulls this over for a second. “Gross,” he decides. 

Mary finishes shredding the potato. She puts the grater down and wipes her hands on her (his) jeans. 

“You started it.”

Dean turns back to the counter. The top of the second pancake is starting to bubble. He flips it. 

“So you’re in here because of him?”

“What?”

Dean nudges at the pancake with his spatula. It does not need to be moved. “Here,” he says, “in the kitchen with me. Instead of out there with Dad.”

“Oh,” Mary says. She takes out her phone again, only to fiddle with it for a second and place it down on the counter. 

Dean raises an eyebrow, “You okay?”

Mary sighs. She runs her hands back over the denim. 

“I'm not hiding from your father because I’m hooking up with some other guy,” she says, a sentence which Dean decides to file away to have a minor crisis over at another time, “I’m in here because I don’t know what to fucking say to him.”

“I know it’s been twenty years for him since I died—thirty-five for you and your brother.”

Dean corrects quietly, “Thirty-six.”

“Right. But for me it’s like, three years ago I had a baby and a four year old and a house in the suburbs with a husband I loved but—” She stops. She starts again. “I had this life I was starting to feel trapped in. This marriage that was supposed to be perfect and I was trying so hard to be perfect with it and I had this idea of what that would look like—this timeline for you and your brother. Preschool and kindergarten and how long I’d stay married to John so you boys wouldn’t end up too fucked up by a divorce and then—I woke up in a graveyard and you told me your father—the man I had loved, the man I married—raised you like soldiers, fighting monsters in a life I didn’t want for you. A life I left so you could have a normal childhood. What the fuck am I supposed to say to him?”

Dean rolls his eyes, “Literally what are any of us supposed to say to him?” He asks, “It’s awkward, okay. I get it.”

Mary fixed him with a look. Serious, she says, “You don’t.”

Dean mutters, “Wanna bet?”

She watches as he spaces the cinnamon rolls out on a cookie sheet, slides them into the oven to heat, and sets a timer.

“Dean,” she says, softer this time but still persistent, “I have no idea who that man out there is. He’s as good as a stranger to me.”

And that. That gets him. Because, for Dean? John Winchester, with mud on his boots from 2003. That’s about as familiar as it gets. 

He flips the bacon. Ladles out more pancake batter. Starts mixing the potatoes with the eggs and flour. Turns on a burner to heat the oil. 

Mary asks, “Where did you learn to do all of this?”

“Cooking shows,” Dean says, “Jesus Christ.” She raises an eyebrow, “Magazines, those recipes they have on the back of the box sometimes, whatever was around. Get outta my face.”

Mary does not, in fact, get out of his face. Instead she says, “And your Dad didn’t like it?”

Dean starts to scramble the eggs, “I don’t know,” he grumbles, “why don’t you go ask him?”

And then it looks like she really is about to go and do just that and he scrambles to reach for her shoulder saying, “Shit, wait, hold on— No. Just. Go set the table, alright?”

Mary says, “Fine.”

“Fine,” Dean tells her. He turns back to the counter. Turns back around, clenches his fists, calls after her, “Wash your fucking hands, alright?"

She does, and then he’s alone with the empty, yearning drum of his own thoughts and the pop and fizz of the oil frying. He makes the hashbrowns. He makes another pot of coffee. 

The door opens again. 

“That table had better be—”

He turns, and Cas is there. 

He comes up behind Dean and hooks his chin over his shoulder. Broad hands running over the spill of Dean’s belly over his tight waistband 

Dean casts a quick look behind them towards the door. “Where’s my dad?”

“Sam took him out to see the car again.”

Dean turns back to the stove, grumbling, “She has a name.”

Cas tugs him in closer by his belt loops, sliding his hands unapologetically up his padded torso to grope at his chest.  

“Oh I’m sorry,” he rumbles into Dean’s hair, turning his mouth so that his breath ghosts hot over Dean’s ear, “Baby.”

And that. Okay. That. 

He leans back into Cas and Cas rocks him gently against his chest. Solid and unyielding behind him. The space between cooking and eating. Between finishing dinner and doing the dishes. He takes his weight. 

Dean gasps, “I’m pretty sure my dad will actually kill you if he finds us like this.”

And Cas growls, “If the devil himself can’t kill me, I’d like to see John Winchester try.”

But he leans away from Dean a little, putting space between them. 

Dean reaches out and switches off the burner. He twists around in Cas’ arms. Cas’ eyes are blue. The corner of his lower lip is caught between his teeth. The shadow of his stubble darkens in the divet of his chin. Cas’ eyes are blue. And Dean knows what he’ll see in them. He can hear it in Cas’ voice when he says, “I can go.”

That he wants to stay.

And Dean.  

Wants. 

He fists his hands carefully in Cas’ collar, drawing him closer. Close enough that he can see the hitch in Cas’ throat as he catches his breath. 

He doesn’t know how many more mornings like this he has left with Cas. He doesn’t want to think about it. But he doesn’t want to waste it either. 

He kisses him. 

Cas kisses back. Heated. Unhurried. The smell of fried potatoes and bacon grease. Sweetened at the edges, the sugar from Mary’s cinnamon rolls baking in the oven. 

Who else has a love like this?

Cas pulls away slowly. His eyes are dark, searching Dean’s. Dean holds his breath. 

And Cas’ phone pings softly. 

They stay caught in the moment between them for a minute, and then two. And then Cas sighs and steps away, digging his phone out from the pocket of suit jacket. He flicks the screen on with a few swipes of his finger, then clicks on the message notification at the top of the screen. There’s a brief moment of conversation between the app and his phone, debating whether or not it will open, and then snapchat loads grudgingly on the screen.

Dean says, “You need a new phone, man.”

Cas shushes him. “Quiet.”

Jack’s face has appeared, taking up most of the screen. He’s using one of those goofy cat-eared filters which makes his eyes big and his nose small, framed by little sparkling whiskers. 

The video plays. 

“Heyo!” Jack says cheerfully, panning the camera around to show the interior of Jody’s kitchen. He gives a thumbs up. “Proof of life—say hi Jody!”

Jody’s voice comes from off-camera, “Hi Jody.”

Claire is visible in the background, turned to the side and far enough away that the filter glitches, giving her one cat ear on her face, and the other floating out in empty space beside her head as she measures dark liquid into the row of vials assembled on Jody’s kitchen table. 

Jack turns the camera back on himself. 

“We’re making dead man’s blood bullets,” he reports, “I’ll call you tonight. Love you!”

The recording ends. Cas frowns down at the screen. 

“Hey,” Dean tells him, “Even powered down the kid’s tougher than any of us. Plus he’s with Jody, he’ll be fine.”

Cas sighs, “I know.”

“He’s like a baby god,” Dean says, as much for his own benefit as Cas’, “A few vampires will be easy-peasy. He can handle himself.”

“I know,” Cas repeats, “I still wish we were there.”

Dean turns back to the stove, “Me too.”

He flicks the burner back on, watching as the oil heats again. After a minute, he asks. 

“Do you think Jack knows?”

“Yes.”

Dean shifts on his feet. He fiddles with the dials on the stove. “Has he asked you if we’re…” He trails off, unsure how to finish. 

Cas says, “Did you ever stop to wonder if your parents were together?”

Dean starts another hash brown. He pokes at it with the spatula, even though it doesn’t need it. 

“I don’t know,” he says, “Maybe I should have.”

Somehow he gets everything finished and plated while it’s still passably hot, and then he’s got the table cleared off and laden with enough food to feed all of them several times over. Then there’s nothing to do except call everybody in. So he does. 

“Holy shit dude,” Sam says, stopping short in the doorway, “Cas doesn’t even eat, man.”

Cas, half a step behind Sam (and a good six ahead of John) says, “This looks wonderful, Dean.”

Sam pulls an apologetic face, “Shit,” he says, “no, it does! And leftovers are great, dude. Seriously, Jack’ll be super happy. I bet he’s bummed he missed this.”

Dean rolls his eyes, “Whatever,” he tells Sam, “it’s fine, I’m used to your ungrateful ass.” He points at Cas, “And you’re fucking eating today.”

Cas says, “Whatever you say.”

They sit down. Dean and Cas beside each other, Mary next to Sam, John at the head of the table. Dean gets everyone served, and gets the condiments passed around, and then he looks down at his own laden plate and thinks—crap. All his nervous energy drained into all of this food, and now he’s actually going to have to eat it. Fuck his life. Fuck his poor decision planning. Fuck John Winchester. 

The steam rising from his plate twists into a scatter of wings, lest he forget about Micheal. 

He glances up, and there’s his twenty-nine-year-old mother staring blankly over at his fifty-two-year-old father, plate full of untouched hashbrowns. Sam seated tensely beside her, drawing patterns through the syrup on his plate with the tines of his fork. Cas dutifully chewing a bite from one of Mary’s gas-station cinnamon rolls. 

John cuts into his pancakes, “I want you to tell me more about this case you’ve been working on,” he says, decisively, “later. After we eat.”

Dean fists a hand around his fork, shoulders hunching further over his plate. “Yes, Sir.”

Both of Mary’s eyebrows go up. 

Dean would call the silence that follows tense, but that would imply that something about it has changed. 

John takes another bite. 

“Seems like you could use an extra set of hands.”

Dean engages in an entirely silent, heated conversation with Sam, until John looks over towards them and each of their faces go carefully blank. 

“There’s some…” Sam says slowly, “basic stuff you could help us with. Some journals that we haven’t gotten to yet. They’ve got an index but it’s not totally detailed, you could—”

“I cannot believe,” John says, voice suddenly icy. Cold, sharp and hard-edged, “That you would ask me to do that.”

Sam looks up at him, “What?” he says, and there’s genuine confusion in his voice. 

Dean holds completely still. Not moving, not flinching. Watching Sam. Watching John. A spark has started to dance lazily along the edges of his vision. He grips his fork tight, trying to bring the room back into focus. 

“My father,” John begins, rage clear in his voice, all the traces of last night’s nostalgia gone from his face.

Sam’s expression has cleared, like he’s resolved the problem. Dean thinks, don’t , but another spark has joined the first. Metal on metal. Like something’s trying to cut into him. So he can’t move to stop what’s coming.

Sam backpedals, “No,” he says, “Not Henry’s journals, just—”

“ I cannot believe ,” John says again, somehow louder and more terrible, “ that you would ask me to do that. ”

“I haven’t—” Sam starts, hands raised. Clearly mystified.

John scoffs, and it comes out as a snarl. “You’ve always been selfish,” he declares, “Ungrateful.” He turns on Dean, and Dean realizes he’s standing, ready to move between Sam and his father. So that’s. Fuck .

John looks at him for a second, mouth twisted, eyes dark with anger. “I’m not hungry,” he decides. He gets unevenly to his feet, pushing back the chair with a heavy screech.

“Dad—” Sam starts again, utterly bewildered. 

“ENOUGH.”

John’s hand, big as Dean has ever seen it, slams down onto the table. In his clumsy state, he miscalculates and hits the side of his plate, catching the tines of his upturned fork and the bite of pancake still speared at the end. A sound tears out of him, angry bellow of rage, and he hits the table again, sweeping the dishes in front of him into a shattered mess on the floor. The smash and clatter of broken glass and porcelain rains down around them. To Dean, it looks like a swarm of glittering flies. Like light reflected all around him. 

When he blinks back into focus, John is gone.  

The room echoes back into silence. And then Mary stands without speaking and walks out. 

Cas says, quiet, “I’ll go after her.”

And he gets up and leaves. 

Sam says, softly, into the silence, “ What the fuck. ”

Dean. How does he feel? He doesn’t feel anything. That calm center in the eye of the storm. The heart of the blast radius, before the explosion hits. 

He sighs, stepping back from the table and Sam’s questioning eyes, whatever accusation he might find there.

“Just, get me a trash can, will you?”

“Dean—”

“Probably a mop. Definitely the broom.” 

Sam stands slow, watching him, but he doesn’t move towards the door. Dean comes round the table, scooting some of the bigger chunks of broken plate over towards the worst of the mess. “Closet in the laundry room. Same place as the cleaning supplies. Grab one of the all-purpose sprays too. A couple rags.”

“I know where we keep the fucking cleaning supplies ,” Sam says. There’s a bite to his voice, something hard and angry, “That isn’t what—” Then he stops. Visibly collects himself with a quick breath in and long breath out. Eyes shut for a second and then back open. When he speaks again his voice is quieter, his tone less sharp, “Sorry. Sorry, yeah I’ll grab them.” He stops when he reaches the door, turning back to Dean, standing over the wreck in front of him. “You need anything else?”

A cup of coffee. A gun. The moment before this started back. Coffee. Cas. Mary, how he remembers her. A way out.

“Dust pan.” 

“Right,” Sam says. He knocks on the doorframe on the way out. 

Mary finds him on his hands and knees, scrubbing at the coffee stains on the hardwood beside a trash can piled with broken dishes. Pancakes, eggs, cinnamon rolls, bacon, hash browns. He sits back on his heels, wiping the side of his wrist through the sweat on his forehead. 

Mary is dressed in the clothes he washed for her. Jeans and a long-sleeved henley. Dean’s black and gray flannel, leather jacket. 

“You’re leaving,” he surmises, pitching the spent rag into the trash. 

Mary flips up the collar of her jacket, tugging on a beat up pair of biker gloves.

“Sorry bestie,” she says, “I am way too hung-over for this.” Then she sags. Coming into herself. She looks tired. She looks twenty-nine. Hair pulled back in a loose pony-tail, that trace of eye-liner smudged along her lash line. Summer freckles faded out into smooth, unmarked skin. There’s a faint scar just beneath her earlobe that he’s never noticed before. “No,” she says, “No. I just. I can’t…” her eyes move around the carnage of the breakfast table, Dean on his knees in the middle of it all, looking up at her, “I don’t know how to handle it. I need a minute.” She bites at the corner of her lip for a second before adding, distractedly, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Dean tells her, “I got it.”

Mary nods, “Thanks, kid.”

She lays a hand on the back of his neck as she passes, which is close enough. 

Sam is back after a minute, carrying a fresh cup of coffee. 

“Here,” he says, offering the mug to Dean, “let me take over for a second, drink this.”

“I’m fine,” Dean tells him, “I got it.”

Sam says, pointedly bitchy, “ That doesn’t sound like drinking coffee.”

Dean huffs, feeling a smile tug at his mouth, despite everything.

“Fine,” he raises his hands. His knees throb sharply as he moves out of Sam’s way, shifting his weight carefully until he can sit all the way up, “Fine. Help yourself.”

Sam shoves the coffee at him until he takes it. 

“Hooray.” he cheers sarcastically, looking down at the floor, “man, what a mess.”

Dean winces, palms warm on the ceramic, tongue a little burned. “Yep.” 

Sam scrubs for a couple of minutes, wrapping them both in the comforting smell of coffee and Pine-Sol. There’s some time that passes, and then he says, “I’ve never seen him do that before.” 

Dean hums, noncommittal. The coffee is cooler now, but it isn’t really doing shit for him. He suspects it might be decaf. 

“I mean, blow up? Sure. But I’ve never seen him lose it so quick, over something that—” He stops and sits back, resting the used rag against his knee. “It was like he wasn’t totally there, almost. Like he didn’t understand—I mean maybe he was being a dick on purpose, picking a fight. But it almost seemed like—. I don’t know, it’s weird.”

“Mmm.” Dean grunts, he goes back to his coffee.

Sam is studying him, he can see it in his profile. He doesn’t turn. “Was he like that a lot when I was at school?”

Dean keeps his eyes trained on the opposite wall. He pries his mouth open to say, “He wasn’t great.”

“Okay,” Sam tells him grimly, “Right. Okay. We’re doing that ritual tomorrow. I’ll talk to Rowena tonight. She’s close. I think we can crack it. Because this,” he waves a hand over the mess in front of them, “cannot be helping.” 

Dean nods dully. He feels impossibly tired all of a sudden. Like he’s just had to sprint away from an explosion and hasn’t totally escaped the blast radius. Sam looks like he’s second away from helping him up which, yeah. No.

He levers himself to his feet, squeezing his hands into fists. 

Sam hesitates briefly, watching him. “You’ve talked to Cas, right?”

“What?”

“About finding the Angel Tablet. You’ve asked him where we should look?” Dean shrugs, non-committal. He looks away. He can see Sam frowning at him in his peripheral vision. “Dean, why not? This is serious. It’s the one real lead we have against Michael.”

Dean studies the wall of the map room, waiting for the pictures to re-shuffle themselves into the correct order. Why hasn’t he asked Cas about the Angel Tablet? Why hasn’t he told either of them his hallucinations are getting worse? Because he isn’t ready.

“Dean . ”

“Fine,” he says, looking back at Sam,“fine, I’ll ask him.”

Sam continues to frown a moment longer. And then he relents, standing too. “C’mon. Let’s get this stuff put away.”

Dean makes a show out of gesturing for him to lead the way, and then he hangs back a second, wiping a hand across his dry, aching eyes.

Growing up, he used to feel like he had two different fathers. The sharp, dark-eyed man with his big hands in two fists on the steering wheel, and the one with his broad forearm resting along the open window. The one who sang old country folks songs under his breath along with the radio, and laughed at Dean’s jokes. Gospel blues and Johnny Cash. Sunlight pooling across the dashboard. And then it going dark. Night falling. A white-knuckled drive through rain so thick he couldn’t see the road. 

Two Johns. Two fathers. Each unrecognizable from the other.

The John he knew like the back of his hand, and the one he couldn’t ever understand. The dad he never quite said the right thing to, and the one he still might be able to. Sometimes they blended together, creating a grey middle-ground overlap. Becoming two possible parents with two sets of rules and corresponding expectations, and Dean would have to guess which was which. An enigma of a father he both couldn’t disappoint and couldn’t please. A tight-rope line walked between truck stops and road stations that might just as easily snare his feet as carry him safely to the other side. So that whenever his feet found solid ground, he’d still be waiting for that same line to tighten around his throat and pull the trap closed. 

He’d hang in the purgatory of that, the unknown space, and then John would shout or he’d smile or he’d go silent for long tense hours, and he’d come out the other side one man or the other. Known or unknowable. A coin toss. His father re-materialized. The possibility of the other John would be a ghost, and the living-breathing one would be walking beside him, head tilted towards Dean, eyes bright with conspiracy, or leaning away from him, his expression cold.  

The problem was that Dean could never get both of his fathers in the same place at the same time. One was always walking into the room while the other was walking out.

What was that old riddle? About the farmer transporting three things across a river, in a boat that could only carry two things at a time? The goat, the tiger and the bundle of grass. The challenge proposed during long hours on the road, to figure out a way for the man to cross that would keep the goat safe from the tiger, and the grass safe from the goat. The answer always a variation of the same strategy. For the man to carry two things to the far side of the river, and then take one back with him when he returned for the final item, so that nothing was left with what it was most vulnerable to.

There were different versions of the story. Sometimes it was a bridge instead of a boat. Sometimes the farmer could only carry one thing at a time. Sometimes the grass was a yam or the tiger was a wolf. And Dean would answer it. 

Sometimes it would come to him later, that same riddle. The answer. Moving from one place to another without being eaten. He would play the strategy of it through in his mind. To be clever, to be quick, planning three steps ahead every time he took one step forward. 

Except in his version, there was never a right answer. And he never knew if John was the tiger or the wolf or the farmer. Maybe John was the one telling the riddle, and he was the one who always got it wrong. 

A couple spray bottles still stand on the cleared table. He collects them slowly, twisting the caps back on, wiping down the nozzles.

What was the point? After a blow up like this one. In trying to talk about it. When he didn’t know who John would be. What would it solve?

The problem was. The problem was that Dean couldn’t ever seem to get himself to speak in the moment, when it was happening. Sure he’d try, he’d say something. But it always came out different than he wanted it to. Like he’s always hitting the target just a little off center. Always saying the wrong thing. Or the right one, too late.

He starts to feel rain fall, soft on the back of his neck. 

Maybe everyone had two versions of their parents. Maybe John came from a long line of men who had split themselves down the center, straight through the heart. Maybe he never got the answers right either. 

Anyways, there had to be two of them. Because Dean’s dad and Sam’s dad were two different people. 

John had changed in those first few years on the road. That quiet time. After the fire, after Mary. Dean sitting silent in the backseat holding on to a little brother who couldn’t even form memories yet. And by the time he could, John had become a whole different person. Untouchable. Unreadable. Except by Dean, who’d grown tuned to him like a compass or an airplane tower. Always looking to him for direction, for guidance. To make sure he didn’t crash. 

Into what, though? That was the question. He didn’t know. Not then. Not now. What exactly to brace for. So he just braced for everything. The good times to become bad again, the bad times to become worse. And then sometimes for sunlight. The clouds breaking. And how it would feel to watch that happen, for one of his fathers to thaw into the other. Sun so bright it hurt his eyes. Almost worse than it was before, knowing the darkness was coming. 

In front of him, Sam pushes open the kitchen door, disappearing from Dean’s line of sight. Only a second passes before he’s shoving back through it, saying, “Nope. No, I’m not doing this. Absolutely not.” 

They almost run right into each other, chest to chest. Sam comes up short. He blows a lock of hair out of his face, and points down at Dean. “Don’t fucking do it. Do not go in there.”

Dean shifts his weight across his shoulders. He shifts the cleaning supplies into the crook of his arm and tugs the broom from Sam's free hand. Voice low, he says, “I have to put these away.”

Sam snorts derisively, hands going up. He opens his mouth like he’s going to say something else, and then he just shakes his head and keeps shaking it, sighing as he side-steps Dean in the narrow hallway. His giant hand falls on Dean’s shoulder briefly as he passes. And then he’s gone.

Dean looks after him. Something like a heatwave shimmers at the end of the hallway.  He watches  for a second too, and then he turns towards the kitchen and pushes open the door.

John is posted up beside the fridge, sprawled against the counter.

Dean keeps his head low, his movements steady. 

The room around him starts to go soft at the edges, stainless steel counters bleeding into dark wood then turning back again. Nothing to see here. 

Dean crosses to the sink, a couple of feet away from John, and starts to put the cleaning supplies away. Rags rinsed out under hot water, bottles lined up across the counter. Glass becoming plastic and then glass again. Something gold. 

The mirror above the sink catches a reflection of red neon. Electric blue light. White marble. 

There’s a glass in his father’s hand, a bottle on the counter beside him. It looks gold out of the corner of Dean's eyes, but when he turns it's just a flat, murky brown. 

Dean reaches down for one of the dishes, left stacked and rinsed in the sink by either Sam or Mary. He turns the faucet on. 

John drinks and Dean washes, running the sponge in firm, steady circles. John doesn’t say anything, just watches him. The water runs between them.

Dean opens his mouth, soap on his wrists. He gestures with his shoulder towards his father, not turning. “You should get Sam to show you the good stuff.”

John takes a pull of the whiskey. A single spark falls from his mouth. “You show me.”

Dean goes back to the dishes. Scarred hands wrinkling under the water, steam rising up from the basin of the sink. Aware of John’s proximity next to him, voice low and rough around the edges, “You shouldn’t say that shit to him.” 

John shakes his head, arms folded across his chest. He makes a sound in the back of his throat, looking down into his glass.“You’re always too soft on him.”

Dean can feel the room opening up above his head. A cathedral. Stone columns. 

It’s like he’s lived this scene a thousand times. Knows it beat by beat. The careful dance of de-escalation, laughing low under his breath, hands covered in soap bubbles, tongue pressed against the back of his teeth. Still in John's corner, still his man. “You’ll thank me when he’s still talking to you in three days.”

John drinks again. “That kid hasn’t said a word to me in six months.” He wipes the back of his hand across his mouth. “He swore he was done with all of this.” 

The water runs. 

“You go missing,” Dean tells him, “in 2005. I went to Stanford to tell Sam. We got on the road right afterwards.”

John laughs, dismissive. “Just like that, huh?”

Dean says, “His house burned down.” John’s immediate silence renders this piece of information as unexpected. Dean gives it a beat, voice only slightly uneven “Sam’s girlfriend, Jess. She died in the fire. The same way that Mom did.” The dishes are done. He switches off the water. “We go to hunt the demon. We find you. You and Sam make up on the road.”

John is silent for a moment. Then he says, “Who’d they get for you?”

“What?” 

“Who’d they kill. To keep you going all these years. Who did you have?”

Cas, Sam, Jack, Charlie. Ellen and Joe. Bobby and Rufus. Benny. Cas.

Dean says, “I didn’t have anybody.” 

“Nobody.”

“Nothing serious.”

“Not in fourteen years?”

Dean starts to move towards the door, “I’ve gotta—”

John stops him with a hand on his arm, “Let your brother do it.”

“I—”

His father tips his glass in his direction, “Show me where you keep the good stuff.”

Dean goes still, “I’m not real thirsty.”

“Sure you are.” There’s a spark to this too. A fire burning low across the countertops. Dean watches as John reaches out, materializing a shot glass from somewhere deep within the flames. He says again, “Nobody in fourteen years.”

“I—” Dean is breathing in smoke. His head thick with it, “I didn’t—”

And then the door opens. 

Cas is in the doorway. His chest a broad, white sail, his voice pitched low, mid-sentence, “Dean, did you need—” and then he breaks off. Dean with his back against the counter, the shot-glass extended towards him. John standing in front of him, his face set, the bottle in his hand. 

Dean watches Cas’ eyes move between them, caught in amber. He says, voice carefully neutral. “You’ve finished the dishes.”

Dean scrapes out, “I’ve finished the dishes.”

“Sam wants you to—”

John’s voice is dismissive. “Let him sulk.” He gestures at Dean with the glass, “Have a drink with your father.”

Over John’s shoulder, Dean is watching the tense set of Cas’ shoulders. The soft curve of his lower-lip. There’s a fine mist curling in around him, causing the air between them to catch and reflect the light. Dean blinks. Smoke behind him. Cas before him, wreathed in atmosphere. The promise of rain. 

They both watch John pour the shot. His hands are steady on the glass. His eyes are dark. He isn’t angry in the same way that he’d been over breakfast, but he’s something. Something. The unsettling switch to it, then and now, danger running hot between them. The air a live wire. 

John isn’t angry, but he’s something. 

Dean watches the liquor shine in the shot glass. It feels like a dream when John holds it out to him, saying, “Drink.”

The apparition comes to life before him. John blooming from fire. The smell of burning. Dean sees the reflected neon light from Rocky’s Bar. He sees the bone-white cloth draped across the counter. And he feels Michael go suddenly still inside the walk-in freezer, breathing in. The padlock clinking against its chain. 

John standing in his kitchen. Everything covered by a faint, red glaze. 

Maybe this isn’t real at all. Maybe he’ll take the glass and it’ll turn into spiders, evaporate into smoke. 

Dean reaches out, and his fingers find something cold, solid. 

John, on cue, repeats, “Drink.”

Dean says again, “I’m not thirsty.”

He can feel the weight of it in his hand. A cheap, novelty shot glass picked up at a gas station somewhere in the desert. One and a half ounces of alcohol. John’s gaze, unwavering.

Dean’s eyes drop to the whiskey, and he finds the corner of a baroque gold picture frame reflected across its surface. He tilts the glass and it becomes an ornate oil painting, a branch of tall, white candles and sparkling crystal. 

He remembers the smell of that room. Clear and cold, like standing on top of a mountain, breathing in. How quiet it had been, just him and his heartbeat. Zachariah telling him his destiny was pre-determined, that he was meant to end the world. An angel figurine falling to the floor. 

Ten years. He hadn’t said yes to Michael then. Ten years. 

John is in front of him, his heavy brows drawn. A calculating look clouding his expression.  

Dean’s eyes find Cas again, and he remembers. Cas’ hand over his mouth in the green room. Dean’s breath caught against his calloused palm, the brief stretch of time between them, his eyes wide and Cas’ face unreadable. That first leap that Dean had taken. Nodding his head. Stepping over the edge.   

And Cas pulling his hand away. Letting it fall. Cutting into the meat of his own forearm with the demon knife, blood running hot and thick down his skin as he’d drawn quick, clumsy sigils across the wall. Determined and disobedient. Looking away from Zachariah, looking towards Dean. Betraying Micheal. Betraying the divine plan. Laying waste to the hosts of heaven. Hunted. Rebelled. Kissing Dean. Wrapping his arms around him. 

He was not a god. He had bled.

Dean looks at Cas, and Cas looks back at him and Dean can see it all. This life they’d made up together as they’d gone. Destiny a curved road. Destiny a straight line, a circle. Taking you right back to where you began. Maybe. Maybe. 

Cas steps forward. His expression is steady. Light shines from his eyes. The crackle pop of electricity above their heads. 

John steps back, half turning away from Dean, towards Cas. “What the hell?”

The walls around them omit a muffled humming buzz as every appliance in the room flicks steadily on, one after the other. The fan in the refrigerator whirs loudly to life as the empty dishwasher begins to cycle, and the plate in the microwave spins at two times its normal speed.

There’s a particular feeling to the air, time slowing down and speeding up, both at the same time. The sharp, distinct outline of the room.

Cas comes towards Dean. He takes the glass out of his hand. And then he takes the shot himself. His head thrown back, his gaze fixed steadily forward, watching Dean beneath dark lashes as the bulb above their heads flares and the lights reflect in his eyes. 

John says something else, incredulous, disbelieving. A loud, incoherent sound. 

Cas sets the empty glass down on the counter. He wipes his open mouth with the back of his hand, still looking at Dean. His eyes like iron. His voice like thunder. “Let’s go.”

The bunker’s showers are built to take up half of the bathroom. Industrial-sized with high-pressure shower heads set at regular intervals, spaced evenly apart.

With the water running hot, beating down against the tile, it feels like another world. A place cut off from time. Somewhere humid and suspended, separating them from everything else. Just the rough sounds of their breathing and Cas’ strong hands under Dean’s ass, hauling him in close and then fucking him back against the shower wall. Dean’s skin slapping wetly into the tiles, half-stifled sounds escaping his lips. His heartbeat drums in his ears. His body alive, skin singing wherever he's touched. Thighs wrap around Cas’ hips, head tipped back, water falling into his open mouth. He breathes it in and he holds his breath, his throat working around a low, (guttural) moan. It’s like he’s falling to pieces, being shaken apart. He drops his head, biting back the sound, and Cas changes the rhythm of his hips, chasing the spot where he's most responsive, and staying there. The movement of his body unrelenting, until Dean hears his own voice echoed back around him. 

Dean’s back hits the tiles and he braces his shoulders against the shower wall so he can use the leverage to push himself closer, dragging the backs of his calves against the back of Cas’ thighs, tilting his hips and gasping his name into the clouded air. Steam hangs in sheets around them, rain falling between their bodies. Dean tastes it, and then he's tasting Cas’ mouth and the line of his jaw. Metallic. Salt. 

Cas fucks into him again. He holds Dean against the tile like he doesn’t weigh anything at all. Strong hands and thick shoulders, his movements deliberate and intentional. A weapon of heaven, detractor from its cause. Molded to be built in the image of god and then taken apart. All the pieces of him collected and re-assembled again. Pressing into Dean, pressing him back against the tile, spreading his legs further apart. Kissing him like he’d been built for that instead.

A miracle, standing right in front of him. Good things do happen —and they had. They did. 

Maybe— 

Was it possible they had another miracle in them? Another good thing?

He fists his palms against Cas’ chest to get him to slow, breath shaky, breathing out. 

Cas’ voice is rough in the back of his throat, his eyes drawn together, water beaded in his lashes, “Are you—”

Dean steels himself. The water rushes down around them, his body flush with Cas’.

“Can we— The Angel Tablet. Can we use it to beat Michael?” He hears himself, breathless, echoed back against the walls. He keeps talking. “If we find it here, in this timeline. Can we use it against him?”

Cas is silent against him, his body still, breath stirring the steam before his face. 

“No.”

“Couldn’t we—”

Cas’ hands tighten at his thighs, Dean feels the indent of each finger. 

“It's in Heaven.”

“Oh.” 

Water slides from his chest to his belly, collecting in the space between their stomachs. 

Cas’ voice comes through the sound of the water falling around them. There is longing there. A kind of raw hope, uncovered.

“Dean—”

Dean draws him in closer, urging him forward. Trying to get Cas to fuck him again. 

“It doesn’t matter,” he tells him, “it doesn’t matter.”

“Dean, I—”

“Cas,” he says, and he isn’t in the cage or the bar or the forest. His voice sounds broken, “Please.”

Cas moves again. Once. Twice. Rhythm slow and deep. Dean moves with him, watching ice frost across the mirror over Cas’ shoulder. He groans and wraps his arms tighter around Cas’ neck, their reflection cut through by the glittering spread of ice. 

He feels the heat the same way you do when you've just come inside out of the cold. The water and the steam. Cas’ mouth on his. His own body chilled through, over-sensitive. Tipping his head back, gasping at the scrape of teeth along his collarbone, Cas’ tongue hot at the junction of his neck and shoulder. 

Inside his chest, the molten core of him, burning. Like cities falling. Like pressing your hand to frozen steel. Like stepping inside out of a snow storm. The gentle warmth of the room just on this side of unbearable, after becoming accustomed to the cold.

Steam collects along the ceiling and it looks like snow falling in the distance, that clouded haze stretching down from the heavens. The earth reaching up to meet it. 

Cas moves inside him, stirring a sound from the back of his throat. The haze of desire sparking in his belly, rising to his lips. Snowfall, backwards. The heat building low in his gut and tumbling out of him. A frozen litany from his open mouth. Heat becoming steam becoming clouds, condensing across the ceiling. Becoming snow. Falling down and melting and falling down again. 

Cas changes his rhythm and Dean throws his head back, groaning. He feels the water on his skin. He feels snow. Cas’ mouth is close to his ear, his voice dragged up from somewhere deep in his chest, grip tight on Dean’s thighs. “Louder. ”

Dean’s mouth opens in a ragged gasp. His skin, soft and pliant, begins to freeze over. He moans again and he can feel the cold travelling up his legs where they’re wrapped around Cas’ hips, through his chest and down his arms, until he can only feel his body in the places where Cas is touching him. The heat of his hands and the sound of his voice, saying, “Again.”

The wet slap of skin against skin echoes off of the tiles. Dean has the fleeting thought that they need to be quiet—that someone will hear—and then he’s tasting the sharp sound of Cas’ name on his tongue and he isn’t thinking at all. 

Cas says, close, breathless. “I’ve got you.” One of his hands moves to the small of Dean’s back, holding him up. Bracing him.

Dean gives himself over to it. He says Cas’ name, over and over again, and then he says something else that isn’t his name, but could be. He feels his back arch against the palm of Cas’ hand, he feels the insides of his thighs seize around Cas’ hips, the curve of his elbow where it’s hooked around Cas’ neck. The palm of his own hand pressed flat to Cas chest, where he can feel his heartbeat like an open flame. 

Cas says it again. “I’ve got you,” and then he says Dean’s name, and then he says, “I’ve got you. I’m right here. I’ve got you.” Holding him through it, riding it out. Dean’s fist in his hair and his face pressed hot into Cas’ neck, shuddering, open-mouthed. “I’ve got you.”

Flash of white, light in his eyes— 

And then he’s back in Cas’ arms, staring at the blurry outlines of their bodies in the mirror above the sink, as his body shudders and stills. Condensation beads across his skin, the heat of the water sends steam into the air. Cas says, once more, “I’ve got you,” low under his breath, barely a whisper. He holds Dean for a moment longer, and then he steps away from the wall, making space for Dean to carefully lower himself down. 

Dean goes slow with it, giving his legs a moment to take his own weight. One of his feet has fallen asleep. Pins and needles. He rubs at the muscle of his thigh, working to get the blood flowing again. 

Cas steps back, his eyes dark, regarding Dean. 

Dean glances up, blinking water from his lashes, “What?”

“Nothing,” Cas tells him. “You’re very beautiful.” There’s heat to it, subdued. And there’s something about his eyes, a strange softness, like he’s watching mountains rise from the earth; ash in the air. 

Dean rolls his eyes, looking away. “Shut up.” It feels present in the bathroom with them, time stretching out like the Rocky Mountains. Tectonic plates pushing up beneath their feet. Ice ages and extinctions. The sun, a bright pin-prick of light, winking out. He rubs at the ache starting to build in his lower back, shifting his bare feet on the wet tile so that he can shake the static tingle from one leg and then the other, head ducked beneath the water, not looking at Cas. “I’ll tell you what, though,” a soft, low laugh, a dull pain in the back of his throat, “I’m getting too old for this.”

Cas’ calloused palm falls to the curve of Dean’s waist. He brushes his thumb along the barreled edge of his ribcage, and a cool shiver of relief starts to spread across Dean’s skin. He stills. His body going warm and weightless, swaying back into the gravity of their bodies, this close, protected space between them. 

Cas doesn’t pull his hand away, “You aren’t old,” he says, soft.  

Dean’s eyes have closed, he leans into the touch. “Yeah okay,” he says, “but I’m getting there.” Cas hums a low note of acknowledgement, the touch of his hand still improbably warm against Dean’s skin. Dean leans into it. Cas’ palm, and the suspended feeling of time stretching between them. He feels like he barely breathes. “You are too, right?”

Cas reaches behind him to turn off the shower. The bathroom echoes into silence as he admits, “I am a little.”  

There’s a familiar patch of grey hair coming in along his temples. Dean reaches out to comb his fingers lightly through it. “You told Jimmy Novak that his body wouldn’t age.”

Cas’ eyes are soft, watching him. “I did.” 

“And Uriel and Zachariah both kept their vessels for centuries.” He hesitates, “But you’re getting older. Why?”

Cas’ hand moves from his grip on Dean’s waist to rest against the plate of his chest, his thumb sweeping through the sparse spread of fine blond hair. 

He says, his voice very gentle, “I fell in love with you.”

He knows. 

Of course he knows. 

Cas is saying it. 

And he knows. 

And it’s the end of the world. 

They stand together, static. Cas’ hand over Dean’s heart, Dean’s chest tight, his eyes open. He feels like he might laugh. Or cry. The beginnings of each bubbling up in the back of his throat. There is a feeling deep inside of him, like the cage is slowly cracking open. He holds it shut. Holds the moment before him in the palms of his aching hands. Cas’ body close to his, the humid air, and cold tile beneath their feet. The earth beneath them, still turning. The bunker around them with its lights on. Everything in this moment.

“I—” Dean steels himself. He keeps the door between himself and Micheal firmly closed, he keeps it all in the hollow of his hands. “Me too.”

Cas leans forward and kisses him. Carefully, at just the corner of his mouth. Everything between them is perfectly still. 

Cas says, “I know.”

“Not new but feeling new.” 

Dean looks around the meeting hall. The room is full of strangers. He takes a breath and it tastes like copper on his tongue. There’s something charged to the air, a soft hum, the lines of him hard and solid; everything else noise. He's done this before. He can do it again— my name’s Dean and I’m an alcoholic—  

“My Dad’s back.” The first confession. And then the rest comes easier, stranger’s faces turned towards his, the coffee pot dripping softly in the background. “We thought he was dead. For years we thought he was dead. But now he’s back and he’s drinking.” His breath pushed out, a subtle stirring around the room, a flicker of recognition. “I thought I’d never see him again, I thought it was over, that he—” It catches in his throat. He clears it away, “I didn’t think we’d be here again. But now he’s back and it’s like nothing has changed.”

The room is laid out differently than his homegroup, long tables squared off from each other bordering the room. Dean’s seat is close to the door, his back to the wall. Hands smoothed over the rough wood in front of him. He looks down at them. The scars across his knuckles and the scars cut into the tabletop. The scratched edge of a broken ballpoint. His voice feels indistinct in his chest, like it can’t quite fill up the rest of him. 

“He’s drinking all the time, and he’s angry all the time. My brother’s angry and my mom is…” He reaches for the right way to say it. What is Mary? “She can’t handle it. I had to send my kid out of the house because—” he cuts himself off, fingers chapped, still red from the cold. He tastes it again, blood on his tongue. Revelation bubbling up inside of him, spilling out, “I’m so fucking sick of watching this damn disease eat him alive, you know? And I’m sick of watching him let it. My whole damn life, that's all he’s done, and every time I think things are gonna be different it just…” 

He shakes his head. Shakes it off. Keeps going. 

“I don’t know how to handle it, but I’ve got to because that’s what I do. My brother’s pissed. My mom’s just—she doesn’t know. Nobody knows what to do except me. Because I’m always the one who handles it. Handles him. That’s all I’ve done my whole life, is handle it—or try to. But I must never get it right, because we always end up here no matter what I do.”

Here in this room. Here at the end of the world. 

It feels like it’s going to swallow him whole. Or like it already has. His red hands. His beating heart. Counting down the measures until it stops. 

“Why’s it gotta be me? Why do I have to be the one who—” The revelation. The confession. Blood on his hands. Copper on his tongue. Glaciers moving, the universe tilting. Cas’ hand on the back of his neck. 

“I feel so fucking helpless. And I’m angry. I’m angry like he is, only I can’t do anything about that either. I’m so fucking angry. I feel like that’s gonna eat me too. Like I’m just going to keep going until there isn’t anything left.” He drags in another breath, feels it fill and then hollow out his chest. “Only I can’t be mad at anyone, because I’m the one who’s supposed to keep things balanced, keep the peace. And I used to do that. I used to be so damn good at it, and I felt like I could do it forever. Like the only two things I knew how to do was handle my dad and drink. But now. I wanna do something else. And it’s too late.”

A beat of silence. An echo. 

“Thanks Dean.” 

The next share begins. 

Dean watches the shape of the speaker’s mouth, her words half-distorted, sound not quite lined up as she gives her name and then pauses, running her neat manicure over the wood grain in the table.

She says, “My mom died right around this time last year,” and her voice catches and stretches, reflected light, “We had a… Difficult relationship. Co-dependent, I guess. Mixed up.” The room shifts again. The woman smiles, almost. Something soft about it. Tempered down. “Like you couldn’t ever quite tell which of us was the parent and which was the kid.”

The woman's hair is blond, and she's wearing a black coat with a high collar. Her nails are a glossy nude color. Her words carve a familiar shape in the air.

“She was my best friend, and she was the first person to break my heart,” she laughs, soft. Glass falling against itself. Sunlight. “And I never knew how to talk to her.” Another shift. Those same nails run back over a groove from somebody’s keys, gouged into the table. “I think when you start drinking at a young age you just don’t learn those skills.” 

She looks across the room, at the different faces turned in her direction. 

“I remember when I was younger and when I was drinking I used to feel like we were the same age, like we were sisters or twins instead of mother and daughter. Now she’s dead and I’m sober and I feel like a damn toddler. I don’t know how to feel any of my feelings about her, but they’re all right here and I get trapped by it. Hating her. Loving her.” She trails off, considering the scratch on the table in front of her. “I’m the only one who ever saw her at her worst, but that meant I saw her at her best too.”

The room falls to silence for a minute, uncertain. The woman knocks her knuckles against the tabletop. 

“That’s all I’ve got.” 

Everyone says, “Thanks Susan,” and Dean says it too, after a beat. 

She catches up with him in the parking lot afterwards, snow in her hair. Both of their breath forming clouds in front of their faces. Dean’s got his keys in his fist, fumbling cold to find the right one, and she lays her hand on his arm. 

He startles at it. Says, automatic, “Thanks for your share.”

The woman nods. A group of people stand just beyond her shoulder, smoking, shifting their feet against the cold, tiny red-orange fires standing out in the night.

She squeezes his arm, once, and then her hand falls away and she tucks it back in the pocket of her coat. “Keep coming back, okay? It’ll get easier.”

Dean’s chest is so, so tight. A single spark dances out of the corner of his eye.

“Yeah,” he tells her, keys in hand, voice thick, “Okay.”

In all their years in Lebanon, Dean has never seen snow like this. Deep drifts on either side of the road, tall piles pushed by snow plows. The Impala glides silently through all of it, the quiet hush and the soft white shine. It’s been dark for hours but it feels like twilight, with the sky bright around the edges, the road lit by reflected moonlight. He thinks about Sam saying, how does Dad disappearing in 2003 reverse climate change?

The sky falls quietly all around the car. Stars and snow. It doesn’t seem that crazy to him, that moving John around the board could disrupt the whole world. Hasn’t that been Dean’s entire life? The first half going through it, and the second catching up. Everything Before and After.

Before Mary. After the fire. Before Sam. After Stanford. Before before before. After after after. 

Before John and after John and back before him again. Before a lot of things. After. 

He spreads his hands on the steering wheel, the night sky like a lid that’s been screwed on over the world, stars like holes some kid had punched in the top. A whole world inside a jar; inside a car, driving down a dark road, headed towards After.

But this time. What’s this time? Before, what? Before Michael? Before Dean. How is this supposed to end? How’s he just—how’s he supposed to leave them all? Cas, Jack, Sam, Mary. After. 

A car on the highway, all the lights going out. Holes punched in the top so they can breathe. Will they be able to breathe? After he’s—. 

He feels his hands tighten on the wheel, like he might be able to—. He just wants. He wants to hold on, hold out as long as possible. Slow everything down until he knows what Now feels like. Until he can breathe for the first time in his life.

The snow is thicker outside of town, plowed once down the center line earlier in the day, then left to crush down into a thick sheet of ice. They never got snow tires. Maybe tomorrow they’ll go into town. He inches slowly along. 

The front wheel of the Impala catches suddenly on an uneven patch of asphalt, and Dean has just a second to register that he’s driven slightly off the unseen edge of the road before the car begins to swerve too far towards the right. He turns the wheel towards the left, gentle as he can with his heartbeat jacking up in his chest, pumping the brakes off and on to try to keep from sliding. 

The wheels come up out of the rut they’d been caught in, but then the whole car veers across the empty street into the oncoming lane. Dean edges the wheel slightly back towards the right, and then he’s swerving towards the ditch again and has to re-correct. 

And his mind is—. It doesn’t even happen in slow motion, it just happens slow. The wheels skidding across the quiet, icy road. Dean with his hands on the wheel, snow still falling on the empty highway. Dean with his hands on the wheel. His car sliding slowly out of control. Dean with his hands on the wheel. 

He’s not going fast enough for his life to flash before his eyes, not in any real kind of danger. He doesn’t even get that full blown adrenaline rush, just a practical itinerary of what to do when this happens automatically looping in the back of his mind. Pump the breaks, steer gently, don’t freeze up—and all he thinks is, I’m almost home. 

Then the guardrail comes up too close on his left side, and he finally has to ease all the way down on the break to keep from hitting it. The front wheels of the Impala grind to a stop, but the back wheels keep right on sliding, sweeping the car around in a full half circle before they finally catch and everything comes to a halt with the Impala parked diagonally across both lanes, hood facing back in the direction that he’d come. 

Dean sits there for just a second, his back against the seat rest, his eyes on the road. He feels his heart still beating beneath his breast. He lets a slow breath unfurl into the silent cab.

“Okay.”

Headlights shine around the curve up ahead. He reaches out and moves the Impala into reverse, pulling an easy three-point turn so that he’s pointed in the right direction. Then eases down on the gas and heads towards home.

Sam looks up when he comes in the door. “How was it?” 

Dean says, “I want to tell Dad about Michael”

Sam looks alarmed. “Dude, what—Are you fucking crazy? No. ”

Dean’s got the keys to the Impala in his pocket. He pulls them out and hangs them on the little hook, next to Cas’ keys to his truck and one of the spares to the bunker. 

“I didn’t say I was gonna.”

“Good,” says Sam, “Jesus.” He starts to sit back down. 

“I just.” Dean turns to him, “Remember those times when he was good? When you could talk to him and he’d just get it?”

Sam blinks, “ No. ”

“He was, though. He was good. Sometimes. Maybe you didn’t see it and maybe it didn’t last long but Sam, I swear to god, some days having him in my corner, it made me feel like I could do damn near just about anything. Like everything was going to work out fine. No matter what.”

Sam shakes his head, hair falling into his face a little. “Dean…”

“I swear it was like this switch would flip and he’d be just so easy to talk to. Felt like he had all the answers. Like I could tell him anything.” 

“Uh huh,” says Sam, “and how’s that working for you?”

Dean says stubbornly, “He was good sometimes.”

“Yeah,” Sam tells him, “but the problem was you never knew when that same switch would turn on, and when it would turn back off again. For years I watched you try to figure it out. Try to do everything you could to get him to be proud of you or hell, to—to. Just to like you, even. I watched you tip toe around the things you thought would set him off and,” he takes a breath, “you know how much of it worked? Nothing. None of it. Because eventually, anything you did, even if it was right the week before, he’d find some way to make it wrong. I watched you give him everything, and it wasn’t enough.” 

Dean says, “Maybe it’s different this time.”

“God,” Sam scoffs. He runs his hands back through his hair, tugging at the knots. He looks a little like shit. Shadows under his eyes. “You always do this. You let him in too close and then he guts you. I swear the worst times weren’t even when he was mean, they were when he was kind.”

“So what,” Dean can hear his voice rising. He lowers it back to a whisper, “I’m supposed to wish, what? That he’d been shittier to us? That there wasn’t ever good stuff? That we didn’t have—”

“Dean, of course not. Just. You’ve gotta be able to see how that would have been easier, right? That what makes it painful isn’t that he hated us. It’s ‘cause he—”

“Stop.”

Sam is looking dead at him. 

Dean takes a breath. “Just, stop.” 

Sam sighs, he turns back to the stack of books in front of him. To the notebook filled with tight enochian and an overlay of different sigils and diagrams with different parts annotated or scribbled out.

“Fine. But you give him any length of rope and he’ll hang you with it. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but it always comes back around.”

Dean is leaning up against the tailgate of the Impala, illicitly smoking a cigarette when he hears the garage door open behind him. He fumbles to stub it out against the tread of his boot, but then he hears John’s voice, saying, “You got an extra?”

Dean looks up and there he is, standing in the space between two of the cars wearing the coat Dean left at a rest stop in Montana eighteen years ago, his hands in his pockets.

“Yes Sir.” 

The Impala shifts as John settles in beside him. Cigarette between calloused fingers, smoke cutting through the cloud of his breath, both spilling into the air. He taps the tailgate one-handed saying, “You’ve done a good job with her. Clean.”

Caught off guard, Dean answers, “Yes Sir,” again, automatic. 

Dean watches him in profile as he takes a drag, the hot orange burn of the cigarette against the chilled air of the garage. His hands curl cold in the pockets of his coat. The same one Jack has, in a different color. 

A memory surfaces. Summer 2001. John leaning up against the tailgate of the Impala, still dressed from a hunt with a lit cigarette in one hand and his face turned towards the setting sun. How tall he had looked, broad and handsomely grizzled in his blood-flecked, tan Carhart and two days of stubble. 

Dean remembers how he’d come around the corner of their hotel and come up short, caught with the late-evening sunlight in his eyes. He’d raised his hand to block it out, and seen John smoking against the Impala. The all-American picture he made. Some roughneck in faded Levis and biker boots three sizes bigger than Dean’s. Cigarette in his hands, staring off at the horizon. 

The kind of pride and awe that had welled up in him. His Dad. 

The image shines golden and heavy in the air before him for a minute, and then its light fades. Another memory takes its place.

The cold depths of that same winter. John with his weight collapsed on the bumper of the car, stripped down to his boxers, aluminum can dangling from his hand. His concave shoulders and swollen belly. The gaunt shells of his cheeks. His arms, usually so strong, hanging frail at his sides. The sour, unwashed state of him, staring off into the empty parking lot, his eyes unfocused. Defeated. Dean's dad.

It feels like it had been a dream. But it happened. He knows it happened. 

He remembers that the Impala had blocked them partially from sight of the motel, but he could still make out a few lit windows. How John had taken another swallow of whatever was in the can and mumbled something incomprehensible about Mary, or bitter about Sam. And when Dean had taken his arm to lead him back to their room, John had seemed startled by his presence. Dean had told himself he was tired, worn out, and tamped down the shock of adrenaline which suggested suddenly and persistently that John didn’t recognize him. He had brushed the feeling aside, but he hadn’t forgotten.

He knows that time passed between these two memories, but when he searches for it he comes up blank. He knows what happened between each of these moments, but when he thinks about that first year without Sam, he just sees these two memories pressed up against each other, like a smash cut or a book closing. Cut to black. 

John standing tall against the fading sunlight, and John crumpled over in his underwear, slurring something incomprehensible, blind drunk.

Without Mary. Without Sam. Just him and Dean alone in a frozen parking lot on the side of an anonymous highway. A pinprick in the dark, a single wavering light. 

For a second, that same feeling of helplessness wells up in him. Like he’s staring at the blank screen of John’s cell phone without knowing who to call. 

Dean flicks ash from the tip of his cigarette, “I got in an accident on the way home.”

John says, “Yeah?” 

Dean takes another drag, saying into the smoke, “Someone plowed like an idiot, caught the Impala’s tire on the edge of the asphalt. Hit ice when I pulled back onto the road.”

“What did you do?” John throws out the question, a familiar routine. And Dean answers. 

“Took my feet off the gas, pumped the brakes.” He breathes in smoke. Then the confession, “She still spun out pretty good. Had to put my foot down there at the end, so she wouldn’t hit the guardrail.”

John nods his head, considering. “Good thing you were going slow.”

“Yeah,” says Dean, “good thing.”

He sinks back into the memory. That hunt the year Sam left for school. Staring down at John’s cellphone in an empty parking lot, his fingers half-frozen, trying to figure out who to call.

Dean had smashed up his own phone on a hunt a couple months earlier, and they’d been too broke that year to replace it. John sometimes said that he would get to it, but mostly he said that it wasn’t a priority. He had all of the numbers saved that they needed, and who was Dean gonna call anyways?

But then. When John had blacked out in that motel parking lot, stars spinning above their heads, the moon a frozen disk in the sky, Dean had powered on his phone and found that John had almost no contacts at all. Just a jumble of unsaved numbers, a tangled call history that he couldn’t parse out. Hands shaking slightly, he’d dialed a number he had memorized, but the line rang out into an automated the number you have dialed message. And Dean had hung up and convinced himself that it had just gone to voicemail. 

Except. The thing with John had happened again a few weeks later. There’d been a string of good days, of good cases and easy wins, and Dean was high off of that and the relief of the winter finally beginning to thaw. John had told him they were taking a case out in Idaho, but Dean had already promised one of their contacts he’d meet her down in Oregon to help with some other case. John had nodded sagely when Dean told him. Dean had felt a thrum of anxiety as he’d filled him in, but it was an important contact and Dean so rarely went against John’s wishes. The hunt in Idaho shoulda been a basic salt and burn too, which John could easily handle on his own. 

It had gone fine. The conversation went well. John was clearly displeased by the change of plans, but he’d taken it in stride. And then later that night, he’d got black out drunk in their motel room and posted up in a worn leather armchair with a bottle of whiskey at his feet and the T.V. on in the background. There was the familiar buzz in the air that there always was when John drank like this, but that was normal too. 

Halfway through the night, Dean had picked up John’s phone, asking if he could call ahead to confirm his rendezvous with his contact for the next day. 

John’s blood-shot eyes had landed on him, suddenly as sharp and furious as Dean’d ever seen them. 

Dean flicks ash from his cigarette. His hand looks like somebody elses’ and he can’t remember exactly what happened next. Remembers already forgetting it as it was happening, the jarring way that John had said, “You don’t care about this family,” and “I can’t believe how selfish you’re being.” And how trying to explain had just turned it into, “I can’t believe you’re trying to make me feel guilty.”  

And how nothing—. How nothing Dean said had made it any better, even after he’d caught on enough to try to de-escalate. Keeping his tone level and his movements calm, until John had stumbled up from the chair, swinging blindly for him. Dean had dropped the phone down on a side table and taken a quick step back. John’s heavy fist had closed over his cell phone, but the lubering momentum of his stride carried him completely through the little side table. The wood splintered easily. John’s eyes were red and mean when he looked at Dean, and Dean’d gotten that feeling again, that John hadn’t known him. 

Dean had spent the night sitting awake in the cold, cramped motel bathtub, with John sleeping it off in the next room. Arms wrapped around his knees, he’d felt the rise and fall of his shaking chest and thought—it had been an accident. John had miscalculated in that last moment when he had grabbed for him. Dean must’ve—he must not have said the right thing. John must have misunderstood. Or maybe John hadn’t. The empty bathroom echoed all around him. It had been an accident. 

John had behaved like he didn’t remember what had happened the next morning. Dean never found out if his contact in Oregon had caught the monster.

The smoke from his cigarette eats away at the tip. 

John says, “You don’t brake on ice.”

“What?” Dean looks up, lost. 

John repeats, calmly, “You don’t brake on ice. That’s what you do in rain, if you’re hydroplaning.” He takes a drag, “With ice, you don’t break. You take your foot off the gas and just try to steer your way out of it. If you brake then you’ll slide, so you can’t brake at all.”

He pauses, cigarette almost burnt down to ash, cupped in the palm of his calloused hand. He looks so sturdy then. Solid. Calm. Nothing like he had that Winter, nothing like he had that morning in their kitchen. 

“I remember driving this icy mountain once when you boys were pretty young, asleep in the backseat.” Dean gets that tingling feeling he does sometimes, when he hears John talk about their childhood and realizes that he must remember it too, “We hit this patch of ice and started to slide,” he takes a drag, “took everything in me not to step on the brakes.”

Sam saying, the worst times weren’t even when he was mean. 

The age-worn screen of a desktop computer in a public library, Dean’s hand sweaty on the mouse, scrolling through the search results for Alcoholic Dementia. Alcohol can lead to cognitive impairments and mental health disorders.

Sam’s phone ringing out to the same recording, the number you have dialed is no longer in service. 

One of the garage lights above their heads begins to flicker. Dean glances towards it. The bulb flares once and then the filaments pop, burning out. 

“You’ve got a real wiring issue here, huh?” 

The question comes calmly, without malice. He glances back at his father, “Uh, yeah. It’s on the list.”

John stands, grinding ash against concrete with the bottom of his shoe, “I guess it’s hard to put in a work order for a place like this.” He pauses for a moment, considering the cold air of the garage, and then he lays a warm hand briefly on Dean’s shoulder, “I’ll see you inside.” 

Dean nods. He hunkers down. John takes his hand away and heads towards the door. 

Dean watches him go. He sees the icy mountain from John's story and all he can think is that if it’d been him and Jack in the car, they woulda slid off that cliff every single damn time, Dean’s foot on the brakes, trying to save them. 

The garage door closes behind John, sending the single hanging bulb above the doorway swinging. Dean watches the arc of the light, the way that it hangs in the air following its pendulum swing. A dripping, slow-motion tendril reaching out into the room, reflecting across the car’s windshields. Like those sparklers you can get as a kid.

He starts to feel it, that creep up the back of his neck. The tingling at his spine. He opens his mouth and he can taste the pulse of the air, how it crackles around him. Coming alive. 

He looks down at the smeared ashes of John’s cigarette, still crushed against the concrete floor, and hears the crunch of glass on pavement, sees the shattered mess of his cell phone from years before. He rubs at his eyes. What does it matter? 

But he knows it does. 

That’s the problem really, more than anything. The knowing. If he could just take everything that’s happened to him, everything that’s happened between them, put it in a box somewhere, shove it down and close the lid. If he could give all of those pieces to someone else. A different version of him. One who hated John or didn’t care about him. It would be easier. It would be easier to hate him. He’d have some place for it all to go. 

From the corner of his eye, he sees the next light closest to him flare, filaments sparking and then separating from the bulb, twisting through the air to join with the first. Reaching out to draw shapes across the ceiling, dripping down the walls. Burning the shadows away.

Dean leans back against the car. He feels old. And he feels young. That helpless, full body sense of uncertainty and indecision. Tired. Giving up the fight. 

Another light goes, closer to him. And then another and another, moving down the garage towards him in a wave, reflected off of the windows of the cars and the metal faces of tool cabinets. There’d be something beautiful about it if it didn’t mean he was going crazy.

Alcohol can lead to cognitive impairments and mental health disorders.

It doesn’t seem fair, really, to stop before it was too late, and then to have it be too late anyways.

But none of this is fair. It doesn't have a point to it. No neat, natural conclusion. There aren’t—

And then the first windshield blows out. The force of it rocks him up against the Impala, glass cutting into his forearms as he throws them up to cover his face. Another crash, another window. He’s on his feet, ducking behind the nearest workbench just as something crashes to the floor right where he’d been standing. The garage shudders, walls bowing inwards, tools clattering to the floor, car alarms blaring. 

The radio in the car closest to him, a 2002 green Subaru Outback that Sam had rescued, switches on. A high, keening static shriek quickly joined by the radio of the truck beside it. And then it’s every radio in every car, tuned to each other in that same screaming, piercing note. 

Dean tries to run, he tries to put his hands over his ears, but the floor beneath his feet is cracking, concrete heaving up and then buckling down. The force of it slams him to the ground. His head smacks into something on the way down, smell of blood in his mouth as he struggles to breathe.  The last thing he sees before he goes under is the blurry view of someone’s feet, moving towards him. He thinks he hears his name. And then he doesn’t hear anything at all. 

Chapter Text

The first night that Dean had been apart from John, he had dreamt of horses. 

In the dream, he and John had been riding beside each other on a pair of sleek, black mustangs. Like something out of a Western classic. 

Hooves churning the dirt beneath them without sound, only the clouded snort and pull of their breaths against the black night before them. 

John rode slightly ahead of Dean, the flanks of his mount slick with sweat. There wasn’t any color in the dream, but Dean could see the whites of the beast’s eyes, and the sharp glint of his fathers smile. 

He thought it might be raining, though he couldn’t feel it.

A shape had loomed abruptly out of the darkness before them. Tall and indistinct, surrounded suddenly by a heavy mist that had not been there moments before. 

John had pulled up short, shouting something that he could not hear, and then Dean was ahead of him, gun in hand. The pearl handle of his revolver a perfect line of teeth in the night. Whatever was ahead of him had turned. He could feel it turn. 

He fired a shot; his eyes came open.

And then he was back in his body with some guy jerking him roughly off in a dark alley, shoved up against the wall of a bar with John inside. Dean so drunk the stars were spinning, a stranger coming on his shoes, rain beating down on his face. His collar damp and scratchy on his neck, the burn of brick against his lower back, where his shirt had pulled up. The water-logged smell of garbage. Rain. 

When he’d gone back inside, John was sitting at the bar, hand on a glass, flipping through the pages of his journal. 

“We’ve got a case.”

Dean eased himself down on the stool beside him, praying that the dark would hide the state of him. 

But John didn’t so much as glance over. So it didn’t matter. 

“Right,” he could feel the rasp of his words at the back of his throat, “Okay, I’ll grab our stuff from the motel and meet you back at—”

John stood from his stool, draining his drink. 

“Don’t bother,” he said, “It’s nothing I can’t handle on my own.” He set the glass back down on the bar, sheen of whiskey wet at the bottom, “Keep following that pack up the coast. They’re getting desperate, bound to slip up soon.”

You can spend your life answering, Yes Sir, so often that it becomes automatic. 

Dean had said it, “Yes Sir.”

John’s words floated on the surface, they hadn’t yet sunk in. 

John clapped him on the shoulder without looking, digging the Impala's key out of his pocket. He flipped it carelessly on to the bar. 

“Good,” he said, already walking away.

Dean stared after him. Mouth still tingling, jacket still soaked through. The door had shut. 

“Bye, Dad.”

“You want another?”

The bartender was back, looking at him expectantly. 

Dean said, “Yeah, yeah man. Thanks.”

The bartender cleared the empty glass and turned away. Dean stared at the faint ring of condensation where it had rested. 

He thought of the horses. 

He’d fallen asleep that night in an empty motel room, plunged straight back into that same dream. Riding behind John in the rain, raising his gun. 

He’d woken before he could tell if he had hit whatever he’d been shooting at.

The first thing he had noticed when hunting alone was how much easier it was to move through the world without John Winchester. Fewer fights. Fewer doors slammed in his face. Silence lasting for long, untested hours. He hadn’t known how easy it could be. The right word here, a smile there, and people just bent for him. Felt like he was on a hot streak, sometimes, like he couldn’t stop winning whatever hand he played. Only instead of cards it was stranger’s eyes, their attention, conversation. He was holding all of them. 

And they bent. And they wanted to. And it was easy.

People liked him. 

And that made it easier for him too. To let his guard down, his gaze linger. What was the harm? Let some guy at a dark rest stop “teach” him how to build a small fire, then press him back into a cheap hotel mattress. A deep voice, a low laugh, big hands guiding his own, here like this . A spark in the darkness. 

It was easy to be taught things, to learn. To let the tide pull him down long stretches of black highway between pin-prick-lit road houses. Other hands. Other voices, laughter. It was easy. So fucking easy. To get them talking, to get them laughing, to brush his knuckles against denim beneath a water-ringed table. To lean in instead of pulling away. 

People liked him. He hadn’t known that before.

He’d let guys teach him how to play pool and how to shoot. Or else he’d show them up and show them how to throw a knife or hotwire a car.

Everyone liked him. He didn’t know everyone liked him. It made things easier. 

Jobs solved quicker, leads dispatched personally to his private number. And then all of a sudden he was making calls, and he was sending tips, getting pulled onto cases or called for support. Sometimes just called to say, “whatcha up to?” or “get over here.” To answer a purposely composed, “what are you wearing,” an in-joke that was spreading quickly between all of them that winter, but that more often than not led to a liquor-stained night under neon lights, spread out beneath more stars than he had ever seen. Head spinning, someone else’s skin salty on his tongue, his hands cold, his chest warm, still in on the joke. 

And there were women, too. Female hunters, suddenly everywhere. Cleaning their guns on grimy diner tables, signs flipped around after hours. Laughing around cigarettes, lipstick prints on water glasses. Loud up at the bar, insistent on, no this is how you kill it, don’t fucking play with me . Telling stories or sharing scars, sometimes lending him their suture kits or stitching him back together. Rough hands holding his. Calloused fingers.

There’d been one night, early on with a woman in their group. Someone Dean had asked about something. Maybe about the case he was on or the local history. After she’d given her answer he had leaned in to brush his finger against her waist and she’d told him, straight-forward. “Honey, you don’t have to do that.” 

And then he hadn’t.

Instead he had given her a haircut. His hands calloused, his hands rough. Fingers gentle in her hair, soft where they brushed over the nape of her neck. Afterwards, she had looked at herself in the mirror, smiled at him in the reflection. And he had known that she’d been telling the truth.

And then he didn’t offer anymore. 

And the women in their group, the different girls he met along the road, they didn’t stop liking him for it.

If anything, they seemed to like him more. He got pulled into more groups, into greater confidence; companionship. Setting bones in the shitty, under-lit bathrooms of various bars, joining in drunken arguments about movies or music or fervent chourouses of, you’re too fucking good for him. The earnest call and response of he would be fucking insane not to call you, I swear to god if I see him again I’m going to key his fucking car.

And then, Jesus Christ, your ass looks amazing. 

And then, I’ve never done this before, will you hold my hand? 

And him saying, It’s the fucking jeans, and him saying, Hey, it’ll be okay, it’s not even that bad. See? It’s not even that bad. 

Falling asleep with gentle fingers carding through his hair, TV on in the background, whatever conversation had started in the bar continuing on above his head in lowered voices. 

And it hadn’t come at a price. 

He still hunted with the men in these groups. Still spent nights in their cars on miserable rain-drenched stake-outs, pressed against walls beneath stars, the twilight gloom or gasping, twisted fabric of their beds. They still had things to teach him, they still had questions to ask. 

Sometimes when he’d nod off on a highway, he’d wake with his head resting in someone’s lap, and a wide, flat hand cupped around the base of his skull, thumb sweeping through the fine, short hairs at the base of his neck. Voice above him saying deep, rough, low, c’mon boy, let’s get you to bed . 

Sometimes he pulled bodies twice his size out of the mouths of vampire nests. Sometimes it was someone else with their head in his lap, drifting off or bleeding out. Dean white-knuckling the wheel racing the speed limit, or keeping the car steady on curving country roads so that everyone else could sleep.  

Whatever he’d thought he’d have to pay for this, he didn’t. 

And the image he’d had in his head of the prototypical hunter melted away.

John’s world had been flat. It had been empty. Dean’s world was easy. It was full. People liked him.  

But Dean’s world was also John.   

And that came back for him. 

One night he dreamt again about the horses and the gun going off, and the next morning, John had called.  

So Dean went. 

And here was the trade off. Here was the cost. Different road-houses, different bars, different circles. The world spun back down to a thin, gray line. A tiny wire walked on heavy work-boots and cigarette smoke. Stale, recycled conversation doled out in sparse, quick bursts over miles of empty, stretching highway. 

Different. Separate.

Some contact of John’s eyeing him up, saying, “You got any friends in that area?” 

Dean saying, “I was just passing through.”

John looking over at him from the driver’s seat as late night bled into early morning, saying, “What are you always on that damn phone for?” Dean’s eyes so pinched and tired he couldn’t see straight. 

And then he realized that John saw it too. How he had kept them so carefully insular. The same roads and bars and diners. Men that looked and talked and sounded like men. Who looked at Dean a little too long. Women behind bars, carrying pads to take orders, serving drinks. 

Different. Separate. 

And Dean would dream of the horses. 

The trade-off. 

His phone smashed to pieces on the side of a highway. A broken glass and an easy laugh snatched from a bar bathroom. Hundreds of photos lost beneath the heel of a badly placed boot.

Different. Separate. 

Wheels of the Impala passing by a half-empty motel where Dean had once let a girl crawl into his lap so she could carefully sweep a smear of sticky cotton candy lip gloss across his mouth. Kissing her after, just briefly, very gently on the corner of her mouth, too overcome for words. The laughter that had peeled out of her, leaning back in with the tube and applicator, telling him to hold the fuck still so she could re-do it. 

Somewhere else he’d got his ear pierced. 

The first place he’d been held all through the night. 

John saying, “Who are you gonna call anyways?”

And then he’d sleep again and in his dream he’d be riding just in front of John, enough so that he couldn’t see where John’s gun was pointing and he’d hear the shot fire just as he opened his eyes.

They’d even hit that rest stop, eventually, the first one Dean had crashed at on his first night on his own. Tired and feeling sorry for himself. Letting himself be taught how to make a fire. Letting himself want it. 

John, cutting himself out of his ruined jacket. Dean, knelt down in the thin spread of gray-white ash around the burnt-out fire pit, striking a match against the soul of his boot, the flame eating away at a brittle stack of twigs and yellowed newsprint. Dean knelt beside it, the stars cold and distant above his head. 

The wind had moved unseen through the black trees around them, in a night that felt loud but was somehow impossibly still.

There was never any sound in Dean’s dreams about the horses, but he always knew when the gun went off. 

The thing is. You can touch fire. That lit candle trick kids do sometimes, running black soot streaks onto their fingers, quick through the flame. 

You can touch fire. 

What matters is for how long. 

You can do something once. But you can’t keep doing it over and over and over again. 

Dean had looked into the fire. He’d thought of the horses. He’d thought of Mary. And he felt like he was burning too, just very very slowly, around the edges. 

How do you sculpt an elephant? You start with a block of stone and carve away everything that isn’t an elephant. How do you carve an elephant? With a sharper knife. 

He fires a shot. His eyes come open.

Chapter Text

He comes to slowly, spread out across the forest floor. Hard earth and fine soil sifting through his fingers. 

It isn’t burning anymore. 

The night is dark dark dark but he can feel the trees towering above him. The sway and clink of them. Branches against branches, glass on glass. The hush of leaves falling, falling, all around his body. 

Down. 

Down.

Down.

A fine spray of glass showers across his face, and he finds he can see the reflection of it, even though there isn’t any light. 

It must be a dream. 

He must be dreaming. 

The trees clatter again, divulging a rush of leaves that plummet down to slice and bite into his skin. He hisses at the sting of it, tries to draw himself up but finds that he is pressed down. An unseen force holding him in place. 

A long, deep gash has opened across his chest in a rough-edged, jagged pattern. Blood runs fast from his body and he fights to raise his hand to staunch it, but his fingers clutch gracelessly at the ground. 

What happens when you die in a nightmare? He never knows for sure. 

He’s dreaming, right? 

He must be dreaming. 

He goes back under. 

John had taught him how to change a tire once, very patiently on the side of the road. Lying on the dusty asphalt, working the jack up under the car. 

The memory of it echoes back through time. John’s voice light and easy, his grip steady and sure, even though it was Dean who had been driving. Down in the dirt, saying, Now you’ll know what to do when this happens again.  

Dean waiting on a knife’s edge, bright bubble of adrenaline welling up inside of him, almost afraid to breathe.

He turns his aching head against the ground and he can see them, there between the trees, in and out of focus. An image projected on a flickering screen. Ghosts. 

John with his hand on Dean’s shoulder, lining up the sight of an oversized shotgun against a row of green glass bottles.

Dean’s thin shoulders, his steady child’s hands.

I’m gonna impart to you the wisdom that’s been passed down through generations—you don’t tighten the lugs one at a time, you tighten them a little at a time in a star pattern. Like this. 

John’s hands positioning his elbows. John’s hands on a tire-iron. The earthy smell of asphalt baking.

He watches himself, bleeding out on the forest floor, yards away through the trees. Standing in John’s shadow. The gun too big. His hands too small. Six or seven. 

Why?

John’s voice, low and patient. His hands lifted from Dean’s shoulders, stepping back so he can take the shot. 

If you tighten ‘em one at a time they’ll end up loose. You need to tighten them up all at once to get an equal amount of force on either side of the wheel.

He sees himself pull the trigger. He hears the shot fire. 

And then he feels it hit. 

Dead in the center of him, gnawing into his chest. 

The bullet buries itself. 

And then it shatters. Glass. 

A breath tears into his aching lungs. 

A sound creaks out of him. 

He opens his eyes. 

…

You know how it feels to wake up from a dream?

Floating half in and half out of his body, suspended between realms, slightly above the bed. 

Voices in the other room, talking low. 

How long has he been out?

He reaches out a hand, expecting glass, expecting asphalt, but finds instead the familiar texture of sheets beneath his fingers, realizes with a jolt that he’s in his own bed, and that someone has stripped him of his shirt and jeans and left him in clean, fresh clothes. The walls of his bedroom resolve around him, dim and shadowy before tuning again out of focus. 

It was a dream. 

But that deep, piercing ache is still there. And when he tries to move it worsens. That sharp concussion feeling all throughout his body. He flails clumsily out, a ghost passing through his own body, actions ill-matched to the thoughts slipping through his fingers. The bed feels vast and empty around him, an ocean stretching out and out from the island of his body. He twists again to sit up and the ache turns sharp and sudden. Something flayed. 

What happened? The walls swim. 

As he moves he has the sensation of time slipping. Pain that he feels and forgets and feels again.

He gets a hand on the head of the bed, then braced against the wall. And then he’s trailing down the hallway and finds that his legs can’t completely take his weight. His vision goes white. And then it grays and blackens before hazily defusing into a blurred interpretation of the bunker. He can’t decide if he’s floating or if he’s gonna fall. 

The voices are coming louder now, the sound of someone arguing. 

Cas saying, “ We have to wake him, it’s been too long, ” with something fierce and terrible to it. A catch at the end like he might be close to crying. 

Sam saying, “ We don't know that .”

Dean says, “Hey.” 

They both turn to him. Sam with a hand pressed to his own shoulder, hanging a little awkwardly away from his body, Cas with his face completely drained of color. Expressions an echo of each other. 

Cas’ voice is a whisper. A specter of something, “Dean.”

Dean braces himself against the doorframe. His body shifts and he winces, and then the room splits momentarily in two. Once he’s blinked it back together, Sam is in front of him, hand steady on his shoulder, “Hey,” he says, “hey, easy, okay? Take it easy.”

Dean gets caught between pushing him away and leaning closer into him. Sam’s got the shallow edge of a cut showing above a fresh bandage wrapped around his shoulder. Dean can make out a couple of bloodied fingerprints on the cotton before it disappears under his shirt. 

He opens his mouth. When he swallows to speak he feels the burn on the back of his throat, voice horse as he asks, “What happened?”

Sam’s eyes flicker, shuttering for just a second. “What do you remember?”

Dean looks past him towards Cas, and he—

Cas on the bed, Sam yelling, “hold him down!” John in the doorway. John in the doorway. Thin light from the streetlight cutting a line down a faded motel carpet. Black trees. Red lights flashing a claxon wail against cement walls. A gun. A tire iron. A bright fall day. John in the doorway. Cas on top of him. Pining his shoulder with one hand, his blade in the other, the look on his face cut together by the pulse of emergency lighting between heart-beats of black. Sam saying, “It isn’t going to hold!” John in the doorway. 

“I—”

Cas gripping his face, tight. Everything hot. Everything shimmering; underwater. The blade, sharp and familiar. Pain splitting him open. Holding him down. Sam behind him, drawing large, sweeping sigils across the wall with one hand, grasping his own shoulder with the other. Shouting directions over to Cas, up to his wrists in Dean's blood. The flare and spark of the Angel Blade as it gouged signs into his flesh. Smell of burning. Sound of horses. 

Cas is watching him from the other side of the room, not approaching. “I’m sorry,” he says, voice low, “we had to—there wasn’t time.” 

He isn’t looking at Dean, just the shape of him. Dean tries to find his eyes, but there’s something in them he can’t identify.

And then Mary comes around the corner.

Dean’s swallows, voice small in his chest. “Mom?”

Mary comes around the corner. 

Mary comes around the corner, wiping her hands on a dish towel. For half a second, Dean thinks that it’s oil. But then he blinks and it’s his blood. It’s his blood. 

Mary says, “Hey kiddo.”

Dean reaches out for the cloth automatically, “Christ,” he says, “don’t use tha—fucking OW!” 

A sharp, bright shock of pain sings through him, piercing the thick mist of soft, whispered sounds. The unnoticed cacophony, lattice of faint multi-colored lights and reflected prisms. He doubles over, clutching at his chest. The room swims in and out of focus. In and out of sepia tones and bright technicolor. Waves of panic and nausea threatening to pull him under. He swallows it down. He swallows it down. “What are you doing here?”

Using his clean dish towel to wipe his blood from her hands, Mary says, “They called me. For you.”

Still from across the room, averting his eyes, Cas says, “We had to.” Dean watches him swallow. And then he watches as Cas’ expression shifts to something resolute. When he looks up to meet Dean’s gaze, there’s a quality to him that is irrevocably inhuman, “I cut too deep. You were losing too much blood.”

Dean turns slowly towards Mary. She seems to flicker in front of him, her outline fading in and out. Real and not real. A ghost and his mother. His mother and a ghost. Slowly, like he’s testing it out, he asks, “You gave me stitches?”

“Babygirl,” she says “this was an all hands on deck kind of situation. We gave you stitches.”

“I don’t understand—.” Dean looks to Cas who won’t look at him again, “Couldn’t you heal—”

Cas cuts him off, abrupt. He shakes his head. “I couldn’t,” he says, “We didn’t know if—”

And then he breaks off. Hand coming up across his mouth. Not quick enough to cut off the sound that comes out of him. 

Everyone seems to be breathing like that. 

Choked.

Dean looks between them, “What did I do last night?”

“You tried to kill Cas.” Sam says, after a beat. Brutal. Unvarnished. Without looking away.

Dean’s blood runs cold. “ What? ”

Sam holds up his hands, bartering. “He’s fine,” he says. “It’s okay. He found you in the garage last night—He found Michael.” 

Dread washes over him. “What?”

Sam gestures at Dean’s chest, winching and then rubbing at his shoulder. “Rowena and I haven’t completely finished modifying that anti-possession ward. So you’ve got our latest draft.”

Dean chuckles weakly, a little huff of ha ha ha. Sam looks just about as miserable as he’s ever seen him. Face pulled tense and cut like stone. He’s got that set to his mouth like he’s about to tell Dean to kill whatever they’ve captured, and the look in his eyes that says he wants to let it go.

“It needs work,” Dean tells him. He winces, hand pressed to his stomach. “Damn Cas, you got me pretty good, huh?”

It takes Cas a minute to answer, when he does it’s like it costs him. “It had to be deep enough to take,” he says, voice low, “and we couldn’t. My grace—it made Michael stronger,” he draws a breath, “I couldn’t heal you.”

“Hey,” Dean says quietly, “it’s okay, I’m not—.”

Cas says, “You stopped breathing. I thought you were dead.”

Dean flinches, and then he hisses in pain, staggering forward, clutching at his stomach.

“Hey now,” Mary ducks forward to get her hands on him. “A lot of work went into stitching you up just for you to go and pull ‘em all out again.” She glances at Cas, who has slumped back against the wall, head in his hands, his shoulders shaking. Her expression sticks. “Right. Okay. Let’s get you cleaned up.”

Dean lets her take most of his weight, still dizzy, light-headed. Sleepwalking. Mary’s got a bandaid on her left bicep at just the right spot for a blood draw. He has to look away. 

Everything kind of. Fades again for a moment. In and out. And then he’s propped up against one of the kitchen counters, and Mary’s got a first-aid kit spread out around him. 

With tactical precision, she unbuttons the front of his flannel and begins to unwind the gauze from around his chest and stomach, exposing his wounds to the sterile, white light of the overhead fluorescents. Dean tries to get a clear look at them. The complex, branching writing. The lines of the sigil carved deep into his flesh, criss-crossed by dozens of tight sutures, black with blood. 

There’s bruising too, covering his chest and belly, a mess of abrasions across the crest of one hip. Something like the scattering of a salt round. 

The stitches are inelegant, hastily done. He can see the slight variations in their patterns, the subtle nuance in technique. At least two people working at once. Fast. Messy. 

“We numbed you up pretty good while you were under,” Mary tells him, “but this is gonna hurt like a bitch once that wears off.”

Dean raises his head to look at her, and the room tilts bluntly around him. Closing his eyes, he rasps, “Cas… wasn’t able to heal me?” A statement and a question. 

Mary laughs, a quick, harsh sound in the broad, empty space of the kitchen. She clears her throat. “No,” there’s a rustling sound as she sifts through the kit beside her, “He, ah. He tried. Once, I guess. It was not. Uh.” Dean cracks his eyes. Mary is standing before him, dabbing fresh blood from one of his opened wounds. He can see the tears in his skin where the stitches have pulled.

“It seemed like anything he gave you just fed it. Him. Michael. I think that’s when they called me. When they realized they’d have to—” she grunts, tossing the gauze into the sink beside them, “uh, cut deeper. And Castiel wouldn’t be able to. Do anything. He couldn’t even keep using his blade after a certain point, had to switch to a knife instead. It was not. Pretty.”

Dean looks down at his chest. And then he has to look away. Something swoops low in the pit of his stomach. The walls of the kitchen bend and sway. “Will it hold?”

Mary shrugs, grim. Her fingers working. 

“It should for a while. I mean it has so far. We just don’t know how long.” She pauses, and then says like she’s deciding something, “We didn’t know if you would stay you. Not until you’d woken up. It was a—. Long night. Everyone’s trashed. You must be—” 

Dean grins at her, “I feel great,” he says. 

Mary rolls her eyes. 

“Oh, well then I guess…” but Dean can see the tightness around her mouth. And then he blinks and it’s lipstick. It’s her hair caught in the reflected glow of neon lights from twenty years ago. Her hallowed head bowed over him, this moment in the present stretching back to a memory from the past. Blond hair and black mascara. The scent of blood in the air, golden. And then it’s Mary again. 

Voice cracked, he says, “You need a haircut.”

Mary tells him, “Shut the fuck up.”

She leans in with the needle, and then it’s a cigarette, a tube of lipgloss. Nothing.  

After a minute, Mary offers, “I was always bad at that.”

“What?”

“Haircuts. Cutting hair. John did yours.”

Dean blinks at her, “No he didn’t.” 

The needle bites into his skin. 

“You were four,” Mary says.

Dean says, “He didn’t cut my hair.”

Mary studies his chest like she’s trying to judge the thickness of his skin. She picks a spot and the sting of the needle begins again. 

“Okay.” Six stitches. Twelve. Mary says, “When you were younger, he did.”

Dean says, “I don’t remember.”

Silence. 

“I’ve got a question about your dad.”

“Get in line.”

Mary takes half a step away from him, studying his expression. “Why aren’t you telling him about any of this?” 

Dean’s head lulls a little to one side, “No one’s telling me about it,” he mumbles. 

Mary goes back to stitching. He can tell that she’s trying to be careful about it. “Seriously. He’s got an outside perspective on it, roughly twenty years of experience, theoretically. No one told me he was a shit hunter, so he’s gotta know something— but Sam very explicitly told me not to tell him what’s going on, why?”

She’s asking, but she knows. 

Dean says, “Dad’s… Kind of. He can be hard to predict sometimes.”

“Honey,” Mary says, “You weren’t exactly subtle last night.”

Dean closes his eyes again. He breathes. “How much did he hear?”

“Why does that matter?”

She looks at him, expectant. 

Dean sighs, he wipes his hand down the lower half of his face. “Are you gonna finish fixing me or what?” 

“I'll fix,” Mary tells him, “you talk.”

“Fine,” Dean says. The needle bites into his skin. “Living with Dad was like living with two different people, alright? And you never knew which one you were gonna get. One day I couldn’t do anything wrong, and the next…” He trails off in a sigh, “Well, you know.”

Mary ties off the last stitch, sealing off the gash across his collar bone and starts working on another one.“What about Sam?”

The question hits and then it dissipates. Mist in the air. He reaches for it, disoriented. He misses a step. 

“I cut Sam’s hair.

Mary frowns. She shakes his leg a little, “Keep it together.”

Dean clears his throat. He finds his footing.

“Sam…” he pulls it out of himself, like he’s remembering. Soft baby hair. Careful scissors. “Sam always had his own stuff going on, even when he was a kid.” Illicitly parked in front of some motel, foot on the break. A line ringing out to voicemail. He shakes it off. “Dad was pissed at him when he left, but you could tell he was kind of proud too.” He tells his fingers to flex, but they won’t listen. “I mean, they were always like that. Dad mad at Sam but also—he respected him, you know. They were too alike.”

Mary nods. She works delicately. It still hurts. 

“So,” Dean blows out a breath, long and slow through his mouth and then in through his nose. “A lot of the time it was just me and Dad, and sometimes he was broken up with grief, and sometimes he was just pissed at everything, pissed at the world for being the way it was, pissed at other hunters for being too fast or too slow, too good on one case or bad on another. And he was always pissed at me because I wasn’t ever going to be the man he wanted me to be, and I wasn’t ever going to be you either.”

He pauses, and it spreads out across the ceiling. Dad on the side of the road, lying in the gravel under the orange autumn sun, Dean passing the wrench over to him. The sky shining blue and endless above their heads. 

“But sometimes there’d be these moments where he was also like—he was my favorite fucking person in the whole world. He’d be so easy to talk to and he’d always just. It’s like sometimes he had the answer for just about anything. And he’d be patient about it. And when it was like that —”

The air cool around him. The sun warm on his face. 

He looks around at the stark lines of their kitchen, his blood smeared across the counter.

“There’s this thing I heard during a meeting once. That God is that feeling you get when you know that everything is gonna be okay. And that’s what it felt like.” His uncertain, child’s hands on the barrel of a gun. John standing beside him. He draws a breath. “And then sometimes it didn’t.”

He does something that isn't a laugh, it just sounds the same. “Sam—I mean. He grew up like that too, but he never got sucked into it like I did. I think in his mind Dad hasn’t got much depth to him, so he’s good at tuning it out. But for me.” He looks at his hands. Steady. Man-sized.  “I remembered everything.”

Mary says, softly, “I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah,” Dean tells her, chest hollowed out. “Well, why would you?”

He looks at Mary and his brain does that thing it does sometimes, like it’s glitching between timelines. Because he can see the way she used to look when he was four and she was the center of his whole universe. And he can see the way she looks now that he’s forty, ten years younger than he is, standing next to the stove she doesn't know how to use with the needle that she does. Sam’s hoodie and last night’s makeup, a streak of his blood on the underside of her wrist.

And in-between both of these Marys is all of the ways he’d ever remembered her. Her long hair and soft hands. The sound of her laugh. Led Zeppelin played low on dusty vinyl. A kiss pressed to his forehead, coveted in lonely motels along empty highways during the stretching, sleepless nights of his childhood. The way he’d pictured how coming home would feel, with her waiting to wrap her arms around him. The sweet way she had smelled. 

And later, maybe this is how it would have been? Mary, holding his hand in their kitchen, tending to his stitches. 

But maybe… in some different timeline. In another world. Maybe it could have happened softer, too, that first time. Maybe it could have been some kind of accident, something dumb with his friends. Falling off his bike. A tense car ride and a bright-lit hospital room. Not a dingy motel bathroom. Not dental floss. His own hands shaking, hiding it from John. Something kinder, something softer. An easier life. 

Maybe it could have been Mary driving him to the registrar’s office when he dropped out of highschool and making him sign back up for classes. Taking his photo before homecoming. Hanging a paper he’d written up on the fridge, pointing to the circled ‘A’ on the top of the page, saying, I knew you could do it.  

And Dean. Fighting with her about breaking his curfew or going to college, compromising on trade school. Living at home after all of his friends had moved out on their own, even if they teased him about it, helping her with dinner and Sam with his homework. Mowing the lawn on weekends. 

And once, years later, going to her after a barn and a shower of light and saying, I met someone.

He closes his eyes, then they open again.

He’s looking at Mary and then he’s looking at himself, and then he’s looking at her again and it’s twenty years ago. He dreams about horses. He dreams about John. His phone rings from the nightstand. He wants me to meet up with him. Mary saying, don’t go.

His eyes are shut again.

Mary puts a hand to his elbow as she moves past him, two fingers, and when she does she smells like his cologne and dollar store deodorant. Kerosene and gunpowder. Cheap liquor and sweat. A little like their laundry detergent. She smells like Dean.

Through the depths of the silence around them comes a soft, animal sound. A low whinny.

He opens his eyes.  

Over Mary’s shoulder stands a black mustang, flanks shining almost blue beneath the fluorescents, breath clouded before its face. Beside it, an elegant chestnut gelding dips its head towards them, dappled pattern across its cheeks, white star in the middle of its forehead. Dean reaches careful fingertips towards it. Sun on his face.

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing.

He drops his hand. A shot fires. The horses scatter. 

He says into the empty space in front of him. “Look. I know the formula, alright? I know what I’m supposed to say here. I know I’m supposed to say it’s different for us, it’s not what it looks like.” He draws a breath, filling the cavern that love carved out of him, “But you can’t tell Dad about any of this shit because we don’t know what he’s gonna do.”

Mary ties off another stitch, “I know.” Dean nods, he settles back, “But he heard you last night.”

Something clenches in his chest. A sick, swooping feeling in the pit of his stomach. The cut across his left shoulder, the one Mary just fixed, bleeds slowly back open, edges smoking. Dean presses a hand to it, fingers bloody. 

Their eyes lock for a moment, frozen. Waiting. Dean’s blood seeping slowly from the wound. The stitches hold. 

Mary picks up the needle again. “Don’t move.”

The door opens. Dean turns, expecting to see Sam, but it’s Cas standing there. He pulls in a breath and then hears it leave his body way too soft, “Cas—” 

Cas says, “We have a problem.”

Dean feels his heart seize. “Did I—” 

Cas holds up his phone, “Tell them what you told me.”

On the screen, Jack’s face is half-lit, like it’s night wherever he is and it just hasn’t reached them yet here. Or maybe it has. He doesn’t know what time it is. 

Jack gives a little wave, “Hello.”

“Jack,” Cas prompts, and Jack squares his shoulders, face set tight.

“Right,” he says, “Jody and Donna don’t know who you are.”

“What?” 

“Jody asked where my Mom was, and I said—you mean Dean?”

Dean feels his face heat, “Uh-huh.”

“—and at first I thought she was kidding—” he twists around, looking at something Dean can’t see, “and then I think she thought I was kidding, but—”

“What about Cas?” Dean says, “Does she know who he is? Or Sam?”

Jack shakes his head, “She doesn’t remember any of you,” he falters, “except—” his eyes go to Mary. 

Mary says, “Hi kid.”

Dean looks at Cas, and is relieved to find that Cas is looking back at him.

“This is bad,” he checks, and Cas confirms,

“Yes it is.”

“Jack,” Mary says, “When did it happen?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t notice right away. It was just little things. Little differences. But today. Today it happened all at once.” He pauses, then, “Claire can’t remember either. Except for Mary. I don’t know—” a sound comes from behind him and he breaks off, “I’ve gotta go.”

The screen goes black. 

And then Kevin’s voice from the other room, “ What the fuck just happened? ”

Sam ducks in through the kitchen door, almost running over Cas, his phone pressed between his ear and uninjured shoulder. He gestures towards it, meeting each of their eyes, saying evenly, “We’ve got something on our end causing issues.”

“Okay—” Kevin starts, the sound of something clattering onto the floor echoes over the speakers, “ Shit! Okay. I’ve almost figured this out. Can you just—can you keep everything really fucking cool over there until we can isolate exactly what split the timelines?”

None of them answer. 

Kevin says, “Just don’t breathe. Don’t blink. Don’t go outside.”

Sam looks over at Dean. Grocery shopping. The meeting. Tires on ice, “Hypothetically, why?”

Silence, then, “ You left the fucking bunker?”

Sam holds the phone a little further away from his ear. Dean winces. 

“Nobody said anything about—”

“Oh I’m sorry ,” Kevin cuts in, “I didn't realize that I had to specify not to contaminate —” he breaks off, collecting himself. Dean can picture the way he’s pinching the bridge of his nose. “Look, we’ve just got to put everything back the way it was. It’s too unstable this way. Both timelines can’t exist right on top of each other.”

Dean asks, into the silence, “What happens if we don’t?”

“I don’t know,” answers Kevin, responding as though he’s said, can’t , “I don't know. Maybe we rip apart the universe? Maybe one of the timelines is strong enough to accommodate the changes, and the other collapses, gets pruned.” 

Cas says, “Kevin.” The line goes immediately silent, “how much time do we have?”

Kevin’s voice has changed. “A day,” he says, “maybe two.” He seems very nervous to speak to Cas directly. 

“Thank you,” Cas says. He reaches out and hangs up Sam’s phone. 

The room goes briefly silent. Then Sam speaks, “We’ve gotta send him back.”

“No,” Dean tells him.

“ Dean .” Impatient, angry. Scared. “You heard Kevin. It’s getting too unstable. Dad’s gotta go back. We’ve gotta—” 

“I can’t.”

“What?”

“I’ve gotta stay.”

Sam with his hand in his hair, staring daggers, “What the fuck are you talking about?” 

Dean takes a breath. The idea that’s been festering in the back of his head. A plan. Hail Mary. He says again, “We can’t send Dad back.”

“I cannot fucking believe —” Sam begins, self-richeous, angry. 

Dean says, “We can’t reset the timelines.”

Sam’s expression freezes, caught along a well-worn track. 

“Michael isn’t here,” Dean draws it out slowly, his breath a ghost between them. His head feels light, like something gripping him by the back of the neck. “He doesn’t exist in this timeline. Jack was never born, he didn’t make the rift to Apocalypse World. Michael never crossed over. He’s still in the cage.”

“ So? ”

“So I need to stay.”

Sam says again, quieter this time, “What the fuck are you talking about?” But it sounds like he knows.

Dean presses two fingers to his stomach. He can feel the place where his blood has seeped through the bandage. “If we send Dad back to 2003 we just end up back at square one with this thing, trying to figure out how to beat Michael.” He takes a breath “Only I’m all busted up. We have to find some way to trap Michael here, keep him contained.”

Sam isn’t an idiot. Dean can see it in his eyes. The furrow of his brow where he’s getting that frown line, putting the pieces together. 

A sharp pain snags in his chest. He can hear it in his voice as he keeps going, the gasping, ragged sound of it. Pain and desperation. Bartering. With Sam? With God? He doesn’t want to do this. “We don’t send Dad back. We keep him here. We keep Michael here. Figure out how to separate the bunker from everything else. Keep it in the new timeline but keep it isolated so there’s no cross-over. Let the old timeline collapse. Then everything’s,” he takes a breath, “then Michael doesn’t torch the world. I don’t start the apocalypse. This is the good timeline, right? It gets to be good.”

“Dean—” 

“We stay here,” Dean insists, “We stay here. Everyone we love is still alive.”

A moment of silence falls between them. 

Sam says, “Okay.”

Dean looks up at him. He’s expecting a fight. Or maybe he just wants one. For Sam to be unreasonable and demanding and for everything to go back to the way that it was. Before Michael. Before dad. Before he made this stupid deal to fight the devil. Hell, all the way back to the beginning. Before Azazel. Before Cain. Back to the moment of pre-destiny. And to have it go a different way. 

Sam is standing with his arms folded, expression set. Dean’s heart is a bird in his chest. There are lights blooming at the corners of his eyes. “Are you sure?”

“I don’t want to drop you in a box in the middle of the ocean,” Sam says, “and I don’t want you to destroy the world. So, I’m sure.” He pauses, his eyes shifting in thought, “Let me talk to Rowena. See what she thinks.”

“What if she doesn’t remember you?”

Sam waves his hand, “We’ve got a kind of… bond. A spell. In case one of us—” He breaks off, “You know what, don’t worry about it.”

Dean nods, slow, he leans his weight back into the counter behind him. His breath comes labored. Sam watches him settle, then he turns in the doorway, “Okay,” he says, “hang tight.”

He knocks on the doorframe as he leaves. 

Silence settles briefly over the kitchen. A slow hush. A blanket of snow. 

When he speaks, Cas’ voice is low. There’s spark to it, a struck match, something dangerous.  “How long?” he asks. Dean turns to him. Cas’ voice shakes perceptibly. Not with fear. “How long have you known? How long have you been planning for this?”

Dean takes a breath. He can’t lie to Cas and he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t look at Mary. “Since Kevin first told us that Jack was never born in this timeline.”

Cas considers this, dangerous. A knife between them, a blade. “And what about Jack?” His voice has taken on the resonance that makes it sound like it’s got at least fifty leagues to it, “You want him to be trapped here with us? With you?”

The answer lies fragile as glass on his tongue. There’s no way not to break it.

“No,” he says softly, “No, I think… I’ve been thinking. There aren’t two of him here. He isn’t a paradox. I think this timeline could adapt around him. I think he could survive on the outside.”

Cas’ face has shuttered, “Alone,” he begins, “by himself. You want him to—”

Mary says, “I’ll stay.” 

They both look over to her, standing at the sink with her sleeves pushed up over her forearms, blood on her hands. “With Jack,” Mary repeats, “I’ll stay.”

And it’s that ache in his chest again. That star exploding. 

Mary continues, “I don’t exist in the timeline either. I can stay with Jack. He won’t be alone.”

Dead silence. Then Cas, collecting himself, “Thank you,” he says, stiffly, “But I—” 

“Whatever you decide,” Mary says. She rests a hand on Dean’s elbow, “I’m going to get cleaned up.”

Dean watches the halo of her hair as it disappears. 

Cas’ voice comes from over his shoulder, barely restrained, Dean turns to him, “So your father dies, and then Sam dies, and then Michael —”

“He keeps me alive.”

“Yes.” And Cas is looking at him, his eyes blazing, “And I will spend the rest of eternity watching him tear into you until the moment he succeeds.” 

It’s like there isn’t any air in the room. Like Dean doesn’t know how to breathe. He says, “Yes.”

Cas’ face is stony. His voice is cold. “That’s what you want. To spend the rest of your life being eaten until you are nothing, and for me to spend the rest of my life watching?”

It’s got a bite to it. Something that sinks into him deeper than anything else. The sigils and the stitches and Michael wrapped around his frontal cortex. “That isn’t fair.”

Cas lifts his chin, “That isn’t an answer.”

“You’re saying this like I have some kind of choice.”

“Don’t you?”

Dean says, stubborn, worn down, “No.”

“We had a choice,” Cas tells him, unyielding, “and we made it. Years ago. I don’t understand—why are you giving up now? After every—”

And it breaks something in him. A dam. Bones. He can hear it in his voice, all of the anger and sorrow that he feels. Every empty prayer and supplication. Down on his knees on his knees on his knees. A blade in his hands. 

“Because I don’t see another fucking way out of this for me.” His hands like giants. The empty space on his ring finger. “Give me one and I will take it. Cas, I promise I would do just about anything not to have to be the one who makes this call. But we’ve tried and we keep trying and I—” he breaks off, smoke rising up from one of the cuts across his chest, a crackle of blue-white light bleeding from his skin. Cas sways a half step closer towards him, on instinct, and then he pulls away. Dean grits his teeth. “Our window is closing here. I can’t keep this up for much longer.”

The light fades and it leaves Cas staring at him, eyes like oceans, impossibly blue. Again the room darkens, and then it sways. For a second the walls appear baroque gold, the ceiling open to the heavens. Then everything is bare concrete again. Not beautiful. Cas says, quiet. “I have given everything so that you would not have to do this.”

“I know.”

“I would give more.”

He knows.

“Maybe…” Dean drops his head back. He lets the lights from the fluorescents eat away at his vision. “Maybe we were always gonna end up here, no matter what we did. Maybe this is it. Fate. The plan. Maybe there was nothing we could do.”

That’s how he wants it to be at least. Not a mistake or a missed step. Not his fault. Nothing more to try or do. Just over. 

The lights flicker. He looks back at Cas, and Cas is looking back at him. Across the kitchen. Across years and years of violence and loss. Across from the passenger seat. His voice tamped down, saying, “This can’t be what you want.”

Dean’s breath hitches. Something breaks. A fluid, stretching rush of time shifting forward and turning back. A barn. A knife. Sparks in his eyes. A field of wildflowers. A windmill. 

“Of course it isn't.” He draws a breath, draws everything into himself. Of course it isn’t. “I want to grow old with you.” 

Cas’ face—hard, angry—loses its edges. Behind his head, a filament of electric light begins to drip liquid bright onto the floor. Dean can feel that same light pooling up inside of himself, feel it’s touch on his face as he swallows and breathes, “I want all the good shit. I wanna stop being afraid. I want to live someplace with windows. I want Mom to stay and—” I want, I want, I want, “I want to see the Grand Canyon.” He says again, heart in his hands, “I want to grow old with you.”

The door opens. 

Sam comes back in. 

“Fuck,” he says, “why are you still standing up? You should be resting, here—”

Cas says, voice low, moving forward, “I’ve got it.” 

Cas’ thick, strong hands. The warmth of his body, the electric smell of him. Salt and laundry detergent. I still have hope. Dean can’t quite move his feet right. His hands are shaking.

“I don’t wanna lie down,” he mumbles, “Talk to me about Rowena.”

Sam shepards him and Cas over to the kitchen table. 

“Fine,” he says, “Jesus. But you’ve gotta get off of your feet. The fate of the world is resting on you not losing your shit right now.”

Dean eases himself down, “I’m resting,” he says, “talk. Where’s Mom?”

Sam opens his mouth, “She’s—”

Mary in the doorway, her face scrubbed, hair pulled back in a messy half-up, half-down ponytail. It looks like she’s changed too. Dean squints at her. 

“You better not steal my jeans again.”

Mary crosses to the table. She presses a cool hand to his hot forehead. “That’s the time paradox talking,” she says, “these are my jeans.”

Sam points a finger at her. “Don’t fuck with him.” 

Mary raises her hands. Dean’s forehead feels cold for a second longer, air lukewarm around him.  

Sam takes a seat at the other side of the table. He pulls a loose scrap of paper out of the front pocket of his flannel. Uncaps his pen with his teeth. 

“Alright,” he starts to draw a messy diagram, two circles intersecting one another. “Right now we’re kind of like two soap bubbles. Each of the timelines are separate, except in the place that they overlap each other.” He taps the outer ring of one of the circles, “So the old timeline is here, and then the bunker, us, the people in this world who still know who we are—” he shades in the area where the two circles overlap, “we’re here, in both realities. The old one and the new one. The paradox.” He draws a couple of arrows pointing out from the shaded area, towards the outside of each of the circles, “And that’s what’s connecting the old reality to the new one.”

Dean says, “This is a bad metaphor.”

Sam frowns at him, “I mean ,” he says, “That, right now, we’re still able to pass between both realities. So, physically, we can still leave the bunker, and we can still talk to people who are experiencing both timelines. People who remember us. But the more we do either of those things, the weaker the walls get. Something’s gonna break.”

“You mean pop,” Dean says.

“Sure,” Sam rolls his eyes. “Fine, yes. One of them pops, and anything that was in this space,” he circles the shaded area on the diagram again, “anything that was in both realities, either it pops too, or it gets absorbed into whichever timeline survives.”

“Okay,” Dean says. He feels half a step behind, but Cas is nodding. Dean feels the movement against his cheek, and then he realizes that Cas has got him cradled up against his shoulder, against his chest. The heat of his body and the weight of his hands. Dean feels his cheeks flush, but it’s distant, like it’s happening to someone else. 

Sam starts to black out one of the bubbles, darkening the line where it intersects with the other. “Rowena thinks that we might be able to strengthen the forces keeping us separate from the new timeline, this membrane here. So we’d stay separate, even after the old timeline collapses.”

“Okay,” Dean says, “That’s good, right?”

Sam says, “It’s permanent. Nobody in, nobody out. No contact. And if it doesn’t work, then we die off with the old timeline. And I don’t know what happens to Michael. It’s a risk.”

“Does Rowena have any ideas on the odds here?”

“She’s working on it. She’ll be able to give us a clearer answer once she’s figured out the right spells. We’ll have to make the call. Until then,” he inhales, slow. “we’ve got some time to think it over. Eat, sleep, try to keep things as stable as—” on cue, the walls give a violent shake, swinging the lights above the table. 

Sam flinches as Mary swears. Dishes clatter together in the cupboards, one of the doors popping open to divulge a mess of pots and pans. The emergency lighting switches on with a siren wail, sound echoing painfully off the concrete walls. Dean startles and then doubles forward, Cas’ hand on his shoulder, saying something Dean can’t hear. He feels the bones inside his body bend inward, his teeth begin to twist. Michael in his head, all his wounds searing, sparks flying, seeing red. 

The lights flash one final time before shutting off. Silence settles in. An echo. Breaking glass. Dean feels numb. And then he feels Cas’ hands on him. Feels his heart in his chest, pounding. Voice rough, saying “You better tell Rowena to hurry up.” Sam’s face, tense.

Mary says, “Breakfast.”

“What?” 

“I'll make breakfast.” She stands from the table.

Dean follows her with his eyes, “You have got to be fucking kidding me.”

Mary opens the fridge, digging through the shelves, pulling out tupperware. She spreads it out across the table, and then doubles back for plates. Silverware. 

“This is just breakfast from yesterday,” Dean points out, “I made this.” He gestures at the food, and then winces. 

“I made you.” Mary tells him, but he can see the tension in her eyes. “Eat.”

She says it and he flinches. He can’t help himself. Drink.

Mary takes a step away from him, “I’ll, uh,” she runs a hand through her hair, “I’ll get some coffee started. Castiel—”

“I’ll show you,” he says, standing. 

Drink .

And he hadn’t. 

So how had Michael— 

Throat hoarse, he asks, “How did this happen?”

Sam sighs. He stretches out in his chair, rolling out his neck. “We think you just got too vulnerable. With Dad. With—” his eyes almost go to Cas, and then Mary, and then skate away, “everything.”

Dean nods, his head tipping back. There are stars spread out across the ceiling. A million eyes staring down at him. His mouth makes a sound he can’t identify, “too close to home,” he agrees.

“Yeah,” Sam says softly.

Dean squints at him, “You used to be very little,” he says, “I could carry you.”

Sam mumbles, “You could carry me now if you weren’t a coward.”

There’s a tear at the corner of his eye, but it hasn’t fallen. He swipes at it with the back of his hand. 

Dean watches the wall take itself apart behind his head, but he doesn’t think anyone else can see it.

“You were little,” he decides, “and you never wanted to do or try anything on your own. For years. I’d learn something, and you’d watch me—and then I’d watch you learn how to do it, real slow. And you always wanted me to be there.” He takes a breath and he can taste it, there on the back of his mouth, “And then at some point you just. Crossed over me. And you were the one who was fast, and I was the one who was slow—and I just remember thinking, thank god. Thank god I didn’t screw him up. ”

Sam swipes at his cheek again. Anger. Grief. Echoed from childhood.

“I'm gonna kill him. I'm just gonna have to kill him.”

“Who?” 

“Michael. Dad. I don’t know.”

“Don’t kill Dad,” Dean tells him. He can’t quite get the words passed his teeth right, and they come out kind of slurred around the edges, “We need him for the time paradox.”

Sam mutters, “I’ve got fifty bucks saying we don’t.” He pauses, looking down at his own hands. The hands of a giant. The last of them. “I thought it was something else. I thought you didn’t want to send him back because—”

Maybe it was better to be man-sized. To leave a hole.

“You had that soft spot,” Dean tells him, “on the back of your head, when you were born. I probably don’t remember it, but I feel like I do. This vulnerable place when you were a baby, where the bones hadn’t closed, that we had to be careful about. I feel like I remember it. But I was three, so I probably don’t.” He’s looking at Sam. Sam’s looking at him. “Sometimes I think it took more than a year to close, but I know it didn’t.”

Sam says, “You didn’t want to send Dad back.”

“No.”

“Because of Michael.”

Dean sighs, he feels the kind of tired that seeps into your bones. “Yeah.” 

And. 

Sam says, “I’m sorry I was hard on you about it. I’m sorry I—”

“It’s fine.”

“No it’s not. I know you had to keep the peace with him sometimes to keep us together. To take care of—I should have—”

“It’s both.”

“What?”

“It’s both,” Dean’s got it in the corner of his eye again, that early-fall sunlight, the side of a highway. He keeps looking at Sam, looking past him at the car and their dad and the memory that isn’t a memory. All the ghosts in the room. “I kept the peace with him for you. But it was because of me too. I wanted both. I wanted you to be happy and safe, but I wanted him too. Sometimes I still do. I know that’s shitty for you, but—”

“It’s fine,” Sam says, his voice soft, “it’s okay, Dean. Really.” He pauses. “I just thought you didn’t stand up for yourself because you didn’t think you deserved it.”

And.

Dean shifts on his stool. He starts to pick this new thing up, then he puts it down. 

“That’d almost make it easier, huh? If it was just one thing.”

Sam laughs, his eyes still shine a little, “Classically, yes.”

If the love wasn’t there.

So that’s how they end up, all sitting around the kitchen table. Dean with a cup of coffee in front of him he can’t drink, food that tastes like cardboard that he can't eat. Mary with her phone buzzing every few minutes. Sam flipping through an old journal, getting to the end, and starting over. Cas.

And then.

John is in the doorway. His face drawn, expression stern. Eyes dark and unreadable. Without saying anything, he steps over the threshold. 

Dean freezes. Mary freezes. They all do. 

John glances around, taking in the scene. The bloodied first aid equipment, the re-heated tupperware. His movements are slow, gradual. Almost precise as he crosses the room and claims the seat at the head of the table. 

Dean clutches his fork, waiting. 

Mary saying, he heard you last night . Sam’s face, tense. The sigils cut into Dean’s chest, under his flannel. The line of blood on the underside of Mary’s wrist. The bandaid on her upper arm. Cas. 

Nobody says anything. Dean watches John. He heard you last night. The room feels caught in amber. Waiting.

Placed face up on the table, Cas’ phone rings. Dean’s eyes go to it at the same time as Cas’. The phone rings out into silence, then lights up again as Jack calls a second time. Cas looks to Dean and Dean looks back at him, then they both look down at his phone.

Dean starts, “Isn’t he—” It comes out scratched on the back of his throat. John regards him from across the table. Cold. Calculating. He heard you last night. Dean clears his throat. “He should still be with Jody, right?”

Cas says, “Yes.” 

The phone shuts off. Then it rings again. 

“Excuse me.” Cas says stiltedly, he’s already standing, placing his coffee cup back on the table. It isn’t the snowman one today. “I’m going to—I just want to make sure nothing is wrong.”

“Yeah, man,” Dean tells him, eyes trained carefully back on his plate, “do what you gotta do.”

Cas rises. He nods to Mary and to Sam. He doesn’t look back at Dean, but he lays a hand briefly on his shoulder as he passes, like he can’t help it. Then he's gone. 

John’s voice breaks the silence that follows. His tone precise, perfectly lucid, “Why—” You know that feeling right before something bad happens? When you can see it coming? All the air sucking out of Dean’s lungs. Fire reflected across the glass front of the stove. He heard you last—   “—is he here?”

It’s like the blow hasn’t landed. But now there’s something else. Something else coming. 

“What?”

John repeats, looking only at Dean, “Why is he here?”

And everything just shuts off. The kitchen goes back to being a kitchen. The ceiling closes above his head. Shiny chrome and harsh fluorescents. Something sharp in the air, like he can’t quite breathe it in. 

Why is he here?

Dean pulls the words out slow, still half a step behind. Knowing. “It’s like we said. After my deal—when I went to Hell. Cas, he was the one who pulled me out.”

The air in the room is perfectly silent.

John says, “Why is he still here?”

And there’s that ringing again. The thunk and crash of Michael somewhere deep in his head. Maybe deep in his bones.

Sam starts, “He works with us on—”

“Dean.”

Dean says slowly, like he’s hearing himself from far away, like it’s the first time he’s learned to speak. Mimicking Sam, “He works with us on cases. Helps us save the world.”

John says, “Why does he live here.” But it isn’t a question. 

Why does he live here?

Dean hunches over his plate. He tries to take a bite of his food but he can’t bring himself to chew it. He puts his fork back down. “Yeah, well, I mean,” he speaks as casually as he can, laying his words out like his feet before him. Stepping on glass, trying not to make a sound. “We’ve got all of the Men of Letters gear and their books and stuff, for research. Plus, this place is warded all to hell and Cas hasn’t always been the most popular guy with Heaven or Hell, so it’s just easier to—”

“Why?”

“What?”

“Why can’t he go back to Heaven?”

Dean’s jaw sticks. Sam’s frown has started to darken. He and Mary both look like they can see what’s coming, but Dean is missing it. Just wait. Just wait for it to be over. Just—

“Well, so he—I mean he pulled me out of Hell—”

“You said that already.”

“Right,” he’s half a step outside of his body, he’s watching as it happens, “and then he, well. He was supposed to just step aside and let them use me as Michael’s—as a vessel to start the Apocalypse. But he, uh. He didn’t end up doing that. So we teamed up and—” Sam is watching him, Mary is watching him, “—saved the world.”

“I see.” John sits back in his chair. It’s over. It’s got to be over. “And when was this?”

And that’s it. The moment he’s caught in it. He feels the trap snap shut, the snare pull closed.

“It was,” he keeps his voice free of emotion, but John is watching him, and he can see it in his eyes, “about ten years ago.”

John looks him up and down. Deadpan, he says, “Ten years, huh?”

“ Sure ,” Sam cuts in, voice frayed, at the end of his rope, “but it’s not like we get a break between apocalypses, we jump from one straight into—”

John says, flat, even, “Which room is his?”

Sam’s jaw is set, his eyes alight, “Why the fuck does that matter? He doesn’t even sleep. He doesn’t need—”

Dean closes his eyes. 

That’s it. Every hotel he’s ever snuck out of. Every phone number he’d ever thrown away. Every magazine he’s burned. Every time he’d stopped himself from looking too close or staring too long. Every hickey he’d covered with a bruise. Every lie he’s ever told. The useless hope that—. The sunlight vanishes. It’s all over.

Mary says, “They gave me his room, actually.” Dean’s eyes snap open, and then he’s looking across the table at his mother, lying easily. Protecting him. He wasn’t even sure if she’d known. “When I came back. So I’d have my own space. When I visit.”  

Sam’s face has cleared, shuttered smoothly closed. 

“Yeah,” he agrees, “the one next to the—”

“Library,” Dean finishes tightly.

John looks between each of them. Something in his eyes that seems out of place. Almost as if he’s reached some kind of conclusion.

“I see.” 

Giving up too easy. 

They pretend to eat again in silence. Dean keeps glancing at the door, and then making himself look away, and then doing it again. Cas still hasn’t returned by the time that, John puts his fork down next to his plate, takes in a fortifying breath and asks, “Did we get it?”

Dean says, totally blank, “Get what?”

John is staring directly at him again, that same look in his eyes. Like he’s trying to read something in his expression, watching for a tell. “The thing that killed your—” he doesn’t look at her, “Mary. The thing that killed Mary. You said it was a demon. You said we solve the case. Do we kill it?”

“Yeah,” Dean tells him, “Yeah, we kill it.” Mary’s eyes, trained on John, flick over to Dean. Then she’s looking at him and he’s looking at her and for a second he isn’t thinking about Micheal or John or tearing apart the universe. About keeping this last veneer carefully in place. He’s just looking at her and she’s looking at him and he opens his mouth and says, “But I’m not sure we should have.”

John’s voice, thick with anger. The question comes, “What?”

Dean puts down his fork. “Yeah,” he says, and he can tell that Sam’s got both his eyebrows raised. But Dean faces John, without trying to hide. “I think maybe we should have just had the funeral and re-built the house,” he takes a breath, “I think if Hell was coming for us anyways, if we were always going to end up burning in the pit or fighting each other to the death, if the Apocalypse was always supposed to hunt us down, it might as well have found us playing little league and studying for the SATs,” he swallows again, like he’s swallowing something down. And then he breathes it out. A plea. A confession. A prayer. “I think I woulda wanted a couple more good years.”

John’s composure, already thin, breaks again. An incredulous noise escaping from the back of his throat. 

But Dean isn’t looking at John. 

He’s looking at Mary. 

And Mary smiles.

Hail, Mary. Full of grace. Blessed art thou among women. Pray for us sinners, now at the hour of our death. Be done unto me according to Thy word. 

Dean takes a breath. 

And he explains. He explains the deal. He explains about the first seal and about Lucifer and Michael. Heaven and Hell. Able and Cain. He fills in all the blanks. All the pieces. And somewhere in the middle of it, he’s hit with this strange sense of euphoria, this feeling that if he can just get it right, just say it right, just lay out all the pieces—that John might understand. Maybe not everything. Maybe not about Cas or about Jack or even about Dean. But something. He might make him understand something. That first step. A beginning. A bridge between them. 

There’s an alternative timeline opening up in the back of his mind, one where John goes back to 2003, and when he calls Dean it isn’t from a bar or an alley in the middle of winter. It’s somewhere with sunlight and when he calls he says, Son, I think we’ve been going about this all wrong or maybe, it’s good to hear your voice. 

A timeline where Dean has his own friends and his own cases. Where he and John meet up sometimes just to talk, and are there at Stanford when Sam graduates, sitting in the front row. A timeline where John drinks less and laughs more, where Sam feels like he can meet them at ‘home’ for the holidays. One where John speaks fondly, sometimes, about his own father, and never leaves the jacket that he’s wearing now bloody at a rest stop in Montana.

Maybe Dean makes the deal, or maybe he doesn’t. But between then and now, they get at least four good years.

And it’s stupid, he knows it’s stupid, because the tear in time and space that that could create, the contradiction between what had happened and what still could—he has no idea what that would do. And it’s stupid because he’s never gotten John Winchester to see things his way in his whole damn life. 

But he has to try. This one time, to get it right.

Hail Mary. 

He opens his mouth and he’s talking again. He’s saying, “We didn’t stop our first apocalypse because we were great hunters. Back in that graveyard with Michael and Lucifer. We didn’t outsmart them or outgun them. It didn’t matter that Sam could bow hunt. That I’ve memorized all of our cases. It just came down to the fact that I wasn’t going to let him die alone. That he was willing to sacrifice himself to save the world—and you know what?” He swipes a hand across his face, he doesn’t know when he started crying, “I think we coulda managed that if we’d just done Boy Scouts or something.”

John’s face is a stone mask, his eyes are unimpressed. Dean’s voice is shaking. “‘Cause all those times I fell asleep in my car alone on the side of a highway, every time I couldn’t get you to pick up your phone or return my calls—all those years I spent making sure Sam didn’t starve. All of that just so we could end up exactly where we are today—you think that was worth it?”

John says, calm as anything, “I can see why you broke in Hell.”

And it takes the breath, the words—everything. It takes everything out of Dean. 

John, who taught him to aim for the heart and shoot to kill, keeping his voice low and measured, saying, “I didn’t raise you to be like this. This soft, fragile thing. I didn’t raise you to want how you want, to talk how you talk.”

There’s a sound from beside them, metal on wood. Mary lays her gun calmly on the table. 

Everybody turns. 

Her hands are steady.

“You can’t talk to him like that,” she says, “that’s my fucking kid.”

Dean might as well have been shot. 

Mary keeps speaking, the kind of anger in her voice he hasn’t heard before. Real. “And he’s right. None of it mattered, what you did. You did it wrong. Fucked it up. It wasn’t for me.”

John scoffs, unbelieving. 

Mary keeps her eyes on him. She cocks the pistol. “You think I wanted this? Dragging my kids across the country. Treating them like soldiers. What kind of legacy is that? Putting them through hell. What’s that supposed to do? Help you sleep at night? Build me some kind of shrine?”

She takes a shaking breath, like she’s facing it. “I died, John. And before that, you weren’t good to me. Maybe that wasn’t your fault, maybe you were as trapped in all of this as I was.” She flicks the barrel of the gun at Sam and then Dean, gesturing between them, “But you could have been good to them.”

John stares at her, across more than just the stretch of time. Like she isn’t just someone he doesn’t recognize, like she’s someone he’s never known. 

He says, “You think any of this is real?” 

Dean feels it hit. 

But it can’t sink in. 

Calm as anything, John continues, looking around the bunker, “This place. This isn’t real.” His hand casts a long shadow across the table, “What, my dad didn’t walk out on us? He never left me? He just fought demons and died a hero? The world doesn’t work that way. You don’t just get to come back. You don’t get second chances. Mary didn’t.” He looks hard. He looks straight through her. “She isn’t alive. She didn’t come back.”

He turns to Sam, gathering himself. Resolved. “You got out boy, and you weren’t ever coming back. Then all it takes is Dean showing up on your doorstep and you’re dropping out of school just because I go missing? You couldn’t wait to get away from us. You hated him. You hated me. Now you’re some kind of family? You think I'm gonna fall for that?”

“That isn’t—”

John’s voice rises, cutting him off, “See, I've been thinking. Everything. All of this. What does it get me? Nothing but trapped here forever. To stop some angel from tearing open the world—” Mary saying, he heard you last night , Dean saying, everyone we love is still alive, “—but you know what, angels aren’t even real. They don’t even exist.”

Dean’s hears it. Footsteps from the hallway. His heart in his throat. Unbidden, his eyes find Cas in the doorway.

And John sees it.

It seems to dispel any doubt that remains in him. 

He looks to Dean then back to Mary, his face a mask of disgust and anger. 

“ No ,” he says, voice hoarse, “No. This is a trick. It’s a trap. Some kind of—” he's turning between all of them, Sam sitting stunned and silent, Cas in the doorway. Dean, forgetting how to breathe. “—vision or dream, something to keep me from hunting for it—from finding. To make me stop—” 

He inhales sharply. His eyes settle on Mary. “You’re it. You’re the one doing this. You’re the demon.” And then he says to Dean, cold as ice, “And you are not my son.”

The pearl is in his hand. The world is in his hand. He crushes it.

Chapter Text

Today, John’s eyes are clear. And he’s showered and dressed and is convincing the women at Dean’s parent-teacher conference not to kick him out of school. He’s so bright, he says we’ve just moved around a lot. Hasn’t given him time to adjust. Can’t you give him another shot?

The woman is telling him that Dean has been getting in fights. Dean has been telling stories that scare the other children. Dad lowers his voice, says, quiet, sincere, he lost his mother, you know. We’re still figuring all of this out. 

The woman smiles, softening. 

Dean is bright. Dean just needs time to adjust. They're going to figure it out. 

They walk back to the car through the bright lit school corridors. Dad’s broad hand rests on his thin shoulders.

He’s fifteen and he’s just been shot for the first time and it hurts like a bitch, but he’s bundled in the back of the Impala and his dad has his hand pressed to his bloody forehead and he’s telling him that he’s fine, that everything’s going to be fine.

He’s got tears in his eyes and a gun in his hand, and everything is going to be fine.

Today, John is sitting sturdy at a tiny motel table with his solid legs spread wide. Gracious and complimentary about Dean’s cooking, indulgent of Sam’s bad temper and Dean’s bad grades. 

Dean is so overcome he burns the cheap mac and cheese, and John laughs it off and shakes his head and tells him he’s just like Mary. They eat cold cereal instead, and Dean has a hot spark of joy in his chest that won’t blow out. 

He burned the dinner. He’s just like Mary. 

Today, Dean is sixteen and he knows that he’s gotten everything just right. Sam has made the honor roll, and Dean’s taken a bus into town to buy the kind of groceries he needs to make them a real meal on his shitty hotplate.

Sam is sulking because they’ll have to move at the end of the month anyways, so he says it doesn’t matter, but Dean is trying to rally, trying to get him excited about it—telling him he’s proud of him, that he’ll do just as well at the next school, and the one after that. 

Sam won’t be comforted. He mouths off at Dean and he kicks his feet softly but persistently up against the leg of the cheap motel table and refuses to eat what he’s cooked. He says he isn’t hungry, that Dean isn’t any good at school so he doesn’t understand anyways. 

Dean goes to collect his plate, but John stops him with a hand on his arm. His voice is dangerous as he says, “Your brother went to a lot of trouble over this.”

Dean feels a wave of dread wash over him. He knows what happens next. He sits silently as Sam mechanically chews and swallows the food on his plate and thinks, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, and wishes bitterly that he could do it all again differently. 

Sam finishes his last bite, throws down his fork, and stomps out of the motel room. Dean sits rigid across the table from John, body tuned towards him like a compass. 

John sighs, he shakes his head. Says, “You weren’t ever like that at his age.”

Dean is incredulous. Struck dumb. He opens his mouth, and then he closes it again.

He wasn’t ever like that. No shit. 

They’re in a hotel room in a state whose name he doesn’t remember, and Sam’s on the third day of a cold he caught trailing after them through damp, dark woods, sparse branches too thin to block the rain. John has killed the monster, and he’s made three different trips to two different drug stores, but he keeps coming back with the wrong thing, and Sam’s fever is getting worse and worse and Dean is fourteen and starting to realize that it’s about the time they should take him to the emergency room.

And then he realizes that John’s description has been sent out on the local police blotter, and that they’ll be watching out for them in all of the nearest hospitals. 

And Sam, who’s been too cool for Dean for months now, cries out for him in his sleep, wraps his skinny arms around Dean’s neck, and presses his fevered little face into his t-shirt.  

John, exhausted, lays a heavy hand on Dean’s shoulder. He says, gratitude, relief and pain in his voice, “Thanks for your help, son.”

They drive twelve hours to see a pediatrician, and Sam ends up with pneumonia every winter for the next three years.

Dean is twenty, and he’s seventeen and he’s twenty four. He’s thirteen and eleven. He’s four years old. 

John is drinking. John is yelling, John is screaming. John is sitting hollow-eyed on the couch with a bottle tilted in his lap, light from the TV flickering across his grief-stricken face. He’s showing Dean how to shoot a gun. He’s showing him how to change a tire. He’s laughing at Dean’s jokes. 

John is draping him in his jacket in the backseat of the Impala, Sam in his arms and their world burning down around them.

And Dean is. He’s in an empty alley. He’s in a hotel room plastered with ghost stories. He’s calling John’s phone without getting an answer. He’s in a hospital bed. He’s on the side of the road. John has switched his cell phone off. They haven’t spoken for days. 

Dean is driving the Impala down the highway on a clear summer day, listening to one of John’s vintage cassettes with the windows down and the sun a bright, hot flare in the sky. He’s suturing a fresh wound with a fine line of dental floss. He’s changing a tire. He’s tying a tie. 

Dean is twenty-six and he is lonely down to his core and desperate for revenge. 

He’s just like his mother, he needs time to adjust. He’s never been good at school, so how could he get it? He’s never been Sam’s age. 

He’s pulling a familiar leather jacket off of the hook on the door of a hotel room. 

The sleeves are worn smooth beneath his fingers, and when he slides it on, it isn’t as big as he remembers.

So that’s it. That’s the life. Bits and pieces of it. Snap shots. Smoke. 

And Dean still wants to make it right. Even after everything. He wants to go into the other room and say the right thing and get it right and for everything. He wants everything to be alright. He wants his dad to have his back, to understand.  

Except. 

His dad isn’t here anymore.

Time passes strangely. 

Dean leaves the table to go sit on the stairs in the foyer. Knees up in front of him, arm laid across them with his cheek resting against it, head down. His body aches. The stitches across his chest snag painfully whenever he moves, but nothing else happens. Michael is silent. The walls stay where they’re supposed to be. 

Playing on repeat in the back of his head is the time when the British Men of Letters had attacked the bunker and sent it into lockdown. Red lights pulsing overhead, oxygen slowly leaching from its rooms. Nobody in, nobody out.

There’s a shuffling sound, and then Sam eases himself down on the step beside him, winching a little. But it’s not from the timeline resetting. He’s just getting old.  

Dean says, “How’re we looking?”

Sam shifts around, trying to find a more comfortable position, “Things look fine so far,” he says, “We’ll keep checking it out, but it looks like everything is back to how it was before we brought Dad back. How’s Michael?”

“Probably planning his next move.”

“How many fingers am I holding up?”

“Shut up.”

Sam grins a little weakly, he drops his hand. After another minute, he says, “I didn’t know that he was like that.”

Dean’s head feels heavy. His body feels impossibly tired. He feels? Something. The words feel like they come up from somewhere very deep inside of him, dredged. “Like what?”

Sam frowns down at his hands, “All that stuff,” he says, “how he was with Cas. The stuff about where he sleeps and—” he breaks off, “I mean, I knew what he was like when I left and how he was when I got back, but I never knew he was like that with you, about everything. I wish you would have told me.”

“Yeah, well,” Dean tells him, “you already hated him, so what was the point?”

Sam says, “I want you to be able to tell me stuff, Dean.”

Dean turns his head. He watches the room stay still and unchanging before them. And without really thinking about it, he hears himself start to speak, “Back in 2003, when Dad and I split up, I started working with different hunters. Different groups. Only they weren’t like Dad or like anyone we grew up with. Things were different. Easier. It was like… A different world.” He pauses, “I think it was the happiest I’d ever been in my life.”

A campfire out in the woods. Five silhouettes. 

“And then I got a call from Dad.”

Sam nods, taking this in. 

Dean continues, “I’ve got this terrible feeling that he’s just going right back to that, to pull me back in with him. ‘Cause there was a while where I hadn’t heard anything from him, and then all of a sudden he called me up, drunk off his ass somewhere and—and I just went. I just left. And all those people—” 

He looks down at his hands, the scarred palms and rough fingers. John’s hands. Mary’s hands. The hands of a specter and the hands of a ghost. The life-line running down the middle cut almost in two. Dean’s hands. 

“You know I ran into one of them once on a hunt. About a year later, with Dad.” He takes a breath. And then he lets it out. All the air and years inside his chest, “They were working the same case as us and I saw them and I just—turned around and walked away. Told Dad I had food poisoning. And it made me sick to think about. Dad seeing who I was with them, them seeing how he was with me. Who I was with him,” he closes his hands, “but it wasn’t just because he was there. It was like I wasn’t all there. Like a piece of me was missing. And I didn't know what I’d say to them, even if Dad wasn’t with me. It was like something had broken and I couldn’t put it back together.” He shakes his head, “I always thought I’d run into one of them again later, down the road, be able to explain. But I never did.”

“That’s awful.” 

Dean laughs a little. The empty bunker all around them with its high ceilings and impassive walls. The world stretching out beyond its doors. Their world. He draws in a breath, draws everything in, “That other timeline. Those lives the other versions of us got. I didn’t just miss out on that stuff. I had it. That other life. The one we saw. I had it. Those pictures we found online, all those people, I recognized some of them.” He breaks off, looking back down at his hands, and then over to Sam. Finally saying, “I had it and I lost it.”

Sam says, “I didn’t know.”

Dean says, “I didn’t tell you.” He looks away again. “I can’t say for sure that it’s the life I would have wanted. Us not living together. That other guy—. Jack.” He stops. “I like who I am. I like what we built.” The bright center of his universe, all the roads that could have led him here, the one that did, “But I wish that I had gotten here differently.” 

Sam takes this in. After a moment he says, “Thank you.”

Dean grunts, “Whatever.”

“You’re such an asshole.”

“I’m literally dying. You have to be nice to me.”

“You’re not—” Sam begins, and then he stops. “We’re gonna figure this out. We’ll fix it.” 

Dean makes a noise, noncommittal at the back of his throat. 

Sam says again, “You’re such an asshole.”

“Eileen know you talk like that?”

“ Shit , Eileen. You’re right, I should call her. Just—. Hi, Mom.”

Mary sits down on Sam’s other side. “You’re not too old for a time-out.”

Sam says, “I’m not even the one who—” and then he catches himself and laughs. The moment doesn’t break, but it cracks a little. Mary leans back against the step behind her, working a kink loose from her neck.

Dean rouses himself enough to turn towards her and ask, “How are you doing?”

Mary blows out a breath, reaching across Sam to squeeze his shoulder briefly. 

“I’m fine,” she says, drawing away again. “I’m okay.” Dean looks at her. Mary shakes her head. “I can’t quite explain it but—there’s just not as much time between everything that’s happened for me as there is for you. Dying. Coming back. Seeing John again. You’ve got all this space between all of those things, all this time for it to shape and define you. And for me it was like. I closed my eyes there and I opened them here. Like yesterday was the worst day of my life and today is just, Tuesday.”

 She lets out a thoughtful breath, considering, “That’s the stuff that’s hard for me. Missing that step. Burning to death on that ceiling, feeling all that pain, all that fear, and then just—waking up here. With everything different. What am I supposed to do with that shit? How am I supposed to move past it? But it didn’t become a monument. It happened quick.

“I know that for both of you the night I was killed became the thing that’s defined you for your entire lives. How it seems like it made you who you are. But it didn’t do that for me.” She looks down at her hands, whole again after burning to nothing. Her breathing is steady. “Sometimes I don’t know if it’s even hit me yet. Like I’m still in the fallout. That night, John. The last time I saw him. I didn’t have twenty years with him after. I didn’t watch what happened to him, what he turned into. I just remember that we’d been fighting about sleep training, and that earlier that day I’d asked him to grab something for me on the way home and he hadn’t done it. For a while he’d stopped drinking, and he’d started again, even though he’d said he wouldn’t, and Sam was teething which was—no offense—a pain in the ass.”

She looks at Dean, and this time her breath does catch, “And you had painted me a red geranium, because we’d seen one in a book I’d read to you. You’d spilled paint down the front of your shirt, and I had set it to soak overnight so the stain wouldn’t set,” she takes in a shaky breath. There are tears at the corner of her eyes. He thinks for a second that she is looking at another version of him, too. She says, “I was going to wash it the next morning.”

Time passes again. 

Sam gets up and he stretches, and then leaves the room, saying something about making a call.

Mary stays with Dean, seated with him on the stairs. After a while, she says. “You’re a great hunter, Dean.”

Dean looks over at her, her full mouth and long lashes, the splash of freckles along her delicate nose. She isn’t looking at him. 

“You’re strong and you’re brave and you’re so fucking smart. You clearly care about this job so much, and about why you do it.” She takes a breath, “I know that what I’m supposed to say—that what you want me to say—is that I’m proud of you, but I’m not.”

Dean says, “Okay.”

Mary nods. And then she’s looking at him, and he’s looking back at her. The same square jaw and high cheekbones, the elegant curve of his long neck, the flex of his fingers. Mary draws a shaky breath. He can hear the tears building in her voice. Her eyes are dry.

“I wanted you to be the softest, weakest, most ignorant kid in the whole fucking world. I wanted you to cry at horror movies and be scared of the dark. I wanted you to grow up safe and loved and certain that we were going to take care of you. I didn’t want you to have to be afraid of anything.”

Dean’s heart squeezes. His lungs feel hollow.

Mary says, “It isn’t fair, but it’s true, and I wanted you to know.”

Dean says again, hoarse from hours without speaking, “Okay.”

He drifts, slowly. For a while. Caught in the almost over-hot pulse of air moving through the bunker. 

Maybe this was how it was always supposed to go.

Mary reincarnated into Dean and then Dean reincarnated into Mary. Passing it back and forth between them his whole life. Crossing over each other. Dean getting older with Mary getting younger. Him headed in one direction with her headed in another. 

Young when she was old, older now that she’s young. 

He looks at her and he thinks— what if?

He’s looking at her and it’s like she’s water, like he can see all the way down to the bottom of her. Back to his memories from when he was a child, sweet and hazy, distorted by years of echoed longing, spread out across the ocean floor. He squints his eyes and then all of a sudden he’s looking at two different things, Mary from his childhood, and Mary in front of him now. The one he still doesn’t know completely. The bright, hard surface of her. Film negatives lined up one on top of the other, going in and out of focus. The then and now flickering back and forth. 

After. 

Before.

And in between, this intersection, this third thing, the what if of meeting in the middle. Meeting after Dean had grown up but before he’d finished growing all the way. In a road house along a highway in the dead of winter. Dean making his way without John, Mary making her own way, just like she’s doing now. Not old. Not young. But somewhere at the center of it all. 

Mary. 

Mary in a motel bathroom, blood on her hands, laughing into the mirror as Dean pulls her long, thick hair back into a clumsy braid, messy cause she won’t stop moving, saying, you’ve gotta sit fucking still.

Side by side under dark trees, lying in the dirt, listening for footsteps. 

In a diner with the sun coming up over their shoulders. Mary wearing one of Dean’s lost rings, spinning it round and round on her finger as she looks at the menu. Dean putting his head down on the table, almost asleep already. 

Playing shitty car games on hour six of a twelve hour road trip, achy and bitchy and arguing about whose turn it is to drive. And then coming back around. Laughing through it, happy again. The heat breaking. 

He can almost see himself, this shadow of him, sitting just behind her shoulder.

The same height. The same size. Wearing twenty-six the same. 

Mary’s hands on the Impala, resting along the back of his seat as she turns to look behind her. Tapping Dean’s ring against the steering wheel. 

His phone lighting up from the dashboard. Mary saying, who’s texting you right now anyways? 

And all the distance between them, the years and the unknowing, closing. 

He can see it for a second. 

And then it breaks. 

He starts to speak and the words catch up on his teeth.

He tries again, “You ever hear that statistic, about how most accidents happen within ten miles of home?”

“Yeah,” Mary says. She glances up, wiping the heel of her hand across her cheek, “because that’s where we spend most of our time.”

Because that’s where we—

Dean tells her, “I don’t usually think of it like that.”

“Huh.” Mary stretches. She glances around the foyer, tapping her fingers against her knee. After a minute, she says, “You know Claire showed me this thing once, a visual of how people experience cities differently depending on the way they travel. It was a map, kind of. A diagram. Like for people with cars a city is a series of connecting hubs, like everywhere you go is a different island separated by all the places or things that you never really experience. But if you’re on public transit then it’s kind of like a river system, with everything connected. And if you walk, then all the blank spaces on the map get filled in,” She takes a moment, looking out over the bunker. The high-ceilinged foyer and the hallways leading deeper into its heart, “But on the graphic she showed me, everyone’s houses are all lit up the same way. Cuz that’s the spot they leave and come back to the most, where they live.”

Dean says, “Not us, though.”

Mary shakes her head, “Not me.” She bumps her knee against his. For a second they’re sitting together on a motel bed. “You.”

And when he looks at her this time, she’s young. 

Chapter Text

That night when Dean dreams, the bar is empty. Chairs stacked on top of tables, stools pushed up against the bar. The bottles are there but they’re empty, lined up against the wall, and the mirror above them doesn’t show a reflection. 

He walks through empty white-walled room after empty white-walled room, trailing his fingers along cool, hard surfaces.  

He doesn’t know what this means, and when he wakes up, he doesn’t remember. 

Chapter Text

“Alright,” Dean says, “you got everything?”

Mary sighs, adjusting the strap of her bag on her shoulder. 

“Yes, Mom. ” She tells him. Her phone makes a whooshing sound and she glances down at the screen and then back to Dean. 

There’s the sound of the bunker door opening, and then Jack and Claire clatter down the stairs.

Dean looks over at them, turning carefully. He still feels like he was hit by a truck. 

“How were the roads?”

“Good,” Jack chirps, bouncing to a stop. “Claire picked the music.”

Dean squints at her, “Isn’t Donna and Jody’s at least like… Six hours away?”

Claire shrugs, “Normally I would gaslight you about this, but right now it just feels sad. Yes it is, we were speeding.”

Jack punches his hand into the air. “Gatekeep!” He exclaims.

“Girlboss,” Mary finishes, under her breath.

Dean says, “What the fuck.”

Claire glares over at Jack (grinning) and Mary (checking her phone), “ Nothing ,” she says, “it’s just a stupid game.”

Jack gives her an angelic smile, “Less stupid now that I get to pick the music.”

“Fine,” Mary tells him, still texting, “none of that emo shit. Makes me feel old.”

Jack protests, “It’s having a renaissance!”

“I don’t care.”

“Kesha?”

“Fine.”

“Yay!” Jack cheers, “Where’s Cas?”

Dean sags a little, letting the bannister behind him take some of his weight. “Kitchen.”

Mary turns at the same time that Jack and Claire do, and he’s struck for a second by how similar their resemblance is to each other. 

Jack’s face like Mary’s face. Fresh, open. Eyes like a celestial being, like someone stolen through time. The faintest shadows beneath them, delicate hint at the laugh lines they’ll get later on down the road. 

Mary holding herself like Claire, like they’ve both missed a step somehow; wound up younger and older than they’re supposed to be. Settling back into themselves in the in-between, getting comfortable. 

The three of them in their miss-matched jumble of time and experience. Aging fast or aging backwards. Skipping past stages and then returning to them. Going back. Getting to do it over again. 

“Alright,” Mary slides her phone into her back pocket, “I swear to god we’re almost finished with this fucking case, so this last nest shouldn’t take too long.”

Dean hums in acknowledgment, cloudy-headed. He shifts a little against the banister and feels the movement ache all the way through his body.

Mary frowns at him, “And then I’m coming right back,” she says, “I mean it. We’re gonna solve this.”

“Mom…” 

“Don’t ‘Mom’ me. Sam’s a witch, Cas is an Angel. I’m very talented. You also have skills.”

Dean huffs a laugh that makes his chest hurt, “Yeah,” he says, “okay.” 

Mary nods, “Alright then.”

Dean keeps looking at her.

“Mom,” he says it again, this time slowly, “You know Cas is my—”  He swallows. He can’t say it. “You know we’re…”

Her face softens. Her eyes are kind.

“Baby,” she says, “ I know. ”

They stand together for a second longer, before a crashing sound comes from down the hall. 

Jack and Claire come bounding back into the foyer, clearly racing. 

Mary takes an automatic step to the side as Claire shoves her way past Jack, shoving him face-first into the doorframe. 

Dean says, “Guys…”  

Claire comes to a stop in front of him, examining her nails, “It’s enrichment in his enclosure,” she tells him, “he needs it.”

“Yeah!” Jack echoes, righting himself, “It’s enrichment in my enclosure.” He points at Mary, “You’re next.” 

Mary narrows her eyes, “Just because we haven’t found a spell that will work to banish you, doesn’t mean we can’t try.”

Dean huffs, “Can everyone please not banish or enrich anything in my living room?” But it’s a relief to see them resilient like this, blowing off steam. He winces, pressing a hand to his stomach. 

The frenetic buoyancy of the room disappears instantaneously, like it’s been sucked out. Exuberant veneer pulled back to show the tension underneath. Mary, Jack and Claire’s strained faces turned towards him. 

“Go,” Dean tells them, “I’ll be okay.”

Mary lifts up on her toes to carefully kiss his cheek, “Take your pain meds.”

“I hate ‘em,” Dean mumbles, “They make me all dizzy and cranky.”

“Tough shit.” Mary tells him. She steps away, shouldering her bag. “We’ll call you from the road.”

Jack gives a little wave and Claire salutes, before bounding back up the stairs. Mary trails after them, looking back once over her shoulder. 

The bunker door closes behind them.

Dean’s phone goes off in his pocket. He pulls it out to find a text notification from someone in his home group. Their contact name saved under the little red ‘A’ emoji.

How does happiness feel? 

How does grief?

Grateful again for what he has. Scared to lose it. Close to home.

He starts to slide his phone back into his pocket, and then he stops. 

And he thinks of Mary, following Jack and Claire back up the bunker stairs. The profile of her wild blond hair and leather jacket. The feeling of spring in the air. 

Thinks, take your pain meds .

Thinks, maybe.

Back in his room, he eases himself down on the bed, waiting for the little play store icon to load before typing out what he’s looking for into the search bar with awkward, uncoordinated fingers. The phone considers his request for a second, buffering, and then the results are displayed across the screen. He clicks on what he wants and waits for it to load, wades painstakingly through the account set up process, and clicks over to his empty profile. 

No pictures of his face, but—Cas’ trench-coat is laying across the foot of the bed where he left it, over one of Dean’s flannels. He lines both up in the camera and snaps a picture. And then he filters and captions it, hitting post. A little loading bar appears at the top of the screen.

The bedroom door opens and Cas comes into the room, “Did everyone leave?”

“Yeah,” Dean tells him. He starts to ease himself back against the pillows, gritting his teeth. 

Cas moves to him, gentle with rough hands. He helps Dean lean back against the head of the bed, and then he moves to undo his tie in the mirror. Dean watches his reflection, something unsettled between them still. Purpled in the air around them. The bruise, the scar, the wound of love.

Dean has something tight nestled between his ribs, a knot in his throat where his breath keeps catching. He watches Cas slowly loosen the knot of his tie. The familiar blunt line of his knuckles. The way he kicks out of his dress shoes and lines them up in the closet beside Dean’s boots. 

The room is quiet around them in the muted orange-yellow light from the single lit bulb on the desk.  

Cas pauses in unbuttoning his shirt. Looking back at Dean in the mirror's reflection he says, “Your mother asked if I was your boyfriend.”

Dean raises himself up a little further, clearing his throat. His heart would skip a beat or two, if it hadn’t already stopped dead in his chest. “Well, are you?”

Cas’ gaze doesn’t shift, still holding Dean's in the mirror. “No.” He says. Dean nods. He swallows, stares down at his hands, flexing his fingers. Cas says, “I told her we’d been common law married for the last seven years.”

Dean looks back up at him. Cas has turned, tie unfasted and draped loose around his neck, shirt undone. Light in his hair and splayed across his chest. 

Dean’s heart is racing. And it’s laid out across the floor. The words feel clumsy in his mouth. “We didn’t even get back together until—I mean, we weren’t sleeping together or—” They were looking at each other when the other was looking away. They were praying. 

“I know,” Cas tells him, “but the love was there.” 

“Shit, Cas —” 

This might be real. This might be something. Something bigger than himself. 

“Am I wrong?”

“No, I just—,” he stops, “it wasn’t. It isn’t wrong.”

Cas holds his gaze, and then he turns back to the mirror. Again with his eyes on Dean in the reflection he says, “Give us a chance to fight this.”

From his lap, Dean’s phone lights up with a notification. He glances down to see that the photo he uploaded has posted. A single square on a blank page. 

He says, “Okay.”