Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Cas is hunched over in the back seat, brow furrowed. “Six letters,” he mutters. “City in oldest American Viticultural Area in Washington.” Sam watches Dean catch Cas’s eye in the rearview mirror. “Second letter A, fifth letter M.”

Sam considers it. Outside of his window, brittle grass and gray RVs roll by, flat and cold. “A-uh-m,” he says to himself. “Washington state. Washington. Cas, any ideas about the letters in the other blanks?”

“No.”

Dean slaps the steering wheel. Sam flinches. “Yakima!” he says, grin on his face like he just won the lottery. “Gotta be Yakima.”

“Yakima,” Cas repeats, scratching it in with his pen. “How do you spell that?”

“Shit, I dunno, the way it sounds, I guess,” Dean says, glancing over his shoulder before switching lanes. “Y-A-K-I-M-A, I think.”

“Interesting.” Cas holds the crossword away from him like an old man, peering at the letters. “Thank you. I believe I’ve answered exactly half of the clues.”

The way he says it — like this is the most important thing he’s ever done, like anyone will give a shit about a crossword from a middle of nowhere 2019 Sales Event ad masquerading as a magazine — just tickles Sam. “Nice,” Sam says, trying to hold in his laughter, doesn’t wanna discourage Cas. “Good work, dude.”

“Thank you… dude,” Cas says, tapping his pen against his mouth. “Now, what substance is often used in… this magazine says ‘dream quests.’ Is this appropriate phrasing for a majority white readership?”

Dean snorts. “Man, every small town loves to make Native American ceremonies, legends, all of it into shitty tourist crap. You know that.”

“It feels disrespectful,” Cas says. He tilts his head to the side, and adds, “I do believe the word that belongs here is PEYOTE. Unfortunately, the spelling is hardly representative of the plant’s true name.” In the back seat of Dean’s car, Cas ponders the nature of language. “On the other hand, any use of the Latin alphabet requires some form of transliteration, which I suppose inherently compromises any faith to the original.”

“You don’t have to finish the crossword if you don’t want to,” Sam says.

“No, I should.” Cas applies his ballpoint to the paper, presumably writing in his begrudging PEYOTE. “I don’t like to leave things unfinished.”

“I get that,” Dean says, affably enough, and pulls into the motel. It’s a ghost this time, they’re pretty sure, an easy run, definitely doesn’t require all three of them. But Sam likes to push Dean into doing things that are good for him, and spending time with Cas puts a smile on his face like nothing else. “And we’re here.”

Sam steps out of the car, looks up at the neon since. Winces at the ugly halo over the P in PARADISO MOTOR COURT. “Cas—”

“It’s fine.” Cas shrugs, magazine in hand. “I wrote PEYOTE in the crossword. It’s only fair.”

Kaia calls him early one morning in the middle of August, the sun heavy across most of the continental US. “Can you do me a favor?” she asks.

The details are simple — she wants to meet up with a family friend in Seattle and needs a ride — and the context is anything but. “I’m not connected to the land,” she says quietly as Sam packs his duffle bag up. “I won’t— I don’t know if that kind of thing is for me. But it’d be nice to learn.”

“Yeah,” Sam says absentmindedly, thinking about the number of places he’s been and the frailty of them all, the sameness. And yet he knows, too, that there’s something unique to each place, that the difference between Phoenix and Tampa isn’t just the soil quality but something deeper, richer, realer.

He says he’ll pick her up from the bus stop in Lincoln, Nebraska, that afternoon.

Sam runs into Dean in the kitchen on his way out. “Hey, I’m driving Kaia over to Seattle today, probably be back in a few days. Might take a scenic route back.”

“Huh?” Dean turns around from the counter. “What the hell’re you goin’ all the way out to Seattle for?”

Sam puts one of the sandwiches Dean made for him this morning into a ziploc, tosses a box of crackers into his duffle for good measure. He kinda wishes he’d just hit the road and sent a text. “Kaia needs a ride,” Sam says, looking at the zipper of his bag instead of Dean’s face. Dean gets like this every time he goes anywhere. “It’s not a hunt or anything. She just wants to, you know, meet some of her folks or something.”

“Her folks.” Sam watches Dean cross his arms, forbidding. “An’ why can’t Jody drive her?”

“Because Jody has a full time job and a mortgage, and we live rent-free, Dean.” Sam hoists the bag over his shoulder. “You gonna be like this every time I go anywhere without your permission?”

“I—” Dean shakes his head, looks down. “Damn it. All right, yeah, go on.”

Sam hesitates. He doesn’t like to leave on petty terms like this, is never certain of his own return no matter where he goes. “Dean. I didn’t mean it like that.”

“You did and you shoulda.” Dean smiles at him and like that, Sam knows it’s okay. “I know I get— you know. But I’m just—”

“Worried. Yeah, I know.” Sam slaps the table once, with finality, before turning to the door. “Lemme know if you want me to get anything from out west.”

“Like what, fancy weed? I’m good, dude.”

“Or—” and Sam figures he might as well push his luck. He grins. “If you and Cas want me to stay gone a few extra days.”

“What—” Dean steps forward. “Sam, I swear to God—”

“Going!” Halfway to the stairs out, Sam calls, “Seeya!”

“Yeah,” Dean calls back, faint.

Sam decides to take the beat up Torino, since it’s at least a little less obnoxious than all the goddamn Bentleys.

The drive up to Lincoln is an easy three hours. Sam takes the side roads, more out of habit than any conscious choice. He taps his fingers against the steering wheel and thinks about what he could possibly say to make conversation with a twenty-three year old kid, and doesn’t turn on the radio.

The ghost in Grangeville, Idaho, is undoubtedly the ghost of Mary Spinnerts: an old granny who was killed in a freak tractor accident, or so her daughter claims.

“It was so horrible,” Jeanine Pollard née Spinnerts says into her tissue. Sam hands her another one. Jeanine’s hands linger over his knuckles. He watches it happen, doesn’t realize that’s his hand until she pulls away. “She was just— crushed. An old woman, dying that way.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Sam says, Cas wanders around the kitchen behind Jeanine while Dean follows, keeping him in check. “That must’ve been very hard.”

Jeanine dabs at her eyes delicately as Cas squints at a postcard on the fridge. Sam can just make out the big white text over the stretch of desert grass and distant blue mountains. It says YAKAMA.

Sam thanks Jeanine for her time, pitches his voice low and nice, just in case they have to come back. She bites her lip and catches his eye when he hands her a business card with a burner number on it. All in all, she’s very respectful about it, but still Sam tries not to think about it.

Out in the fresh air, Cas says, “That postcard spelled Yakama with an A.”

“Yeah, well, more importantly,” Dean says, “we found a picture of ol’ mama Mary and Keith Pollard, and they looked pretty friendly.”

“You think—” Sam shudders. “Gross, Dean.”

Dean shrugs expansively. “I’m just sayin’. If my mom was sleeping with my husband I might whip out the farm equipment, too.”

“Yikes.”

Cas flips through his notebook. He brings a notebook on cases now, because he read online somewhere that keeping a field notes diary is useful for research. Sam didn’t have the heart to tell him that that advice was more for PhD students writing grant-funded theses, and less for legally dead, ambiguously Kansan hunters. And anyway, maybe it is a good strategy. Not like Sam would know.

“Mary was buried in an Episcopalian cemetery on the edge of town,” he reads. “Should we head there after dark?”

“Works for me,” Dean says, shuttling them back into the car.

Sam watches Grangeville roll past him again, a dirt-brown psychotropic movie that sharpens into a desolate still at every stop sign, left-turning truck, street-crossing schoolkid. Eventually Dean shepherds them through life’s toils and snares and back to Paradiso.

Kaia’s waiting for him at the Lincoln bus terminal. It’s a grody kinda place, the kinda place Sam was always one wrong move away from spending a night in once he got old enough to be answerable for his own backtalk. “Hey,” she says as she climbs in. “Thanks.”

“No prob.” Sam pulls out quick, before he can think about Kaia waiting in a place just like the place where Sam first met Meg.

Out on the road, he asks if she wants to listen to music. She doesn’t, unsurprisingly. Sam lets her stare blankly out the window, at all that nothing passing by. Sam doesn’t feel so bad about the plains anymore — not like when he went to Stanford. As a teen, he felt unmoored the second he was in empty space wider than a city block. These days he likes his clear lines of sight.

Once they’re about an hour out from Scottsbluff, Sam asks, just to make conversation, “Who’re you meeting up with in Seattle?”

“My uncle,” Kaia says quietly. She picks at her fingernails. “Claire didn’t really want me to go.”

“Yeah?”

“She’s worried. Says it’ll turn out bad.” Kaia smiles, a little. “She’s probably right. Still. Figured I better try, right?”

“I get it,” Sam says, because he does. It wasn’t as if he left college on nothing but pure fury, butting up against his dad’s desperation to keep him under his thumb. He remembers Dean’s worry, too. Dean’s voice, quiet so he wouldn’t wake Dad up, saying, you gonna be okay on your own? He remembers Dean making him promise to budget for the big bags of salt, remembers Dean forcing him to get up out of bed at four in the morning to practice his sparring. Dean hissing in his ear after a bad fall, Sam limping and Dean’s arm under him, carrying him, You gonna leave the guy holdin’ you up right now? You really wanna be alone?

Anyway. Kaia says, “I video called him, so I know what he looks like. He says he’s got two kids, almost my age.”

“That’s nice. You gonna meet ‘em?”

“Hope so.” There goes another hour. They pass through Scottsbluff, get over the Wyoming border just in time for their first gas stop. The grassland opens up before them like the sea as Sam fills up and Kaia uses the restroom.

Inside the station, Sam smiles nice as he can at the cashier while Kaia fills her arms up with jerky and chocolate bars on the Winchester dime. He keeps looking up at the big circular mirror behind the counter, the one built to turn light from its true path to catch shoplifters. Every time he looks he thinks he’ll see Lucifer there, but he doesn’t know what face he’ll wear. If maybe he’s already seeing Lucifer’s face, the way he does in every mirror.

These days Sam never knows what language will come out of his mouth. He always thinks a sentence in English before he says it, so he can make sure it won’t come out in the language of angels. Out of the corner of his eye, Kaia adds a bag of sour cream and onion Ruffles to the mix.

“Pump number two and whatever she’s getting,” Sam says as Kaia dumps her haul on the counter.

“Sure.” The cashier — who doesn’t even have a face as far as Sam is concerned, hardly anyone has a face anymore to him; they’re all flesh waiting to become vessels — lets him swipe his stolen credit card without a hitch.

Kaia offers Sam a pack of jerky, which he waves off, and a pack of Red Vines, which he accepts.

In the car, which is hot and humid from the sun boiling the leather, Kaia sticks her feet up on the dash and crunches into a Kit Kat. Sam wonders if he should’ve encouraged her to buy some fruit or something, something grown out of the ground. Try to be a good influence.

He eases them out of the gas station and then back onto the highway. His breathing comes easier once they’re on the road, passing the billboards that used to be the only entertainment he’d get as a kid. Him and Dean used to make up backstories for them, like I bet that real estate agent is cheating on her husband or how much money d’you think they spent on that ad for homeless kids until their dad told them to shut up and let him drive.

Kaia keeps her eyes on her phone. Another hour in, he turns on the radio, just for something to distract him from the endless monotony of the open road.

His phone rings, startling Sam out of his meditative haze. Kaia flips it over for him, and they both look at the name on the screen. DEAN.

Realizing he doesn’t really have a good sense of it, Sam asks, “How long we been driving?”

Kaia side-eyes him, which, fair enough. “Uh… eight hours? Give or take?”

Eight hours. That’s not a lot of time. Sam should probably— Sam should pick up the phone. Something could be wrong.

“You gonna get that?”

Sam looks back at the road. “Nah,” he says, letting it ring out. If there’s an emergency, Dean will text him, probably. He’s just— he’s not ready to talk to someone who knows him yet. He’s kind of been enjoying his nobody-ness.

“Jesus Christ,” Kaia mutters. “Men.”

Sam snorts. Yeah. Fair enough.

Kaia eventually turns the radio off, and Sam keeps on going in the quiet.

Idaho’s decent, in Dean’s opinion. Middle of fucking nowhere, sure, but not near as cold as the Dakotas and easier driving than anywhere east of the Great Lakes. Plus he can take middle of the road towns with prairies ahead and blue mountains in the rearview nicer than he can take Texoma heat, that’s for damn sure.

Cas in the passenger seat coming home with them after a hunt ain’t too bad either. Sam’s passed out in the back after a long night of digging graves, which Dean can’t really fault him for. Dean catches him in the rearview every so often, but he spends most of his time looking over at Cas, which makes Dean think of those long and awful months when Cas wasn’t around.

“I ever tell you when we first heard about the Empty?” Dean asks, suddenly.

Cas shakes his head, turning to look at Dean.

“Yeah, uh.” Dean’s grip tightens on the wheel. Got no clue what possessed him to say it, except that Cas is there, and for a long and hellish eternity, he wasn’t, and Dean can’t think beyond the loss. “It was back when Amara was new. First came on the scene.”

“Yes. I remember.”

How could you remember if you were Lucifer half the time, Dean wants to ask. But maybe Cas was in there every minute. Maybe he does remember. Dean still can’t really get it, how Cas could do that to him, to them — that Cas could think he was less useful as himself. Or maybe he just wanted to get away from it all. Dean can understand that, letting someone else in so you don’t have to decide anymore. Everyone Dean’s body has killed has been his fault.

“Sam was seein’ visions,” Dean says eventually. “Himself in the Cage. Thought it was God.”

“But it was Lucifer,” Cas finishes, because Dean’s told him this part of the story already.

“Yeah.” Dean clears his throat. Thinks about that. That whole year, some strange pull between him and Sam, strange desperation. Amara chose the right guy, considering that well of darkness in him. He remembers seeing Sam in that cabin, dead as anything, and all those barbiturates in the ER. What’s he good for, if not taking care of his brother? “Anyway. Billie came to us. Said she played by the rules. Told us about the Empty.”

“Did it sound peaceful to you when she said it?” Cas asks, softly.

He always knows. How does he always know? “Yeah,” Dean says, just as soft, as if there’s any chance of waking up Gigantor in the back. “She didn’t mean it that way, but yeah. It did.”

“I thought it sounded peaceful, too.”

Shit. Out of the corner of Dean’s eye, Cas is there, patiently watching the road pass him by. Does he see the same grass Dean does? The same endless highway, the same road? God damn it, Cas, why the hell are you here? “But it— it wasn’t peaceful,” Dean says — asks — embarrassed the second the words come out. He’s so fucking pathetic. He just remembers the pit in his stomach when Cas was gone— and then he came back. So sue him for being a little clingy.

“It wasn’t,” Cas agrees, and Dean exhales. Cas turns to look back at Sam. To Dean, he says, “Were you worried about him when he had those visions?”

“‘Course,” Dean snipes.

Cas doesn’t take the bait, though. He just says — promises —  “I will never bring Lucifer into your house again.”

For Sam or for me, Dean wants to ask. He can’t ask that. He’s never been enough of a reason for anything. “Good,” he says, eventually, because it is.

Cas turns back to the windshield in front of him. The stoplight in front of them turns red. Dean slows to a stop.

“The Empty was very cold,” Cas says quietly. Dean’s foot jerks on the brake, and the car lurches, just a little.

Cold. Very cold. Dean can’t imagine that as a horror, can only feel the sense-memory of hellfire and hounds ripping him to shreds, but he sees how Sam reacts to the cold. “Cold,” he repeats.

“Not— physically,” Cas tries. Dean wants the light to turn. He wants the engine’s rumble under him. It’s too damn quiet, Sam’s breathing in the back the only sound alongside Cas’s voice. “It’s… aloneness. Silence. Disconnection.”

“Sounds brutal, man.”

Cas laughs a little. The light turns green, finally. Dean guns it, and lets his baby shuttle Cas’s voice over to him as he says, quietly, “I missed you there.”

Jesus. Dean blinks, swallows. Hoarse, he asks, “Yeah?”

“Yes.” After a second, Cas adds, “I didn’t know that’s what I was feeling. But that was it. Feeling… alone. Wanting.”

“Wanting,” Dean repeats again, like an idiot. And then he adds, like someone who doesn’t understand the limits of what’s available to him, “I missed you too.”

Dean looks at the road ahead, doesn’t dare risk a glance at Cas. Here he is, some nobody, some asshole taking backroads ten miles over the limit with an angel of God in the passenger seat ‘cause he got his wings clipped on Dean’s behalf.

“Did you,” Cas says — asks — softly, but Dean can’t make himself say it again.

A decade it’s been, and he still hears his dad when he creaks open the car door, sometimes. He built the Impala up from the ground but it’s still Dad’s car, Dad’s voice hissing out of the radio like any other highway ghost, saying, you’re in over your head, boy. Saying, I didn’t raise you for this. Saying, I wanted more from you. Saying, talk, damn it. Say something. For Christ’s sake, kid, speak!

Dean’s always been a disappointment. He swallows, and drives on in silence.

The local blues station is doing a Delta blues throwback hour. They’ve got some Lead Belly going, and Sam hums along under his breath. What did you bring me, dear mother, to keep me from the gallows pole?

Kaia points over at a motel sign in Rawlins. “Ended up there after a bad trip,” she says quietly. “No idea how I got there.”

“Yeah?”

“Tried everything, to stop going to the bad place,” she continues, still looking out the window, even if the motel sign’s already half a mile back. “That time might’ve been molly.”

“Damn.”

“Wasn’t a bad place to come down, all things considered.” She chews her licorice. “The plains are nice. You don’t feel crowded in.”

“I get that.”

“It’s nice, now, though,” she adds, “having a real home. I don’t do that stuff anymore. But Jody would take care of me if I did.”

“That’s good,” Sam says, voice cracking, thinking of her at twenty-three. It took him that long, too, or near as, to find his place. He lived in a dorm for his first year and then found an apartment and stayed there, put roots down as fast as he could. Not that he ever felt like he was from California, not really. Sam isn’t from anywhere, just like every other man on the road. If anything, he’s from Hell.

Kaia gives Sam a smile, which is generous of her, like Sam’s worth a kindness like that. They keep on, taking the scenic route to avoid traffic cameras. The sun’s hot in the car. Perversely, he shivers, one last great resistance against the sunlight. Like his body’s still cold, will always be cold, which he already knew would be the case.

Things stay easy until their next stop out just before Utah, where some punk kid tries to hold them up. It’s an unbelievable thing: Sam hunched over and almost forty years old, and Kaia turned mean by Dean’s gun in her face and Claire’s righteous brand of love after two decades of staying nice, and a boy with a gun.

At first, Sam thinks he must be a demon. He throws half a flask of holy water in his face and the kid blinks at him, nonplussed, and Sam realizes. It’s just a kid.

“Gimme— gimme your money,” he says, rattled, the gun shaking in his hands. “’M gettin’ outta here.”

“Okay,” Sam says, pushing Kaia behind him, “sure, no sweat. Where’re you going? Maybe we could give you a ride instead.”

“Really?” Kaia whispers behind him, and Sam shrugs. Might as well take him away somewhere before he holds up some folks who’re less able to help themselves.

“You can’t get me there,” he says, and then Sam sees it in him, too late. He says, “I’m goin’ up.”

Kaia blows out a breath. Sam sighs. “All right, yeah,” he says, “I’m just reaching in for my wallet, okay? Keep cool, kid.”

“Don’t call me kid,” the kid says, but he does keep cool, and Sam does get his wallet out. “Cash. Gimme all your cash.”

“Sure.” Sam gives him two hundred bucks, has more in his coat pocket and emergency money hidden in the glove box of his car. Strange to think that after a childhood growing up in motel rooms with Dean doing God knows what to feed him, he can afford to drop two hundred on a stranger because it’s easier than starting a fight.

The kid flinches away from it but takes it anyway, and then backs away, gun pointed vaguely in their direction until he finally turns tail and runs.

“Poor kid,” Kaia says, and Sam can’t help but agree.

And then, like it didn’t happen — or, rather, like it did happen and it was a non-event, nothing, not even a blip on the radar — they drive on.

Kaia eats the Red Vine she stole back from Sam quickly, furtively, like a rabbit chewing on celery stalks. Her eyes dart around and she curls up like she’s hiding it from someone. Sam tries not to look at her.

“So,” she says quietly, once she’s finished and has packed away the rest of the bag somewhere safe in her backpack, once the sun starts to set in front of their eyes and Sam starts thinking about overnight motel stays, “why’re you driving me up to Seattle?”

“What?” Sam blinks over at her. “Because you… asked me to.”

“Coulda taken a bus.” Before Sam can ask her again what the hell she’s talking about, she says, “I mean. I’m grateful. I’m just saying, what— what’re you running from?”

“Jesus.” Sam laughs. “Big question.”

“Maybe I’m reading into it,” she says, “but you haven’t picked up any of Dean’s calls.”

Shit. Yeah. And Sam knows it, too, knows he should, but everyone else seems fine, Cas hasn’t said anything except to occasionally wish him a safe drive, and Dean hasn’t texted him to tell him to pick up his phone. So Dean just wants to talk. Wants to ask what’s up, how it’s going, where Sam is, maybe.

It’s just— exhausting to be perceived, is all. He shouldn’t make Dean worry. He just doesn’t want anybody to look at him.

“Just needed a break,” Sam says eventually. “Good excuse to, y’know. Get out. See the country.”

“You’ve driven across the country at least a dozen times, I bet.” Kaia settles her chin on her hand, looks out the window. They’re coming up on green space, now, the flat plains rising and falling with every mile.

"Sure." The road is clear ahead of him, trees and farmhouses to either side up ahead like good crop land. Clearcut. A lot of this was clearcut, if he remembers right. "Country changes, though."

"Not that fast, unless people are involved," Kaia mutters, and Sam looks at her. He never spent much time with her before. God only knows why the hell she picked him now, for this.

Grain silo up on the right. He notes it in his head even though there won't be a pit stop accounting this time; it's just instinct held over from long years on the road that he'll never grow out of no matter how far his body gets. If him and Dean count the same number of anything between stops — silos, horses, yellow cars — Dad'll get them a chocolate bar to split.

Sam grips the wheel tighter as they pass two motels, and then a minute later come up on the rest of the town. As if they put the motels as far as could be while staying in the municipality, for propriety's sake. He exhales once they pass through it to the open and distant land.

"So," Kaia says, eyes on the cows. She doesn't say anything, though, doesn’t call cow the way Claire still does when she’s in the backseat, doesn’t even say anything when they pass a field full of horses. "Do you think you'll do anything in Seattle?"

"Huh." Sam slows through a four-way and then rolls back up to cruising. "Good question. I— I dunno, I guess I just— figured, I'd drop you off and— and then see, y'know, if anyone else needed anything in the— in the area, I guess."

Kaia nods. She says, "You could stay, though. Like a vacation."

Sam huffs out a little laugh on instinct. A vacation. It isn't even a funny idea, the sound more an expression of surprise than anything.

The road keeps stretching on and Kaia and Sam keep gunning it, westward ‘til the end of the land. Sam has no clue what’s waiting for them at the ocean — if Kaia will find her family, if he’ll feel anything familiar all of a sudden or not. Maybe that’s why he jumped on Kaia’s call. To see if he still had a home.

“The jury would not forgive him when he took a man within an inch of his life,” Dean sings, scrubbing behind the taps. You’d think they lived in a goddamn pig sty, the shit that gets behind the kitchen sink. He puts his back into it as Bad Company brings them into the chorus, Paul Rodgers belting out in the company of strangers, you find the enemy within.

“You have a beautiful singing voice,” Cas says from behind him, and Dean jumps. “Oh. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“Jesus Christ.” Dean wipes his forehead with the back of his wrist as he turns around. “Hey, man.”

Cas looks— he looks comfortable, Dean would say. He stands there, in his jeans and that huge sweater with a daisy on it that Sam spent way too much money on at a thrift store in KC. Dean remembers standing there while Cas picked it out, saying it was “soft” and “cute” and whatever the fuck. Anyway.

“You gonna put those away?” Dean asks, nodding at the bags in Cas’s hand.

Cas grins. “Well. You’re in front of the fridge.”

“Oh, boo hoo,” Dean says, but he moves out of the way, easy enough. He rests on the edge of the counter, asks, “How was the store?”

“Not too busy.” Cas leans over to put the eggs in the fridge, and Dean basks in the cold air. One of these days he should nut up and wear shorts to do cleaning, rather than sticking it out in his jeans and Henley — ain’t like anyone’ll be home to look at him, what with Sam out driving Kaia to the edge of the earth and Cas popping in and out like Dean’s kitchen is just the first stop on a late night pub crawl.

He shouldn’t say that. Cas is around. Cas even went out grocery shopping, so he obviously ain’t packing up and quitting anytime soon. Still. Dean can’t stop the itch in his hands that tells him he’s gonna be lonely soon.

“I saw a sunflower growing by the side of the road on my way back,” Cas says, while he looks at his onions and decides if they belong in the fridge or on the counter.

“Nice.” Dean, actually, doesn’t think it’s that nice. Dean thinks it’s insane, Cas going to the fucking Walmart and looking at sunflowers growing out from the dust where Dean’s hitched more rides than he can count, as if that’s— as if that’s all he wants. Cas always moves around the bunker like he’s happy to be there, underground in the middle of nowhere, stuck with Dean of all people, a man who’s probably as far from good company as you can get, the kind of guy you go home with for a night but can’t find much to talk about with over breakfast. Dean wants to say, are you fucking serious? Don’t you know any better?

He’s just pathetic enough not to, though. Cas is here. Cas might even stay, for a while. If Dean lets him catch on — that there’s more out there, that he could have anything he wants — then he’ll go, and Dean—

Dean won’t know where he is. He won’t know if he’s safe, if he’s happy. He won’t know anything about him at all.

“Let me show you a picture,” Cas says, because he finished putting away his groceries while Dean was busy having an existential crisis. He crowds in close — too close, Dean wants to say, but he doesn’t pull away — next to Dean, and pulls up the photo.

“Cool,” Dean says, looking at it. The road looks— it looks kinda nice, framed that way, through Cas’s eyes. And the sunflower. Lonely, in front of a field of grass that hasn’t been made into cropland yet. Root system probably stunted as all hell that close to the asphalt, but tall, still. Facing up to the sun. “S’a nice picture, man.”

“Thanks,” Cas says, low. His arm is so close— close enough for Dean to feel it, almost, close enough that if their shirts didn’t have sleeves Dean would feel the heat of his skin.

Dean clears his throat, and edges away. “You heard from Sam?”

He watches — ah, hell — he watches as Cas shuts down, puts his phone away. Dean knows that look. If he was a better kind of guy, he’d— he’d make it right. Ask Cas to show him more pictures, ask him what he wants for dinner. Take him out for a drive. The thing is, Dean’s— Dean’s not the kind of guy who can do all that and still stay free and clear. He can’t do all that and then let Cas go on his way with a smile on his face, when he inevitably does up and leave. He can’t do all that without half falling in love with the guy.

So he lets Cas look down at the ground and shrug and say, “No, I haven’t.”

“Enjoying his trip,” Dean remarks, inanely. He just stands there, awkwardly, and then asks, “You— you hungry?”

“I picked something up at the store,” Cas says, looking up at Dean. “And you’ve been in the kitchen all day, cleaning. You don’t have to cook for me too.”

“Yeah,” Dean mutters. “Sure. ‘Course I don’t.”

“Thank you for the offer, though,” Cas says, adding insult to injury. Dean leaves Cas there, before he makes it into an argument he won’t win.

The light on the west coast is like nothing else in the continental US, maybe like nothing else in the whole world. Sam wouldn’t know. He’s never had a passport that would stand up to airport scrutiny, only made it up into Manitoba for Asa’s funeral by a stroke of luck and a half-asleep border guard. And the rules along the border are different when you’re coming in through the prairies, anyways.

They look at the water, on the west side of the city. Kaia inhales, the breeze ruffling through her hair. Even with the island across the bay it’s a clear path to the sun across the water, even more wide open than his home in the plains. The last time Sam actually went to a beach was at Stanford, some late-night party Jess dragged him to, blurred out by a haze of alcohol and weed and the high of real, normal people looking at him and seeing a human when they did. Not like this, where the clear sky pours light out onto all of it and gives no shelter to the wicked.

“Everything’s bigger here,” Kaia says. She’s right to say it. The trees, the mountains, the waves. Even the clouds are shaped like cliffs. "I think my uncle's gonna show up in a few."

"Cool." Sam looks at the water. He can feel himself fidgeting and he can't stop it — his knee's bouncing, and he keeps tilting his head to the side, trying to pop the vertebrae or stretch out the muscle or something. He's anxious over it, whatever it is. Maybe it's that he can't stop thinking about that kid who held them up in Utah. He did a hell of a lot worse for a hit of demon blood, back in the day. He shoulda given him a number to call or something.

Kaia eyes him. "You okay?"

"Yeah— yeah, yeah, I'm just— just thinkin'." It's also possible that he's struggling to deal with being in his body for so long all by himself. He's amazed it's lasted this long, frankly. At the bunker he'd wake up every night thinking about Lucifer raising him from the dead and Toni curling her long fingers around his jawline and sometimes he would have to just sit there and take it until he could force himself out of bed, limping on feet that weren't injured anymore.

“Kaia?”

Sam turns around along with Kaia. “Uncle Vernon,” Kaia says, so Sam figures he must be the guy.

He looks him over. Thinning hair, brown skin, a leather jacket. He looks pretty normal. He doesn’t get, like, a creepy vibe off him, although Sam’s meter for that shit is skewed about as far as can be without actively seeking out serial killers for movie nights.

“It’s good to meet you,” Vernon says, and his voice has a nice cadence to it, even-keeled. He meets Sam’s eyes, too, looks up their four inch height difference with ease. “And you must be Sam?”

“Yeah,” he says, and then he looks at Kaia, because they didn’t prepare this. “I’m, uh. A family friend.”

“He’s friends with Jody,” Kaia says, and Vernon nods seriously, and Sam figures he must know she’s a cop. “I have… I have a lot of friends. Family, out east.”

“You’ll have to call them once we get to my house, to tell them about your time here,” Vernon says, and Kaia relaxes, and Sam realizes this is part of her safety plan. Vernon even says, “Will Sam join us?”

“Nah, he’s busy—”

“I could if you wanted—”

“No.” Kaia hikes her bag up higher on her shoulder, says, “I’d rather— it’s okay.”

Sam can take a hint. He looks at the two of them, wonders if he should be more worried, but Kaia’s standing up taller just being around someone who maybe might look to her a little more like family, or at least like a different kind of family, than the girls in Sioux Falls. And she’s met Vernon through video calls, and he comes on the recommendation of distant relatives. And anyway, Sam’s dad left them with anyone in the life or near enough. Not that John was ever a model for how to be a decent parent.

“Can I walk you to your car?” Sam settles on as a compromise, and he follows Vernon and Kaia to a beat-up gray hatchback. He notes the licence plate.

“Well.” Kaia turns to him. “Thanks for the ride, Sam.”

“Yeah. Anytime.” Sam tries to look in her face for worries, but she looks— somehow, she looks more relaxed than she did all those hours in the car. “I can come pick you up, y’know. I’ll stick around for a while.”

“I got Claire’s number too,” Kaia says, and she looks down at her hands. Sam follows her gaze, down to the red skin around her picking fingernails, the ceaseless twitching of her thumbs. He’s got that too, fidgets with anything he can get his hands on or still as a statue, no in between. He realizes, suddenly, that she picked him because he is what she is. She’s a survivor.

“You take care of yourself,” Sam says, and Kaia nods. He looks at Vernon, too, and lets himself off leash enough to say, matter of fact, “You hurt her, I’ll kill you.”

“Fair enough,” Vernon says, so that’s— that. Sam watches her get in the car, keeps his eyes on their tail lights until they turn a corner.

Maybe he got it wrong. Maybe he should be tailing them, but then, maybe he should respect Kaia’s choices too. Oh, God, he doesn’t know.

Anything could happen to her. It’s not hard to get a phone off someone — to go somewhere where there isn’t signal, or just hit her hard enough that she can’t put up a fight. Sam sits down, suddenly, on the curb, knees up to his chest.

you ok? he texts Kaia, bites his fingernails waiting for her reply.

A minute passes, and then she says, yeah. stop worrying. but thanks.

Sam exhales. He can do this. She’ll call, if something goes wrong. She trusts this guy, and Sam can trust him, too, for her.

He turns back to the Torino and there—

Right in his car, is— is Nick. Nick’s face pressed to the rear windshield with a gruesome smile.

Sam blinks and he doesn’t disappear, he just— his shoulders are missing. It’s just Nick’s face, the face that Lucifer wears when he isn’t wearing Sam’s. Sam trips over the curb, sprawls on his knees and scraped up palms. When he looks up, Nick’s gone.

Lucifer is here. Sam closes his mouth, can’t say a word for fear it’ll come out a yes. He checks his phone; Kaia hasn’t texted. He breathes in, and holds his breath, and doesn’t know if he’s choosing to hold it or if Lucifer’s doing it for him.

Finally, he staggers up, exhales, walks to the car, opens the door, puts his key in the ignition, looks in the rearview. No Nick. No Lucifer.

He swallows. The open sea ahead, sky above. Trees are good for anxiety, he read somewhere. He should— he should see a fucking national forest, or something. Touch some dirt. Go somewhere Lucifer hasn’t been, somewhere he hasn’t seen him. Somewhere this old earth can keep him safe and close.

“He ain’t callin’ me back,” Dean says, tossing the phone around in his hands, a nervous habit Sam used to lose his mind over in the car.

Cas nods. He looks serious, serious as always— that hasn’t changed a bit, even with his long years on earth. Most days Dean appreciates it, seeing the difference between Cas and the guy popping methamphetamines in Zachariah’s cyberdeck zombie apocalypse. Some days he hates it, knowing that Cas at his core is something so different from Dean that all the nasty crap Dean uses to shove his way through life is something Cas never had to learn.

And some days he feels it so deep in his stomach he can’t put a name to it. Yesterday Dean was standing in the doorway to the library, just watching, while Cas frowned at a book. He’d looked up, still frowning, and Dean hadn’t— Dean wasn’t ready for it. So he’d just stayed there in the doorway, met Cas’s gaze and let him look all over him, firm and brutal like any man’s hand.

He remembers. Cas had looked and looked and looked, and Dean had let himself be looked at, with careful and serious consideration. Like what you see? he’d wanted to ask, except Cas hadn’t seemed in the mood for games. He might’ve said yes, and then where would they be.

Dean shoves his phone in his pocket so he doesn’t keep twirling it around in his fingers, catching the dying light on the screen and half-blinding himself and Cas too, no doubt. He swallows back the memory of Cas’s gaze on him. Today, Cas is looking at him again, but Dean has more important things to worry about.

He squints into the distance, as if Sam will be on the road outside the bunker, hitching a ride ‘cause his car broke down two miles back. Suddenly, he’s reminded of something he’d forgotten until this very moment, looking eastward out to the mailbox at the closest corner and the treetop behind a hill at the intersection after that.

The memory must’ve come from a day with his dad’s mom, the one time they visited as a family before Sam was born. Millie had taken him out to the flat plain behind her homestead, under the equally naked sky, and asked him how far away a distant tree was.

A mile, Dean had said, and when his grandma shook her head, tried, A million miles.

The answer had been three miles, or thereabouts, measured by old Henry’s farm survey. Three miles, she’d said, is the furthest you’ll ever be able to see when you’re home.

It was impressive to Dean, who’d been three years old and about three feet tall, and who could barely understand one foot, let alone thousands of them. And to this Dean who was so small in time and space, Grandma Millie added: If at any time you can see further than that, remember the people below you who can only see what’s right in front of them.

Mary hadn’t been a big fan of John’s mother. Dean doesn’t remember much else about their time with Millie, but he remembers that much. Still. He looks out into that distance, thinking of those three miles, and wonders how far Sam can see, wherever he is. If he can see twenty miles out or if he’s down in it, down in a ditch somewhere looking up at the sky ‘cause the rest of the earth is beyond him.

“He’ll be home,” Cas says. Dean shakes his head, looking out at that treetop, maybe two thirds of a mile away, give or take a few yards. Cas puts his hand, warm, low on Dean’s back as he comes around to face him. “Dean. Do you want to start looking for him?”

“No,” Dean mumbles, and then he steps back, out of Cas’s orbit. That’s the problem with looking at Cas — you just want to agree with him, to let him tell you what to do. Dean resisted the pull for so long, talked shit and held onto old grudges just so he could fucking look at the guy without losing his goddamn mind— but now that Dean’s let it happen once, he’s— he can’t stop, just sees Cas’s collarbones jutting through his T-shirt and wants to crawl into his belly. “Anyway,” Dean says, “he’s probably— he doesn’t wanna talk to me. Made that perfectly clear.”

“You know that sometimes Sam needs his space,” Cas says, nice and soft, which, well, fair enough. Dean tries not to act like his dad around Sam, tries to let him go his own way and come back when he wants, but he just wasn’t built for that. He was built to hold tight and mean.

Dean turns back to the bunker. Sam’s not coming down that road anytime soon. Won’t do him any good to look, especially not looking east, when Sam’s always going westward, west like the sun. His hands itch with how bad he wants to break something.

Sam will come home, or he won’t. No matter how hard Dean tries, he can’t ever seem to make Sam come home before he wants to.

The motel room just outside of Seattle cost him sixty for the night and there’s a guy smoking two feet away from his car, hat out for cash. Sam guesses this place doesn’t shell out for over-armed and under-trained security guards like the snazzy hotels downtown.

He drops a couple bills into the man’s hat and unlocks the door. The inside of his room is tall, like some kind of loft retreat, a wide vase with a fake orchid in it on the table and the bed all clean white sheets like an Ikea ad. As always, the truth is in the bathroom, with its stained grout and a rusted out, clogged up sink drain.

He sits down and hunches over at the table. His body is too big. He curls up over the map, knees scrunched up against the underside of the table, feeling crazy. He’s crazy. He should put Lebanon into Google Maps and let it drive him home but he’s so fucking crazy he draws a pen through Washington down a yellow line on his crumpled up four dollar convenience store road map dog-ears the northeastern corner of Oregon with his pen stops when he’s bleeding-ink-safe in Idaho—

He dropped Kaia off and then it was like his whole body couldn’t bear the sight of a screen anymore, like Lucifer was in all of it. Text messages from Dean reading You alive, at least? and Sam not replying. How should he know?

His hand shakes and the pen line shakes. The blue slices clean through the Rockies.

Sixty for a night because he figured he’d stay a while, see the sights. He never gets to go anywhere except on hunts and he thought he’d do some sightseeing. Why did he think that? Where could he go where Lucifer wouldn’t find him? Because that’s what it is, what Sam can’t stand to think but it’s true, it’s the truth of it — Sam isn’t anything when he’s not doing something for someone else and he’ll always default to being Lucifer’s bitch. He curls up under the nice wide table like a good dog. There’s lint on the carpet, clinging to his jeans. He shuts his eyes. Lucifer kissed him every time he would take the pain away and it was evil, the evil of it was inside of him when Lucifer would do that, when Lucifer would make him not hurt anymore, which is how Sam knows the difference between benediction and love. Dean loves him. Lucifer blessed him.

He presses his forehead against the floor, overheated. His brain is melting. He is on fire but he’s not on the ceiling, it doesn’t make any sense. He has to drive home. He has to go home to Lebanon where Dean who loves him is waiting for him because otherwise how will Dean know he exists? Sam’s not real enough for Dean to know it across distance, over text message. Sam has to be there. Even Sam’s body isn’t enough. Sam has to really, really be there.

His phone buzzes again. Dean calling. I can’t come to the phone right now, I’m having a nervous breakdown, Sam imagines saying. I’m as frantic as a Kerouac novel. He read On the Road once, probably because Dean had shoved it in his hands with a bitter sense of irony, him also being Dean and also being on the road. No Sam in it, of course. Except that early in the book — Sam remembers it had to have been early in the book because he hadn’t finished it, he’d returned it to the library when they upped and left a week later — the narrator said I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that’s why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon.

The thing was Sam really did feel like he was at the dividing line then, at fourteen years old, like he was at the turning point of his life. Those sentences caught his eye because of the word ghost, but the real crux of it was that he was nothing — he was nothing, and he thought that maybe after a strange red afternoon of his own he would become something. He hadn’t figured out yet that he’d been poisoned irreparably at six months old. Like an acid lake downriver from a paper mill town, the kind they drove through too often in the first years of his life, the smell of it sharp and nauseating and unending. Pollution is permanent. He never had a chance.

Chapter Text

It was good to drive out, Sam thinks in spite of everything, circling around the coastal mountain range like a vulture over carrion. Some days it hits him bad, the way his body feels. When he wakes up and he doesn’t feel like himself, doesn’t feel like anything except an empty shell of a person, that’s the worst of it, because it means he could do anything and not feel a thing about it.

The drive back to the bunker is quiet. The sun’s out but colder, different from how it was on his way into Seattle. Maybe it’s just a consequence of being alone in the car without Kaia’s begrudging acquaintanceship or Dean’s relentless CCR.

Dean stopped calling a few hours ago. Sam might worry, but it’s only been two days, and he’ll be back at the bunker soon enough. Besides, it’s nice enough to get a break from the bunker drama, and maybe the lack of contact means Dean and Cas got their heads out of their asses.

His radio hisses.

When he crosses the border down into Oregon, he hits what’s probably a local Christian channel, some Baptist or Mormon production. If I die and my soul be lost, nobody’s fault but mine. Sam switches the station. —the worlds Thy hands have made— pretty pious for a highway outside the Bible belt. Next station: Honey, does it blow your mind that the prophets would lie?

The announcer says the weather’s decent, normal traffic, nothing new to report. The next song is Creedence; he might as well have put on one of Dean’s cassette tapes. I was born on a Sunday, by Thursday I had me a job.

Sam turns the radio off. He passes a billboard advertising a 2020 end-of-year Kia sale, which seems a long way away, but it’s not like Sam’s been in the car-buying business anytime recently. The coastal mountains follow him a few miles to his left, and Sam drives, thinking he might stop when he gets into Kansas and pick up eggs from a farmer’s market, rather than from the Walmart down in Salina.

Dean knows it the day Sam disappears.

He doesn’t recognize it for what it is, of course, but he’s never felt anything like it. Like a thread snapped in him, some piano wire twanging apart. A guitar coming undone. He becomes brittle in a way he’s never experienced before and it makes him stagger over to his sink, look at himself in the mirror in case it’s a physical injury, but he can’t see anything. Just feels the crack of the load bearing pillar inside of him that he didn’t know was holding him up.

When a week has passed and Sam hasn’t returned any of Dean’s calls, Dean tells Cas about it. He says, “A while back I felt something. Like— I don’t know. Like a string in me just— went. You think—?”

Dean never ends his sentences anymore. He’s only ever talking about one thing, and that’s Sam, and he can’t bear to voice the things he’s thinking about his brother. He can’t even imagine it, saying something like, You think it might be related to Sam being—

Even his thinking stops there.

Cas looks down. Dean knows it’s because he’s gonna say something Dean doesn't want to hear.

Cas says, “It usually… it signals the end of your, well. Some call it soulmates.”

Dean clenches his fist, which happens to have a can in it. Beer spills over his knuckles. “What?” he asks, or he thinks he asks, because he can’t hear. He can’t feel, either. He thought he’d be there, if Sam died. He thought he’d go with him.

“Soulmates leave each other behind all the time, of course,” Cas says. Of course. As if— as if Sam is like anyone else, as if Sam could ever be like anyone else— “but rarely is it felt for what it is. Sometimes it leaves a depression, or an injury. Or sometimes when one soulmate dies early, the other suffers some sort of accident and dies, too. That you felt it in this way — in your soul, I think — is unique.”

“Can we use it?” Dean asks, desperate. “Can we track him?”

“I don’t—” Cas sighs. “Normally, I would say it means Sam is dead, but with you two… death is so rarely the end.”

“So what?”

“It’s a hypothesis.”

“Cas—”

“I think it means Sam is gone.” Dean watches Cas’s face fall, watches his throat move as he swallows, and Dean begins to realize the extent of his loss. “I think it means he’s just… gone.”

“How the hell does a—” Six and a half foot tall man disappear, Dean wants to say, but six and a half feet is nothing to the senseless world around him, would barely keep your head above ground if you were standing in your own grave. He changes tracks. “What does that mean? Is he in the Empty?”

Cas says, quietly, like he’s admitting something he’s ashamed of, “What I mean is, I think he… I think he isn’t. He simply isn’t. He’s not anywhere. He doesn’t exist.”

In the space that follows, Dean lets himself take one breath, the last breath he has before the whole unbearable truth of it collapses on him. He doesn’t exist. Sam is—  “But I knew him,” Dean says, instinctively, not even words so much as his body extending into sound. “He exists because I knew ‘im. He’s real. He’s real, Cas.”

“I know, yes, I know, I only meant—”

“People don’t just disappear,” Dean hisses, knowing it better than anyone. He was disappeared into the bowels of the US government and even then he knew himself to be real, knew himself to have a presence. If Sam were there Dean would still feel him, would still know he was a person. “People don’t just become nothing, Cas. The Empty’s a place like anywhere else.”

“I wish I could explain it to you, Dean, but I barely understand it myself,” Cas says. Cas’s eyes are so blue, and his jaw is set, and Dean thinks he must look the same, but he can’t see himself because Sam isn’t around and Dean only ever knows himself as Sam’s brother. He’s been Sam’s brother longer than he’s been Dean.

“So he’s gone,” Dean whispers, trying out the words. All of a sudden, he thinks, vividly, I oughtta shoot myself. I oughtta shoot myself. There’s nothing for him in this world without Sam, but a bullet won’t get him to the nowhere Sam is, so he might as well stay here.

He knows Cas doesn’t like to see him like this. He knows it. But still, he takes a pull from the bottle. What else is there to do. You tell me, what else is there in this rotten world to do.

“Dean,” Cas starts, softly. Like there could be anything soft in this universe for Dean Winchester. He’s sitting on the kitchen tile and got his back up against a cabinet and he can’t feel a damn thing.

“He was my brother,” Dean chokes out, knows he’s crying. Knows it. It hit him like this every time Sam went and this time is worse, because this time it’s somewhere Dean can’t follow no matter how hard he tries.

His hands shake. He says, stutteringly, “It’s like— it’s like there’s this hole inside of me that ain’t ever gonna be right. Like I’m walkin’ around without any of my limbs, somehow.” He reaches out and Cas takes his hand and it’s warm and Dean cries, oh God, he cries, nothing for it but to let it happen because Dean is no longer what he was, which was a man, a fighter. “How do I keep goin’, Cas? Huh? You tell me. You tell me, Cas, tell me—”

Cas gathers him up into his chest. Dean’s nerveless fingers drop his bottle of whiskey. Doesn’t break, but he can hear the whiskey bleeding out all over the floor. The floor where Dean is, face buried in Cas because he can’t hold himself up anymore. “I’m nothin’,” he says into Cas’s shirt, muffled, hands grasping at Cas’s shoulders just to hold something, anything. “You think I wanna be alive? You think I wanna be here, without him, without Sam, Sammy—”

“Shh, shh,” Cas soothes. Dean feels him press a kiss into the top of his head. Every part of him is numb except for where Cas is touching him because Cas is the only other person in the world. Cas is the last levee against the ultimate loneliness that has drowned the rest of him, his skin, his muscles, his spineless hands and heartless ribs.

“He was my baby,” Dean whispers. Like it’s the first of Sam’s deaths again, he understands his dad, why he made that deal all those years ago, when he had nothing else to offer — understands it as the same type of hopelessness he’d felt a year later. There was nothing unique about the drive that led Dean down to Hell. It’s simple: it’s not right to outlive your child.

“I raised him. I raised him. I put— I put his shoes on, Cas, it’s— you wouldn’t believe me, with how tall he is, but he used to be a baby. He used to be so small. I used to put his little shoes on.” He knows it, can feel Sam’s ankles in his hands, the look of him kicking while Dean tried to wrestle worn out sneakers onto his toddler feet. Mouth numb, he chokes out, “When we were going out, I used to put his shoes on for him.”

“You’ve done much for your brother, Dean,” Cas says, low and kind, and Dean can’t stand it but he can’t leave it, either, can’t be alone.

“When he was real little, he used to— he used to ask questions, ‘bout why we lived like we did.” Like it’s the first time again, the first time he held Sam’s body in his arms, the first time he saw Sam’s corpse on a ratty mattress, he remembers their childhood. Remembers what Sam was, has always been, even into adulthood: a snot-nosed, curious, gentle kid. “He never asked anything from me anymore,” Dean says, hiccuping gasps all through it, tears all over Cas’s shirt, Christ, he oughtta— but it’s Sam— “He never asked, I’d tell him— I never told him, when we were little, never answered any of his questions right, but I’d tell him now, honest, anything he wanted to know—”

“I know,” Cas says, rocking him back and forth like he’s a child. Dean can’t stop the sounds coming out of him, the tears. Like he’s emptying himself of all pride, all sin, to become nothing but lack. Dean is not a person. He’s a memorial.

Sam decides to take a desert route back, hopes for the bitter and blistering heat to burn out the persevering cold in his bones. The national forest highway network takes him down along the eastern border of California and then a sharp left into Reno and beyond, meandering along 50, two hundred miles out from anywhere and crawling through to Utah.

From up where the eagles can see, Nevada is pockmarked with greenish fissures made of brown-green mountains and wet farmland, like mold biting through a loaf of bread. Sam’s nearly fifty year old Torino rattles down along wire-thin highways with presidential names underwritten by numbers. He wonders if the concession to American tradition came before or after the numerical classification, if Eisenhower’s real name is Route 80 or if it’s the other way around.

At the intersection of 80 and 93, where Eisenhower meets Lincoln, the Nevada State Department of Transportation makes itself known with a building and a tree the size of an anthill compared to the vastness of the desert. To the north, a farm’s sweeping green circles like radar scanners interrupt the sandy white ridges overlooking Nevada’s moldy fissures. Military outposts, all of it, strategic camps set up to surveil the unclaimable desert.

The DIY Enochian anti-possession sigil Sam inked in just above his hip itches. He shifts in his seat.

The sky darkens — or it’s been darkening, already, and Sam’s only just noticing — and Sam glances at his rearview. Dark storm clouds gather behind him, covering up the sun. The thing about flat land like this, open country, is that you can see the storm coming miles away. A column of clouds hails down twenty miles behind him. The lightning makes him flinch, and he looks back to the road, clear ahead of him.

And then, too soon, the storm comes over him. He shouldn’t be out here in this weather — good God, he shouldn’t be in anything metal in this weather, that’s for damn sure. Lightning comes down half a mile ahead of him and Sam pulls over, gets a tarp out of the trunk and huddles down ten yards away, waiting for the sky to strike him.

Rain clatters over him, loud, ungenerous. The thunder’s so goddamn loud he feels it in his bones. He peeks out of his plastic home to look at the sky.

It’s pink behind the clouds, the hidden sun, maybe. The stormclouds tower like gods, greater statues than Sam’s ever seen, than any place he’s ever been. Everything is red. That’s the trick of it, of the desert — there’s nowhere to hide on the bare and raw earth.

Rainwater rushes past his feet. The stream picks up, turns into a brook — and then into a river, barreling under that Torino, cutting a new road. Sam hides from it all, hunched under his tarp.

It’s warm, but Sam’s cold. That's the worst of it: that the water is warm, or rather that the water is cold on a hot day which is supposed to even out, but he's still freezing. Sam has been cold for so long he isn’t even human anymore, a cold-blooded creature so low-down even the dogs won't fight him ‘cause there's nothing left to fight. Not much for anyone to chew off these bones. The water makes him ice. The water cracks down sharp on the plastic, an inch away from his eardrums, the water pours heaven down and makes him shiver, and the water doesn't make him clean.

Sam closes his eyes. It’s so loud. Thunder roars and he flinches at the sound of it, the feel of it, opens his eyes and looks at his feet and sees red mudwater sluicing by and thinks, that’s my blood. My blood is running across my body which is the sand. Sam's blood pools around his car’s tires. His car is waiting to be struck by lightning.

He shivers under his plastic and the rain keeps coming, endlessly. An inevitable brute. The rain is his father. Lightning, and then one-two-three seconds later, thunder. “Fuck off,” Sam whispers, teeth chattering together, and his face is wet even though he hasn't moved out from under his cover. What he can see of the sky is more purple than pink. “Fuck you,” he says, louder, trying to speak the warmth back into himself, the heat, the fire. Dean’s fire. The fire Dean has in him that makes him throw furniture when he's mad, that makes him punch walls and break bottles. The fire Dad stoked in Sam’s older brother without an exit sign, the fire Sam used to have. Sam wants that fire back. Can't he have it? Dean doesn’t need it, Dean doesn’t want it— it’s Sam, Sam’s the one who needs something, anything in him that’s his and his alone, see, he’ll even take a hand-me-down.

The clouds die off and the rain stops. The sun comes back. Sam’s blood shudders next to his car. Sam carries the tarp on the crown of his head like a businessman holding a newspaper over his head in Manhattan rain. He shakes it off and puts it in the trunk. The car wasn't even struck by lightning. He didn't need to wait outside.

Once he’s inside the car, looking out of the windshield at the endless, inevitable, unclaimable desert, it hits him.

Sam is suddenly, for the first time in many, many years, very angry.

He looks at his hands which are shaking with the residual cold despite the car’s heat and he— he storms out of the car and leaves the driver’s side door open and he kneels down and he grabs handfuls of mud, presses the mud between his fingertips. His whole body is shaking. He’s so angry. He’s so angry. He didn’t deserve that thunderstorm. He didn’t deserve— it itches, the Enochian on him, the brand he took as the lesser curse— the sand is gritty in his palm, he’s never felt the earth like this— there’s no mud in the Cage— he’s nothing, he’s nothing, he’s a dog, he’s less than a dog, but he’s human, isn’t he? Isn’t he?

“Fuck!” Sam yells at his hands, his voice cracking with disuse. He hasn’t yelled in years. He can’t even remember the last time he raised his voice. What does Sam Winchester have to yell about? “Fuck!”

He looks up, straight ahead at the length of mud that stretches in front of him like an ocean. He looks at that horizon. Sam opens his mouth, and he screams.

His sheets aren’t clean. His body isn’t— he isn’t whole, is what Dean thinks. He wakes up at five in the morning and his body isn’t whole.

Eileen came around a few days after they figured it out, after that thing in Dean that keeps him tethered to his brother broke, but mostly it’s just been Dean and Cas. Dean alone in his bed, and Cas in the kitchen or the library or, worst of all, sitting on the staircase to the outside world like he’s just itching to get out.

On impulse, Dean calls Claire. Five in the fucking morning, but goddamn, she picks up.

“Hey,” she says. Claire sounds gentle with him, a little. She knows about Sam, like Jody and the rest of the girls do. There’s wind in the background. “What’s up?”

“You know where Kaia is?” Dean thinks that’s the key. He finds Kaia, he finds Sam. Easy.

A turn signal clicking in the background, Alex saying something. Claire’s driving Alex to work, probably. Good. Distracted enough not to say no. “Out near Seattle,” Claire says, and then Alex says something and she backtracks, “Don’t— don’t go after her.”

Dean hears it in her voice, that fear, but he’s already got a map in his head, and nobody tells a man no when a map’s in his head. The route from Lawrence to Seattle is clear as daylight, picked out in cartoon red across the road map that lives in Dean’s mind. “Just gonna ask her some questions,” he says, standing up to pull some pants on. There’s a flurry of activity in the back, Alex telling Claire where to park, maybe, so Dean takes advantage of her distraction to ask, “You know the name of who she’s with, at least?”

“Vernon—” and then Claire says, “shit, don’t—”

“Vernon, all right,” Dean says, figuring he can get enough out of that. He knows Kaia’s near Seattle, not in it, which means Vernon’s probably a little isolated. Easy enough to trawl some land deeds for a Vernon or Verne or what have you.

“Damn it.” Alex closes the door in the background, and Claire hisses, “Don’t you go after her.”

“It’s Sam.” Dean doesn’t— he stops, hand on his bedframe, just to hold him up. He wants to say, you don’t know a thing about what Sam is to me, but maybe that ain’t true. Maybe Kaia is to Claire what Sam is to Dean, just a little, just in the sense that she’d move heaven and earth to find her — and here’s where they fight, because Kaia is heaven and earth to Claire, and Dean is going to move her.

“Let me come,” Claire says softly. “Just— wait a couple hours. Let me come with you.”

“Wasted enough time already,” Dean says, and then, feeling like a real asshole about it, “Bye, Claire.”

He hangs up and walks down the hall. Dean knocks heavily on Cas’s door, shakes the doorframe with it. “Get up,” he barks, and leaves once he hears Cas start to move around. He sets the side of his fist just once against the brick wall of the hallway, firm but not break-the-wall hard, rests there for a moment before continuing on.

Cas catches up to him in the kitchen. “Are we going somewhere?”

“Talk to Kaia,” Dean says shortly. He loads his gun in the library, not far enough gone yet to do it in the kitchen. Maybe after another night he might’ve been. “Shoulda gone after her yesterday. C’mon, we’ll get breakfast on the road.”

“All right.” Cas — like always — follows after him, lets him do what he wants. Always lets him do what he wants until it blows up in their faces, and even after that. His jacket looks sturdy, at least, not that he’ll need it now at the end of August.

The two of them pile into his baby, and Dean drives out as Cas fiddles with the tape player. BB King’s easy guitar starts in, and Dean swallows. It’s discordant, is what it is, the anger rising in him as BB King sings the key to my kingdom is the thrill of your kiss.

Still. Cas rarely picks the music, and Dean can dig it. The sound of it is closer to a worship tune from any church down south than the real devil’s blues, and Dean’s anxious to make sure Cas gets his daily dose of righteousness where he needs it.

He knows his roads better than the back of his hand. Google Maps or whatever the fuck would have him get up over into Nebraska first thing but he can’t afford to get caught on a clear line of traffic cameras this close to home, and besides, the traffic’s a bitch near any big city. He takes some backroads meandering westward instead, drives through a gas station for hash browns and two cups of coffee. Cas refuses his and Dean chugs it out of spite. Their first real stop comes after he just misses Denver, rolling to a stop in another gas station outside of Fort Collins by noon.

“You want anything?” Dean asks, and Cas shakes his head. “Get out’n stretch, at least.” He leaves Cas to piss or touch his toes or whatever, loads up on defrosted breakfast wraps and another pair of coffee cups. He grabs food for later, too, a coupla sandwiches and an obscene amount of snacks. Cas eyes them, must realize they’re on a long haul, because he heads over to the restroom.

Back in the car. Cas asks, “Do you want me to drive?” and the look on Dean’s face must tell him something, because he just nods and looks out the window. At 75 an hour everywhere looks the same.

“It’s so haunted,” Cas murmurs. They’re in that half-eaten stretch of nowhere between national forests, one long interminable place where no tourists go, made of teetering rusted GAS signs and green-brown brush blending in with short scrapwood fences. All of it the same wildfire-dry beige except for the occasional American flag.

“You mean, uh, ghosts, or…”

Cas shakes his head. “No,” he murmurs, brow furrowed from what Dean can see of the faint reflection in the window. He says, like it’s an explanation, “I wonder if the United States of America was made in Heaven’s image.”

“Startin’ to sound like a Mormon there, buddy,” Dean says, for lack of a better reply. Of course, he knows Cas doesn’t mean it as a compliment. Knows better than anyone the fuzzy and sometimes nonexistent border between the visible ghosts of individual dead and the swelling, amorphous miasma of horror that sweeps every offroad town from sea to shining sea. Highways cutting through it like the nowhere backend hallways between heavens.

The roads keep them out of the forests, generally speaking, right up until they get near the Wyoming/Idaho border. By the time they start seeing signs for Yellowstone Cas has acquiesced to Houses of the Holy. The guitar swells while Robert Plant sings, I’ve felt the coldness of my winter I never thought it would ever go, right as they hit the Palisades reservoir.

They swing to a stop in Idaho Falls, Cas clearly itching for a break and Dean, he can admit it, ready to stretch his legs, too. There’s a diner out near the highway, so Dean takes them that way no matter what Cas has to say about it.

“How long do you think we’ll be on the road?” Cas asks. He’s easy in his seat, voice low as anything, low as the low-down river choking under every highway. Apparently you have to worry about water pretty much anytime you dig up asphalt. It gets Dean every time he drives past a highway with a hole in it, water spewing up out of the ground just for the air, just for the freedom of it.

“‘Nother ten hours probably,” Dean grunts. His burger’s good, at least.

Cas nods. Dean looks at him. Did he look like this in that Biggerson’s, after he beat the hell out of Dean and then healed him and left him? Did he look like this on the run from the angels, from his family— did he look like this when Dean kicked him out? The streetlight just outside the window makes Cas’s face look bright, covers him in white light the way he’s only ever looked when an angel kicks the bucket in the same room.

Their waiter comes over with another round of coffee. “We can drive through the night,” Dean says, antsy and angry. They’ll get to Kaia in about ten hours, and Dean’ll be real nice. He’ll say, where’s my brother, and he won’t knock her in the face with his gun ‘less she talks back with an attitude about it.

“Maybe you should rest.”

“Ain’t a chore to drive.” Dean’s been driving his whole life. He looks at Cas’s hands around his mug of coffee, holding his fork and knife. He doesn’t look out of place here anymore, in his jacket and his jeans. Dean could take him into the back of his car. Dean could crawl into the back of his truck, nose down his throat and his chest the way he did for a dozen men who look just like him, and drive another hundred miles afterwards. It’s easy; he wouldn’t need to rest. He’s running on instinct. He’s been looking for his family in the western plains since time immemorial.

“Still.”

“We’ll keep driving.”

That shuts him up. Cas eats his fries sullenly and Dean looks out the window. Parking lot’s empty, and the stars are drowned out by the streetlamps in the sky.

Kaia isn’t really the kind of girl who stays in one place. She does when she has to, but above all else, she’s a survivor. She looks out bus windows and chews pencils to the lead thinking about what it might mean to belong somewhere, to feel safe enough to put down roots. That’s all she ever does these days. She hasn’t told Claire yet, but she’s spent her whole stay with Jody thinking that it’s dragging on too long, that she’ll need to cut ties sooner rather than later if she wants anyone to stay safe.

Uncle Vernon has a small house out near Tiger Mountain, just east of Seattle. She only went with him because she has Claire’s number on speed dial and a gun in the bottom of her backpack, but it actually turned out pretty okay. His place looks like every stereotypical PNW tourism ad, a log cabin in the middle of dense and haunted forest, fog and rain around every corner.

The first thing Uncle Vernon shows her — in fairness, she asked for it, kind of — is her aunt’s grave. She’s buried near a fallen western cedar, Auntie Pala. Kind of a funny name. “Pala knew more about the kind of stuff you’re after,” Uncle Vernon says, as they stand over the notch cut into that cedar log under the open and outpouring Washington sky. “But I’ll teach you some ceremony, if you want. Your mother, you know, she always— she said to me she had a baby, couldn’t keep her. Told me all the things she wanted to pass on to you, if she never got the chance.”

“Thanks,” Kaia says, her voice blown away by the force of the rain. The plains are easier for her now. Out here, under mountains and great trees and thunder, she feels so small. She feels that the world is indifferent to her. She feels that she has no place at all.

A week and a half into her stay with Uncle Vernon — she figures she’ll stay for two weeks, maybe call Sam up again when she’s ready to go and see if he’s heading out west anytime soon, or if he’s still in town — Dean and Castiel, Claire’s angel, show up.

“Hey,” Dean yells, from outside Uncle Vernon’s front door, and Kaia turns on her phone. While Dean bangs on the door, her phone loads enough for her to see a missed call from Claire last night and a text from this morning: hey I told dean and cas where you were it seemed like an emergency sry. “Hey, open up!”

Kaia opens the door since Uncle Vernon is out back chopping wood, and there they are, the two of them, Dean and Castiel both towering over her in their wet jackets. “What’s up?”

“My brother is missing,” Dean snarls, “you know anything about that?”

He barges his way into the house. Kaia looks at Castiel, left at the front door. She sighs, “You can come in too, if you want.” She texts Claire, can u come get me they seem angry, and then turns to face them.

Castiel says, as Kaia slides her phone into her pocket, “We just want to know what you remember.”

Dean’s pacing around, in her peripherals. He’s considerate enough to stay in the same field of vision as Castiel, at least, so Kaia doesn’t have to work to keep both of them in sight. “We just went on a road trip,” Kaia says. She didn’t know that Sam was missing. Claire knew she’d be offline, probably planned to tell her the next time they called. She thinks about that big man giving that kid two hundred dollars, him hunched over and quietly buying her chips with his pupils in the corner of his eyes more often than not.

Aw, hell. She whispers, “What do you mean, he’s missing?”

Castiel opens his mouth, but Dean says, “He’s gone. Missing. Not on this earth. Disappeared. You were the last person to see him, so what’d you see?”

“I don’t know.” Kaia curls her arms around herself, wonders if Uncle Vernon will be back soon. “He dropped me off. Was really nice, asking if he should come with me, but I said no. We were— we were downtown, I don’t know.”

“Smith Cove Park,” Uncle Vernon says, coming in with the rain through the back door. Kaia steps back, lets him come into the room. “That’s where we met up with Kaia’s friend Sam. You folks know him?”

“He’s my goddamn brother,” Dean hisses, and Kaia looks back down to the floor. “And Kaia was the last person to see ‘im alive so I’d like to know what the hell happened.”

“I’m sorry,” Vernon says, placatingly. Kaia looks up. Dean doesn’t look de-escalated. “I don’t know what happened to your brother.”

“God—” Dean stands there, shaking. Castiel puts his hand on Dean’s shoulder and Dean— Dean just— he rounds on him, strikes a punch into Castiel’s shoulder and holds his fist there. “Damn it,” he whispers.

“I’m sorry,” Kaia whispers. Dean turns that horrible gaze on her, wet eyes and rage in them, white hot like a sword mid-forge, and Kaia flinches.

“What else,” he croaks out, and Kaia looks back to Castiel because she can’t look at Dean anymore. She remembers when he put a gun to her forehead; this is, somehow, worse. Dean asks her, “What did you— what’d you talk about? Why did you pick him?”

Why did you take him, Kaia hears, but she didn’t take him. “He didn’t— Jody was too busy, and you guys have cars, and—” Castiel possessed Claire’s dad, and I’m scared of you, so Sam seemed like a good choice. She can’t say that. “He was nice.”

“He is nice,” Dean snaps. “He ain’t dead yet.”

“I’m sorry,” Uncle Vernon says, and he steps forward, into Dean’s line of fire. “I’m sorry about Sam, I truly am. But can’t you see that she’s— you’re making Kaia afraid. There’s no need to be hostile.”

“Oh, buddy,” Dean says, “you ain’t seen hostile yet.”

“Dean.” Castiel puts himself between them, says, “We’d just— anything you can give us would be helpful. Please.”

“There’s nothing,” Uncle Vernon says. “I can’t give you anything.”

Dean pushes past Castiel, grabs Vernon’s shirt in his fist. Kaia focuses on the shirt stretching in his hands, the closeness of his forearm to Uncle Vernon’s body. She is intensely aware that Dean could kill him. “I find his body in your yard, you’re dead, old man,” he hisses.

Uncle Vernon stands calm through it. Kaia would like to know how to do that. In her corner of the living room, she shivers. If Dean did that to her— if he did that to her, if he threw her around and put his fist in her face— but he has. He has done that, and she lived through it.

“Get out of my house,” Vernon says, quietly but firmly.

Cas pulls Dean back, and away, and then suddenly, just as quickly as they came, they’re gone again.

Kaia exhales.

“Are you all right?” Uncle Vernon asks, and Kaia nods. “I’m glad. They seem troubled, those two.”

She barks out a laugh. “Yeah. Real troubled.” She checks her phone. Claire’s already replied: I’m already on my way. Be there in two hours.

“I think I’m going to— go,” Kaia says, holding her phone in her hand. Even this place isn’t safe, because the Winchesters and their brand of violence and grief are everywhere. “In a few hours, I mean. Claire’s coming to get me.”

“I understand.” Uncle Vernon sits down next to her, and takes her hand in his. Kaia looks up at him. He looks so— unbothered. How does he do that? “They don’t know everything. Remember that, all right?”

“Yeah.” Kaia clenches and releases her fist, stretches out her fingers as she recalls the soil between them, the plants her uncle showed her, the resonance of his drum. She knows more about this land than any hunter, no matter how many highways they drive. Her knowing will keep her safe.

There’s nothing at the park.

It’s fucked up to think about it this way, but Dean thinks he’s feeling the way other people, real people, must feel when they lose somebody. He feels hopeless.

Back at home, Dean walks into Sam’s room and stops there, right there in that awful and dense threshold, like he is the door, like he can hold back the horrible and traitorous emptiness of the room beyond him. But he’s not a door. He’s not even a slab, not even the cornerstone he was born to be, the foundations of his father’s house. He’s just a man. Sam escapes in the air between his arms and his body.

He starts with the things that are immediately visible, the way you start by looking for barns and trees before committing to a gravel turn off a plains highway. Like if he eases into it — if he starts with making Sam’s bed, with reading the titles of the books on his desk — then by the time he’s hunting through the back of Sam’s closet for his secrets Sam will have had enough time to rise up and stop him. As if Dean can make Sam into an angry spirit out of nothing, can pull him from whatever no-place he is to here, his room, his brother who is violating his privacy.

Only two of the books on Sam’s desk are in English. Dean wonders when the hell Sam had the time to learn French, which is undoubtedly the most cursed language on the planet. Les damnés de la terre — yeah, Dean can figure out what the hell that means, thanks — is stacked on top of Ghostly Matters. Thinking English will somehow give him a leg up, he skims through the ghost book and reads sentences like Haunting asks us to move analytically between that sad and sunken couch that sags in just that place where an unrememberable past and an unimaginable future force us to sit day after day and the conceptual abstractions because everything of significance happens there among the inert furniture and the monumental social architecture and figures he’s better off with the French.

Dean leaves the books. No fiction, far as he can tell, which is a damn shame. The next thing to inventory are Sam’s clothes. There are two sweaters on his chair. One of them is softer than anything Dean’s ever felt, and the other one is rough like it might cut him to a burn if he wore it. Sam has a pair of sweatpants squirrelled away in a corner of his bedsheets, which are halfway off the bed.

The bed compels him to kneel, to look under it, half-hoping for a skin mag he can use to remind himself that Sam was his kid brother who he could poke fun at if he really wanted to. Like if Sam ever returned Dean could hold it over his head. He could say didn’t know you were a fan of brunettes, but I probably shoulda guessed and then Sam would laugh about it and it would be all right that Sam disappeared, because this exchange would mean that he came back more whole than he left.

Dean’s not that lucky, though. What he finds under Sam’s bed is: one syringe; two jars of holy water, rosaries still floating in them; a half-pound bag of salt; a tattoo gun and assorted supplies; a prayer candle with a woman on it, looking up, a halo around her head, cradling a lamb in her arms. Saint Agnes. She isn’t covered in hair in the candle icon, but yeah, Dean knows her story.

He knows damn well what this is for. He can see Sam, alone in this room, tattooing anti-possession sigils on his own stomach in holy water ink with a candle to the patron saint of rape victims lit in the background. Fucking— shit. He doesn’t take any of it out of its hiding place. He just lets the weight of it pull him down his natural trajectory until he’s fully curled in, forehead on the ground, the water moving from his body to his eyes to his cheeks to the tip of his nose to the floor of Sam’s bedroom. He is crying and he is hunched over because he can’t hold Sam’s history and stay upright.

Cas finds him like that, maybe ten minutes in. “Dean?”

“Yeah,” Dean croaks out, pushing himself up to standing. Cas is as ethereal as the first day they met, Sam’s lamp illuminating him like one of those warm paintings Dean’s never seen in person, all yellow light and red carpet and Italy or Spain or wherever the hell just visible through the window. It settles him, unaccountably, the sight of him there. “Yeah, I was just… lookin’.” He doesn’t clarify because there are two things he’s looking for, one of them pushing in where the other is like all ghosts do: he is looking for Sam’s things, and in them he is looking for Sam.

“What did you find?”

“Stuff.” Dean shrugs. Considering where he is and what he’s doing it’s probably hypocritical to feel defensive over the shit under Sam’s bed, but he doesn’t really wanna tell Cas about it. “Anyway. What are you up to?”

“I’ve been reading.” Cas pulls out a book from one of the enormous pockets of his awful cargo pants, the ones Dean really, honestly tried to convince him not to get, which only made Sam more encouraging. “This one is about interdimensional travel. I think it’s supposed to be pornographic.”

“I—” Dean blinks. “Okay.”

“It’s not very good.” Cas slouches against the doorframe and vertigo hits Dean sure as anything, the bizarre combination of grief for his brother’s absence and the wanting, the ache he feels when he sees Cas and thinks he’s mine, and then shot through it all that lasting humiliation over his own weakness. Cas flips through the book and Dean stares. “Would you like me to read you some of it?”

“Maybe— somewhere else,” Dean says, because he is in his worse-than-dead brother’s bedroom looking through his stuff and Cas is offering to read him sci-fi porn.

Cas looks at him over the edge of his book, that softness in his face that Dean has never seen on anybody else, not in his life. “Would you like some more time in here alone?”

Dean swallows. Maybe he would. Maybe he wants to be alone in here, as long as he can, until the universe takes pity on him.

“What if he’s in Hell, Cas?” He doesn’t even know he’s asking it until it comes out. Christ. Christ. He’d thought— the worst, the worst of it was after Stull, that year with Lisa, broken and beaten down and happy, sometimes, and the nighttime grief worse for it. At least here he has a real home, a family he’s built up for longer than a handful of days here and there before the grief struck him down, but God. It doesn’t make a difference. If Sam is in Hell— if Sam is in Hell—

“Dean,” Cas says, softly. He’s too fucking gentle with him. “You know Rowena would tell us—”

“I know,” Dean says. The words cut at him. Yeah, maybe Sam is in a better place. But maybe he’s just gone. How’s Dean supposed to live with that? “It hurts so bad, Cas,” he admits. “He’s—” Dean tilts his head back, blinks at the ceiling. “I was supposed to go first.”

It’s like Sam’s ghost has a ghost. He isn’t haunting them, and the absence is more disturbing than his presence. Dean didn’t burn him. He didn’t let him go. So how could he not be here?

“We’ll find him,” Cas says, and Dean shakes his head. “Dean.”

“He’s nowhere,” Dean croaks out. He looks at Cas and thinks, I thought the Empty was nowhere, but you came back to me. Will Sam? Does he know how to claw his way out of death the way you do? The way I do? “Cas. Cas.”

“I’m here,” Cas says, and he kneels down and Dean grips him, hands in his shirt, ‘cause Cas is all he has left. He has no family. Somehow, Dean has outlived them all.

In the wake of their failed expeditions to both Seattle and Sam’s bedroom, Dean lets his life slide. He sits and watches TV and lets the world pass him by.

When he wakes up enough to see the damage he’s done, all he sees is Cas, itching to get away from him. He starts taking care of himself, starts cleaning up after his nights with Jack n’ Jim n’ Jose, but the situation in the bunker stays the same: Cas, hovering at the edge of every room, out of sight for hours at a time, waiting for the right moment to make his exit. And then Dean rolling his sleeves up and doing the same thing every damn day while praying for Cas to stick around just another hour longer, like a goddamn housewife in a TV show, foaming at the mouth after a Sisyphean eternity of making dinner and cleaning dishes.

By the time they hit the two-month mark, every day of Dean’s life goes like this:

He buys groceries.

He cooks dinner.

He waits for Cas to come to the kitchen.

He sets out a plate for him.

He’s made too much food, and set out too many plates.

He scrubs the dishes clean.

He drinks half a fifth and calls it a night.

And like a goddamn housewife, he’s always suspicious. He tries not to be, fuck, he tries, but he just. Cas spends more time away from him than with him these days and he can’t take it. He wasn’t built to be alone, not like this, not with Sam—

Hours after dinner — because there are no windows in the bunker and Dean doesn’t wear his watch at home, so he tells time by the meals he makes — Dean sits in the kitchen with his nightly whiskey. Third drink of the night. He’s done crying on Cas’s shoulder about it. Cas is fine, apparently. But that makes sense. Cas wasn’t half of a whole the way Dean was, the way Dean still is, a four-legged dog dragging itself around with its hind legs cut off. Cas is sad, sure, but he can see the end of it. Dean knows it. Cas is probably thinking, two years from now I might be happy again. For him, it’s possible.

Dean finishes his drink, and pours himself another. Like hell will that happen for Dean. He looks to the next morning and that’s as far as it gets, because if he thinks about two years without Sam— fuck. Fuck.

But Cas. Cas is safe to think on. Dean figures Cas could even make it, out in the real world, if Dean gave him a leg up instead of tossing him out like he did when Cas first went human. Cas could find someone nice, some nice girl who could treat him good, take care of him, show him all the nice things there are to know about humanity, nice nice nice. And Dean could cry himself to sleep in his little claustrophobic kitchen making leftovers for no one.

He forces himself into bed. When he trudges into the kitchen the next morning, the whiskey is packed away, and his glass is washed and sparkling clean. As if no one had been there, not even Dean.

Dean is so casual about it in the beginning. His slouched shoulders, the seams of his flannel shirt sweet on the slope of them, signal ease as much as the rest of it: his worker’s hands in his pockets, the gentle lean of his body against the doorframe, the smile that Castiel doesn’t think to question. In the future which is past for Castiel, who once knew the vast fullness of time as faithfully as he now knows the tall grasses above the bunker, he might look back and understand that Dean in his grief is more afraid than anything else, but tonight — tonight he is optimistic.

Two and a half months after Sam’s disappearance, Dean comes to Castiel with his voice low, a quiet intensity that Castiel is abruptly attuned to, knows intimately and covetously as the voice Dean uses with others. With women. Dean asks, “Cas, you busy?”

As always, Castiel can’t help the private smile that comes when he hears Dean call him that. Cas. His name. Dean’s name, for him. He turns his face down to his own knees, cross-legged on his bed while he watches Netflix, but he’s sure Dean can still see it. “No, of course not.”

“You wanna—” Cas blinks up at him. Dean shrugs. “Have a drink?”

It is the slouch and the voice and, above all, the request for a drink which orient Cas to the situation. Tonight, Cas thinks, standing up to join Dean in his doorway. He lets himself look at Dean truly, takes in the unsettling beauty of his face, the uncloaked strength in his forearms. He lets himself feel it.

It hits its mark. Dean turns away, blushes. The red is high in his cheeks, follows his throat down to where his shirt begins. Perhaps it follows even further. Cas— Cas wants. “I’ve already had a beer tonight,” Cas says, fingers twitching. His vessel — his body — is desperate for Dean in a way that Cas had never been able to understand until he became human for the first time. Suddenly, he remembers, he had wanted. He’d pitied his earlier self for the crystalline yearning that he’d thought was so threatening to Heaven, so subversive. In his human body, human soul, Cas had felt things that made angelic treason inconsequential. Is it a wonder he's been ill-fitted for Heaven ever since?

“Right,” Dean huffs, nodding. “Yeah, I get it, sorry, man, I shouldn’t’ve—”

“I’m not opposed to spending time with you, Dean,” Cas says, realizing that Dean has misinterpreted his silence. He breathes, and marvels at the shared air in his and Dean’s lungs. “I only mean that I’d rather be sober for it.”

“Oh.” An exhalation, like instinct.

Cas steps closer, feeling brave and foolish. Perhaps it’s hubris, to think he could deserve the warmth of Dean’s body in the same space as his, that he could possibly deserve to feel joy like this after all the wrong he’s done. And yet the nature of grace is its transcendence, isn’t it? The impossibility of earning it, the futility of good works?

Dean clears his throat. “So. You, uh. You wanna watch a movie, or…”

“Is that what you’d like to do?” And then Cas says, “Don’t ask me what I want. Surely it must be obvious by now that I’d yield to any request.”

He watches the bob of Dean’s throat as he swallows, the way Dean catches his bottom lip in his teeth. The sunburnt and generous tan of his freckles, washed out in the bunker’s hallway light. “Like you’ve ever yielded to a thing in your life,” Dean says. He should sound teasing, the words he says, but they come out hoarse, almost absent. “Okay. Okay. Cas, I—”

“Yes, Dean.” It should be a question, too, but Cas finds every answer in Dean’s name.

And then — Cas thinks, I wasn’t built for this, to know this, to understand the complexities of human relations — Dean scratches the back of his neck and takes an abrupt step back. Not too far, but far enough. And Dean says, “Been a while since we been out, man. On— dates or anything. An’ I was just thinking we could— if you wanted.”

Ah. Yes. Cas adjusts his expectations. It’s unsurprising, and it shouldn’t sting, to receive Dean’s sexual desire but not romantic. He chides himself for — what is the saying? — looking in the mouth of a gifted horse. “I understand,” Cas says, and then lets his body take him where his soul has reared back. His hands are on Dean’s shoulders, and Dean inhales, and Cas wonders if it makes him aroused, to be pushed around by an angel, and does not dare to think about whether it makes him feel.

“All right,” Dean says, and his hands come up to wrap around Cas’s wrists — not to stop him, but just to hold him. Just to hold on.

Cas dips forward and kisses him, because he wants, because he can. Dean’s mouth is beautiful, opens warm for him. Cas breathes him in, feels the heft of his body under his hands— closes in with another step forward until Dean’s backed up against the doorframe and in blasphemy, Cas worships.

“Cas—” Dean grunts into Cas’s mouth as Cas thumbs at his collarbone, presses in hot and hard just to feel the give of Dean’s lower lip between his teeth.

Dean pulls away to gasp. “Wow, Cas. Who knew you could kiss like that, huh. Or, I mean— jeez, I keep fuckin’ forgetting about, about the fuckin’—”

“If you say pizza man I will kick you out,” Cas says, hopes it’s obvious that he’s joking, shakes off Dean’s hands so he can hold Dean’s face between his palms, sweep his thumbs along the brutal and naked crest of his cheekbones. He can’t stop himself. Too intimate, too adoring, he whispers, “Look at you.”

Dean just laughs, self-conscious, and takes the opportunity to push Cas away. “Bed, dude,” he says, herding Cas towards his own bed. “Lemme get your laptop—”

“I couldn’t possibly care less about my laptop,” Cas says, because Dean’s nearness has loosened his tongue. He lets Dean close the laptop and put it on the floor before reeling him in, kissing him again next to his bed, hands all over him, taking liberties the only way he knows he’s allowed. The sensation of it is gluttony, greed, makes Cas hungrier and hungrier, sends light down his spine.

Out of this hunger comes a vision of Dean on his bed, sprawled out, legs spread open for Cas and it— he presses Dean downwards, lets him bounce on the bed once before following him, kneeling between his thighs. “Yeah, Cas,” Dean murmurs, as Cas presses a kiss to his jawline, the skin under his ear. “Oh, God—”

“It’s just me,” Cas says, doesn’t even realize it’s a cliché until Dean starts laughing. “I— I meant that literally.”

“I know,” Dean laughs, subsiding into a grin. He puts his hand on Cas’s cheek and Cas burns for it, wonders if he might be part-angel yet because the shock of desire is surely too strong for any mortal to carry. “‘S what I like about you, Cas.”

He can’t think of anything else to do. He kisses Dean’s palm in devotion.

Dean is silent. Cas, open-mouthed, beatified, follows the tendons flexing under Dean’s freckled skin, kisses his way along the heel of Dean’s palm and, gentle, presses a kiss of benediction into the hollow under it, the vulnerable space between the fine bones of his wrist. His eyes are closed; he worries he might become divine if he saw Dean’s face.

The failure of it shames him. He knows — he knows — that Dean is here for an easy time. That Dean is here for the convenience of it, perhaps here to forget about Sam’s absence for a night, but Cas can’t help himself. He noses in and presses a kiss at the crease of Dean’s elbow.

“C’mere,” Dean grits out, and Cas lets himself be pulled up to eye level, settles his hips along Dean’s, their stomachs touching. “Cas.”

Cas waits, but Dean doesn’t say anything else. He pulls him down and Cas succumbs to it, puts his hand in Dean’s hair and strokes softly just to hear him choke out a moan into Cas’s mouth, to feel his hips jerk minutely.

“Do you feel good?” Cas asks, wanting it so much he can’t live with it. Dean, feeling good. All Cas wants is to watch him, to press his mouth at the curve of Dean’s ribs to taste his breath when he gives himself over to pleasure.

Dean nods at him, and Cas slowly unbuttons his shirt, revealing Dean’s bare skin underneath. “Beautiful,” Cas breathes, instinctively, and Dean flinches away from him. He exhales. “Dean—”

“You’re— beautiful,” Dean stutters, and he reaches up for Cas’s shoulders and pushes at them until Cas takes off his own shirt, too, the two of them just like each other and touching. And kissing. Cas kisses Dean again, just to feel him give into it, to feel him take it— as Dean slumps into it, into Cas’s mouth and his hands, sliding gentle like wheat bowing to a strong wind.

Cas would take such good care of him. He kisses the skin under Dean’s eyes. “What do you want?” he asks.

Dean swallows. Cas lowers himself down, gently, until his stomach touches Dean’s, until their chests brush against each other, until Dean’s hips are aligned with Cas’s. “Anything you want,” Cas breathes into the hot space between Dean’s throat and his shoulder, the curve of his neck.

Dean starts to shake, minutely, as Cas runs his hands up and down his arms, feels the skin prickling under his calluses. “I—” he starts, and then Cas feels him breathe, presses his mouth to Dean’s cheek and does him the service of looking away from his tears. “I dunno,” he whispers, finally, explosively.

Ah. He— he doesn’t. He doesn’t know.

“Okay,” Cas says, and he thumbs across Dean’s cheekbones just to feel the pad of his thumb against Dean’s stubble. He is so beautiful. He is so beautiful. Cas kisses him again, and then gently tilts Dean’s head back so he can press one long, breathless kiss to the base of Dean’s throat while Dean shivers under his grip.

And then Cas releases him. “Do you want to have sex?” he asks. Maybe it’s abrupt. Dean snorts out a laugh, half-instinct, but he doesn’t respond.

Cas rolls onto his left side, off of Dean’s body to Dean’s right, but keeps his hand on Dean’s belly, feeling it quiver under him. He loves him so much. Cas loves Dean so much, and all it— all it amounts to is this. His awkward conversation and Dean’s cooling sweat, in Cas’s bed, in the bed Dean gave Cas when perhaps it became unbearable for Dean to see him in the library, to face him in the kitchen.

“Do you want to simply— lie here together?” he asks — presumptuously — knowing that this may be his greatest misstep. Dean didn’t want him to ask. Dean wanted— maybe Dean said what he wanted, earlier this evening. Maybe Dean said it and Cas should’ve taken him at his word; Cas knows, he knows he isn’t the easy mark Dean was hoping for. He could make himself that. He shouldn’t have said a word.

Dean doesn’t respond to that, either. His mouth trembles and he fixes his eyes on the ceiling and Cas watches him, takes in the soft valleys and peaks of his bone structure, the rolling hills of his mouth and his chin. “Why did you come here tonight, Dean?” he risks asking.

Dean’s eyes close. He says, shakily, “I wasn’t thinking about him. I was just thinkin’ of you.” And he says, “I shouldn’t’ve— I shouldn’t’ve been— I shoulda been thinking about him.”

Sam, of course, the only him in the bunker with them, more haunting than any ghost. Of course you shouldn’t have been thinking of him — of course you deserve a respite, Cas wants to say, but it isn’t his place to say that. And if Dean had disappeared, Castiel would have no respite. He would be nothing. He would be over. He knows nothing about what Dean deserves or doesn’t deserve in his mourning. “What reminded you of him again?”

“You, just—” and Dean laughs, covers his closed eyes with his hands as his mouth twitches down into a frown, as his laughs become hitching breaths become sobs. “You know he used to talk shit about us. Me. About my— about what I.” Dean breathes. “I was thinking he’d be happy I actually made a move.”

“You told him about us?” Cas asks, stunned.

“I—” Dean shakes his head, chuckles. “Nah, no, he— he kinda. We went on a case, those high schoolers with the musical version of— of us, and— anyway. He figured it out.”

Figured it out. Figured it out. “He figured out how I feel about you,” Cas concludes, feeling perhaps a little embarrassed. Mostly, though, he misses Sam. Strange that he thinks it here, in a bed with his brother, but it’s true — he misses his sharpness, his steady commitment, his measured insight. He misses Sam’s commiseration when Dean is particularly abrasive.

“No, dumbass,” Dean says (case in point), “he figured out how I feel about you.”

Oh. Cas’s right hand tightens around Dean’s stomach, and he presses a kiss to the top of Dean’s arm. “Dean,” he says carefully, “I think we might feel the same way about each other,” and Dean nods at that, too.

Castiel slides closer. He does it slowly, glacially, imagines his own touch furrowing into Dean, making cliff faces, valleys. He burned a mark into him once. Castiel mouths at Dean’s shoulder, his right shoulder, spreads his fingers wide against Dean’s abdomen and listens to his shallow breath, the noise he makes in the back of his throat. Castiel kisses the skin near Dean’s tattoo and Dean chokes, a small sound that Castiel soaks up greedily. He keeps going, over him and into him, as if he can carve his own love into Dean’s soul so deep it leaves crevasses, sharp pools for water to flow into centuries and millennia later, until finally, finally, his body lies over Dean’s and his hand reaches its first and final destination point, the now-invisible brand on Dean’s shoulder. Dean shudders.

“Stay with me tonight,” Castiel asks, softly.

“Okay,” Dean replies, just as soft, and he closes his eyes and turns into Castiel’s touch, nose buried at the base of Castiel’s throat. And Castiel falls asleep like that, with Dean below him and to the side of him, touching him, for once, the way Castiel has wanted to be touched.

The morning after Dean comes to his room, Dean doesn’t recognize him in the kitchen.

Not— Castiel knows, he knows Dean sees him. But some days, like today, Dean looks upon his body, sees his black hair and his blue eyes and Castiel knows that he thinks, This is Castiel, and walks past him with no intention of knowing him any more than that.

Today of all days, he doesn’t want to take it. Today, he wants to fight that unrecognition.

Don’t you know me? Cas wants to ask, wants to shake Dean’s shoulders. Don’t you know that I am here? Don’t you see me? Am I a ghost?

The first time it happened, only a few weeks after Sam’s disappearance, he had knocked on Dean’s door. Had said, Dean, do you need anything and Dean had said no man I’m good just hangin’ out and Castiel had said all right and left him to it.

The second time he’d tried again, all the stubbornness that wrought such havoc in Heaven laid to bear on Dean Winchester’s grief. And Dean had said, Just leave me alone, God damn it, and so Cas had.

The day after that second attempt, Dean had made breakfast as if to say, I’m sorry, and Cas had eaten it and thanked him for the food and the apology both, thinking about leaving Dean alone. He knows — after the things they’ve been through, after the bottles he saw in Dean’s room when Mary left them that first time after her resurrection — that Dean doesn’t want to be alone, not really. But whether Dean wants Castiel, or is just settling for whoever’s closest — of this, Castiel is less certain.

Castiel knows what Dean’s thinking, although not in so many words. Dean cooks a roast dinner he won't eat and Castiel can almost hear his lamentation, blood of my blood, are you not with me? Dean drives for hours and hours and comes back emptier than he left and Castiel knows he is wondering, am I as gone as you are? Where did you go? Dean sets plates out on the table and Castiel isn't human enough yet for the silence to feel awkward, and anyway, it isn't silent at all. Dean huffs out breaths and clinks cutlery against plates and feeds Castiel to make this his home, and all the while he knows Dean is thinking: Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?

Today is the fifth or sixth time Dean has looked at him that way, unseeing. Castiel considers the possibility of pulling him out of it, and meets himself with the futility of attempting it. Castiel decides to leave him be.

Dean goes out with his baby whenever he feels— disconnected. Just to sit’n look out at the stars, drink a beer and remember those nights when she was all he had, just her and the road. And Sam, of course. Sam even when he wasn’t there at all.

He swallows. Ten years ago — ten years ago he sat out here, too. Out under the same Kansas sky. On the same Kansas road, because every dirt road in Kansas is the same as every other. He’d gone through half a bottle of whiskey and then a six pack of beers just to take the edge off, and then hacked and puked and cried his way through that night, that night after Sam died. Sam put himself in that pit at high noon and Dean drank his way through sunset and midnight and dawn, and drank his way through the next three days, too.

The thing — there’s one thing, one thing at the heart of it. The heart of it is this: Sam is his home. Sam is more his home than any other godforsaken thing or place or person on this whole rotten planet. God, he’d give anything just to hear him— to hear his, his voice, the way he’d say Dean, c’mon, the way he’d say God damn it, Dean, the way he’d say, I’m not listening to any more fucking Led Zeppelin, asshole, always his little brother— Christ. Dean blinks up at the stars.

“It wasn’t supposed to go like this,” he tells them, choking on it. His lip trembles, and he— he swallows another gulp of beer down, bites his lip to keep it in. He swipes the back of his wrist over his eyes.

“Hasn’t it been enough?” he begs. His throat catches. His voice shakes. “Haven’t we given enough? Didn’t we deserve—”

His head drops. Maybe they didn’t deserve anything. Maybe after all of it, all of the shit— maybe it didn’t add up to anything after all. All he’s left with is Sam, out of reach. All he’s left with is his own damn self, shivering through a November midnight under the same Kansas sky he’s been grieving under his whole godforsaken life.

Dean crawls into the back seat of the Impala, his only constant, his home at the beginning and end of all roads. He pulls a blanket over him and curls into her leather, shaking. When they were real little — Dean must’ve been not even ten, maybe nine or eight, because Sam was only tiny, a small scrap of a kid — he used to curl around Sam to keep him warm when Dad would leave them in the backseat. Never anywhere cold enough to be dangerous, just— just cold enough for Sam to whimper and sniffle in his snotty little kid voice. Dean used to pile blankets on them both and swing an arm over his shoulder. He worried about Sam being so small. Look where that got him.

He shakes. He won’t grieve Sam again. He’s only really done it the once — and he’s not strong enough to do it again. If it’d do any good, he’d jump into the pit headfirst. He’d do anything for him back.

Cas won’t leave him now.

Dean can figure that one, at least. Cas won’t go. Dean wore him down bad enough that he’ll stay, through whatever Dean throws at him, whatever desperate tosses of Dean’s body he can manage. It’s humiliating, sometimes, looking at what he is— what he made Cas into. He thinks about that night, near on a week ago now, him crawling into Cas’s bed ‘cause he was just so antsy not to be alone.

And they didn’t even fuck. That’s the most fucked up part out of all of it, that Dean threw himself at Cas and then couldn’t follow through, couldn’t keep the heat up. Said baby won’t you stay with me, and couldn’t make it worth his while.

These days, when he’s able to get out of bed — ’cause some days he can’t, and that’s just how it is — he makes breakfast. He sets it down in front of himself and in front of Cas, when Cas has the inclination to eat, and he thinks— he thinks, my dad wouldn’t sit for breakfast.

Dad’s grief looked different from Dean’s. Or maybe it looked just the same, and Dean just can’t see it. Dad spent every moment looking for the thing that killed Mom. It was in everything. It was in the cereal Dean made for breakfast when Dad had the inclination to eat, his hunt for yellow-eyes. These days, Dean just eats eggs for breakfast.

And Dad never let them forget it. Maybe he didn’t even forget it when he was with Adam’s mom — who the hell knows. Dad probably said a prayer to Mary every morning and every night, probably told Adam about his dead wife who he still loves very much, ‘cause sometimes grief can be complicated like that, kiddo, sometimes you can love a dead person and love an alive person too, the way I love your mom and you. Maybe Dad said that to Adam the way he never once said it to Mary’s own kids. Maybe he did.

Dean doesn’t know. Jesus, he doesn’t know. All he knows is that he did forget about Sam, that night. All he was thinking was, Cas has gotta stay. Cas is gonna go, and I gotta get him to stay. And if I can’t— if I can’t, then— then shouldn’t I get something out of the deal anyway? And then they were in bed and Dean wasn’t thinking much of anything at all, he wasn’t— he should’ve been— and then he thought of Sam again, suddenly, like a lightning strike, and it all fell to pieces. He became useless. He became Dad, or he became worse than Dad, because at least Dad was consistent. Dean, meanwhile, is the kind of guy who propositions a man in his bedroom and then chickens out at the last second ‘cause he can’t fake it that long. Or ‘cause he can’t keep a real thing that long. Fuck, he doesn’t know.

Dean’s hand clenches around his knife. Breakfast is a solo trek today. Cas didn’t have the inclination to eat.

Eventually, Dean has to finish his food. He puts his plate in the sink to wash later and goes out to the library to read some more books about nothing in the lacerated hope of finding his brother.

“Hello, Dean,” Cas says, and Dean nods jerkily in response. Cas nods over at the tablet he has going with updates. “News?”

“Nah.” That’s always the answer. Always nothing.

They sit like that for a while, reading and scrolling through news alerts and generally making no progress.

“Dean,” Cas says. Dean looks up, and Cas is looking away from him. Cas — who used to move in strange, solemn, singular motions, a brief touch to the forehead or a purposeful step — is tapping his thumb nervously against his book. “I was— ah.” Cas’s mouth turns up in a small, uncertain smile. “I wanted to know if you— if tonight, you might want to. Sleep in my room.”

Christ. Fuck. Dean looks at him, at the way he looks down again at his book. His heart starts pounding as he starts thinking about— about— after a night or two, Cas might say, frowning: if I understand correctly, human custom means we are… dating? He might look at Dean and ask, Should I expect flowers?

Or, worst of all, he might look at Dean with nothing in his face at all. Dean would awkwardly set an omelette in front of him, on a day when Cas has the inclination to eat, and Cas would say, earnest as all hell, I don’t expect anything from you, Dean, and Dean would know that he’d finally succeeded in cutting Cas down to nothing. Down to Dean’s level.

He tries to think about going into Lebanon to get a bouquet and considers selling his soul again right then and there to get out of it. Christ. Yeah, he can pretend, all right, but sooner or later the truth of it is gonna come out. Dean just isn’t built for the kind of love Cas deserves.

“Uh—” Dean starts, and then, thank fucking God, his phone rings. He picks it up. “Hello?”

“Got a case,” Claire says on the other end, and Dean says all the right things, mm hmm and No of course you’re not too young to take on this case and I’m happy to help if you want an extra pair of eyes and Claire actually, unbelievably, says yeah, she’ll let him tag along.

He hangs up the phone and looks at Cas, who looks straight back at him. “Got a, uh. Case,” he says.

“Yes,” Cas replies. “I heard.”

“So, uh.” He stands up, and winces at the sound the chair makes behind him. “I’m gonna— go. To the case.”

“Do you need another hand?”

“No, no,” Dean stumbles all over himself, closing up his books. Cas just keeps looking at him, with that stone face of his, a Renaissance sculpture. “Just, uh, hold down the fort here, y’know, keep the— the search—” and Dean suddenly realizes, going cold, that he might miss a lead. That Sam’s chance to come back might pass by while Dean’s gone— while Dean’s with Claire— and maybe that’s not so bad, if it’s for Claire, not for anything selfish, but—

“I’ll look for him,” Cas promises, and Dean exhales.

“Yeah,” Dean murmurs, and then he raps his knuckles on the table to end the conversation. “I trust ya,” he says, casual as he can make it, and goes off to meet Claire.

The case is in some godawful nowhere town in the Oklahoma panhandle, as if the world needed any more Oklahoma, ever expanding westward. Dean hates the Oklahoma panhandle. It butts up against the states that creation saw fit to give real wonders, like the New Mexico desert and the Colorado mountains. He could be in one of those, but no. He’s still, will always be, in Oklahoma.

The mall — he’s in a mall, or, well, a collection of three understocked retail enterprises claiming to be a mall on account of their shared parking lot — yields nothing. No EMF, no hex bags hidden next to the trash cans, no sulfuric residue on the windowsills. Sam’s probably in nerd heaven over the mystery right about now.

Except— ah.

“You find anything?” Claire asks. She’s well into her twenties, they grow up so fast, what a fuckin’ world, et fuckin’ cetera. “The cashier didn’t remember the woman at all. Like, not a clue. That’s kinda suspicious, right?”

“You ever worked retail? You see hundreds of faces a day, no way would they remember someone from a week ago.” Dean shakes his head. What a case. Sam would have a field day. Sam is worse than dead. Dean has a case. “Didn’t find anything on my end.”

“Great.” Claire messes around on her phone, probably texting her girlfriend — the one Dean screamed in front of till he was blue in the face. No wonder she’s not exactly delighted to be working with him.

He tries to offer an olive branch. “That Kaia?”

“Why, you wanna blame her for Sam disappearing some more?”

Dean closes his eyes. Yeah, it’s not pretty, what he does when he gets mad. He’ll see it coming a mile away and won’t do a damn thing to stop it. He’s lucky anybody will stick around. “I know it’s not her fault,” he says eventually. He can’t bring himself to say anything else.

“You ever heard of an apology before?” He opens his eyes and she’s glaring at him. Nice, another kid who can’t stand the sight of him. “‘I’m sorry.’ Two words. Not exactly rocket science.”

“I’m sorry, there, that what you wanna hear?”

“Apologize to Kaia, dumbass. Text her, I’m not your messenger pigeon.” She tosses her bag in the backseat of his car. “You gonna drive me to the motel or do I have to get yelled at again for giving you free therapy first?”

Dean clenches his fist. He’s not angry at Claire. He’s not. He’s not angry at anybody other than himself. He’s the one who’s responsible for Sam and he’s the one who got him lost, no two ways about it.

He sits there, on the hood of his car, squeezing his empty coffee cup into an Escher. The Oklahoma sun beats down on him even on a cold October day like this one. The mall is as desolate as any highway; they’re all just passing through.

“Hey, old man,” Claire says eventually, something dangerously soft in her voice, “you remember how to drive, right? Do I need to take your license?”

“Shut up,” Dean snarls, tossing his cup into the nearest trash can. He turns the key in his baby, and it settles him, just a little bit. He wishes Cas was here. Cas can always take it, is never afraid of him when he’s like this, when the rage gets boiling under his skin like the evil that turned his eyes black. Cas is a better target than Claire, twenty-three and too used to angry men looking at her.

Of course, he’s the one who bailed on Cas, this time around.

“Do you wanna talk about it,” Claire says, longsuffering.

“No.”

“Okay,” she says, as Dean pulls out of the parking lot. “It kinda seems like you do, though.”

“Chrissake, Claire,” Dean mutters, chanting to himself, keep it cool, keep it cool. He might drive into the nearest telephone pole if she keeps this up, though. “You know what no means?”

“Touchy, geez.”

Dean blows out a breath. Eyes on the road. The wind blows leaves across the road and Dean says, “I’m mad.” The road goes on, empty, brotherless, and Dean says, hoarsely, “I get scared of what I do when I’m mad. Your girlfriend knows that. S’why I’m better off in the bunker, and why I’m not talkin’ with you about this, ‘cause you don’t need me yellin’ at you when you’re just tryin’ to help. Understand?”

He sees Claire roll her eyes and he catches himself before he spits something awful at her. “Jesus Christ,” she says, “yeah, all right, but I can take it. You can yell at me if you need to.”

No. No. “That’s not your job,” Dean says numbly, thinking about the fact that it was his job. Claire’s not him. Dean knows how to deal with old men yelling at him in cars. He was brought up for that. Claire’s different. She’s not supposed to know that.

Two stop signs and one highway onramp later, Claire says, “You ever considered, like, writing down your thoughts?”

“Like a diary? I look like a preteen girl?”

“Okay,” Claire says, “didn’t realize the art of writing was only for women. Guess Shakespeare must’ve missed that lesson, asshole.”

Jesus. Dean inhales, and exhales. Carefully, he says, “I am taking it under advisement, but this conversation is done.”

“Loud and clear, chief.”

Dean keeps on driving. About ten minutes later they get to the morgue, where Jody called to make an appointment for them to see the corpse. Dean pulls into the parking lot and hits the brake.

Before they go into the building, Claire says, “You could come by the house sometime, y’know. No one’s shutting you out.”

Yeah, that’s true. Eileen even comes around sometimes — not so often, but sometimes — tries to get Dean out of the bunker. She can’t stay for long without bursting into tears, so Dean doesn’t call her as often as he probably oughtta. And look at him now, with Claire. He’s shutting himself out, and for good reason. He’s not safe to be around.

To Claire, he says, “Let’s see a dead body.”

Castiel thinks about calling Dean.

He thinks about it all through his search through the library, the phone calls to Sergei and the summoning which has become so commonplace it disturbs him. It wasn’t so long ago that even putting bones and blood in the same bowl was enough to damn a soul to hell. Before Dean, Castiel knew the law.

Today he knows nothing but the simple and serious task of his life, which is to protect his family.

Sam is beyond death. He is somewhere — in the Empty, possibly, except that Castiel refuses to accept this simply for the impossibility of his disappearance. To be in the Empty, Sam must be dead. So Castiel summons Death.

Latin syllables are foreign to his tongue. When he was last on Earth, Castiel spoke English. He might have spoken a different language before, but he has no memory of it — all he knows is the ancient Hebrew which rasped across the desert, the Arabic he was privy to because the angels worried about the power of mathematics, the Nahuatl Castiel knows only from a brief glimpse. Upon reflection, it is likely his company was there with Columbus, and that this memory has too been removed.

Latin, though. How it became the language of religion is unclear to Castiel, except for the power of Roman conquest. Anyway, he sounds out salve! mors immatura, awkwardly.

He waits.

Death doesn’t appear to him. His offering cools on the table, bread and cheap olive oil from the corner store. Maybe she’s offended by it.

Castiel sighs, and turns, when he hears it behind him.

“Angel,” says a voice. Castiel looks back.

A reaper.

“Hello,” Castiel says, and then, because he has summoned it here, evidently, “would you like some food?”

It smiles. “I don’t eat.”

Castiel looks at the echo of the monstrous behind its face. He can barely see the form it has chosen, so strong is the vision of a human skull, of rot, of a desolated landscape. The wake of a forest fire stands before him. “Do you know why I’ve summoned you?”

“You didn’t summon me,” it laughs. “You summoned my boss.” As Castiel ponders the absurdity of that word, boss — are they wage laborers, reapers? — the reaper comes around the corner of the table, presses dents into the wood with its fingertips. “Death says to leave her alone. She’s kinda busy.”

“I have an urgent question.”

“She has an urgent answer.” And the reaper leans in, close. “Fuck off.”

Reapers. Important creatures to God’s creation, and yet all Castiel can see is the danger, the horror, the evil of it. “Don’t speak to me that way,” Castiel says, tonelessly. He looks at his hands and finds that he has grabbed the reaper by the throat. It chokes under him and he leans in, fiery, remembers the power of his wrath and the flame of his sword, thinks, I’ll kill you for him. I’ll kill you for him. Of course, it has no body heat. “Where is Sam Winchester,” he breathes, his blade falling into his hand, three-edged and deadly to the animal in front of him.

“Nowhere,” it huffs. Its smile flattens with the press of Castiel’s thumb against its neck. “There’s no answer for you, Castiel.”

“So you do know me,” Castiel says. “Exposure has dulled your fear of death. I understand. But if you know me, you know that I see death as a mercy.”

He cuts a line into its belly and watches detritus, animals and insects and dirt, pour from the hole the way blood pours out from a holy goat’s throat. What he does next is— it’s a violation, a cruelty he has never done before, but one he knows by instinct. He drops his blade to grasp with his bare hands the scavengers and fungi that spill from the wound, the worms and the snakes alike.

“Please—” and Castiel squelches these animals of decay in his bare hand, looks at the shrinking monster before him. Somehow, this, the power to reduce a reaper to nothing, to crush its spirit — despite all the things Heaven has taken from him, this is something Castiel still knows how to do. “Don’t, don’t—”

“Millennia in heaven, with little to do,” Castiel muses, watching the waterfall pouring out of its stomach, hearing its pathetic and whimpering noises. It doesn’t matter. He sees information in front of him, and knows how to get it. “What do you think we studied?”

“What do you want,” the reaper gasps, shuddering. Castiel releases it and it sprawls against the table, its fingertips twitching. He notes, almost surprised, that it is crying. “I can’t tell you where Sam Winchester is. Nobody knows. What do you want?”

“Tell me how to find out.” Give me something to take to Dean, Castiel thinks, but even he can realize that this is an absurdity, a weakness that would be easy for this reaper to exploit if he said it aloud.

“I’ll give you a ritual,” the reaper says. It covers the wound in its stomach with shaking hands, pushing the wet maggots and the filth back into itself. All at once, Castiel— he sees, he sees what he’s done, he feels— he is, suddenly, disgusted with himself, a wave of brutal shame which makes him prickle and shiver. Castiel steps back as the reaper presses a soiled hand into the paper Castiel left on the table. As he watches, a dense text overwrites the ingredients for his summoning. “Here. I don’t know what you’ll get, but you’ll get something.”

“What is it?” Castiel asks, throat dry.

“A spell to summon Sam Winchester.” The reaper steps back, flinching at every strike of its foot on the ground. “Or, something like him. I don’t know.” It is broken. Castiel has broken this creature. “There’s a struggle and split to come, Castiel,” it says quietly, voice trembling, “a two-faced creature just the same as you. Think of where you speak, when you say it.”

He could ask questions. He could ask many questions about that, but— but its hands shake, and it blinks wetly at the paper, and Castiel thinks that its warning was a gift, even after the evil Castiel has done to it.

“I release you from your bind,” he murmurs quietly, and the reaper vanishes.

Castiel steps heavily towards the table, towards the paper. The words are simple, the ingredients too. It has to be spoken by a fallen angel, though, which is why it has never appeared in his searches — Castiel doubts anyone has ever been in a place to use such a ritual.

Bones. Blood. The outdoors, a place that is high up, as close as you can get to where your prey vanished. Castiel thumbs over the word prey, and wonders if hunting is always and only grief, at its core.

He sets his palm down next to that sheet of paper, and then his other palm, too, supporting him there at the table. Slowly, his head sinks, and he closes his eyes. What he did— what he has done, over and over again, for Dean Winchester and his brother— was it worth it, he wonders, was it worth it, the glut of violence in his fist as he touched parts of that reaper no one has ever touched before—

“I’ll find you,” he whispers, to Sam, because he misses him. He does. It’s done, now, and Castiel will never undo it. He has never been able to undo the cruelty his hands and his wings have wrought. But if he can alleviate the great burden of grief which cores Dean at his stomach, which passes like the angel of death over Eileen’s face when she signs, which snakes wretchedly up through Castiel’s own ill-gotten lungs — if he can do this, then perhaps a time for peace will come. Perhaps Castiel will lay down his arms one final time when this hunt is over, and he will come home to his family and he will do nothing but love the world around him, the way you ought to. When this is over, he will love in a careful and gentle and human way.

Maybe it was worth it. Castiel opens his eyes, and sees the hope in front of him. At least he’ll have something to tell Dean about on the phone, if he calls.

“Honey, I’m home,” Dean calls when he gets back into the bunker, mostly because he knows Cas won’t be in the war room to hear it. Cas isn’t in the kitchen, either, or his room. Dean leaves his crap in his room and walks around, hand to the wall, like he’s feeling for him, dowsing for water in his concrete bunker.

He shouldn’t be worried. Case went fine, after all, and Claire’s back home with Jody. Cas didn’t call or anything, so they’re probably all clear here, too. But Dean—

Anyway. He looks for Cas. He looks for him in the dungeon, and in the Dean Cave, but he finds him in the archives.

“Cas,” Dean says, ‘cause he’s never seen Cas down here. Maybe he should’ve looked. Shit, maybe this is where he’s been the whole damn time. Cas looks— Christ. He looks at home. He’s wearing — Dean swallows — he’s wearing glasses, down at the end of his nose. His normal button-down, rolled up to the elbows. Jeans. His eyes are blue as anything when he looks up at Dean. Oh, hell. “You, uh— didn’t realize you were down here,” he says, mouth dry, like an idiot.

“You’re back,” Cas says, smiling. Dean wants— well. Everyone knows what Dean wants. “How was the case?”

“Fine, fine.” He kicks at one of the cabinets, sees Cas frown out of the corner of his eye. Figures it’s a better shot not to tell him about the crap he laid on Claire, back in his car. “Killed the vamp, saved the girl, yadda yadda.”

“Presumably the girl in question isn’t Claire,” Cas says dryly, typing something on his tablet. Dean watches him squinting in the light. Maybe there should be better lighting in here — could replace the fluorescent tubes with some warm lamplight, something cozy. Dean could do that for him.

“No, someone else,” Dean says absentmindedly, thinking about the lighting. “Hey, you want something else in here?”

Cas looks up. “What?”

“Fuckin’ hate fluorescents,” Dean says. “I could get like, a nicer ceiling light in here. What do you think?”

“Really, the ideal would be a series of track lights that can be turned on and off separately, for preservation purposes,” Cas says. “But that’s—”

“I could do that.” Dean looks up at the ceiling, blinking at the buzzing white lights streaking across the stone, puts his hands up to measure the distance. “Easy. Get a few bulbs each along, what, four lines? Five? Hook ‘em up to different switches and you’re golden.”

“That would be nice,” Cas says. The warmth in his voice— Jesus. Dean oughtta do something about that, he really should. When he looks back at Cas, he’s all splotchy from the backwash of neon light behind Dean’s eyes. Still, he looks good. “It’s— this project is— it was important. To Sam.”

Ah. Fuck. Dean swallows. “Uh huh,” he says.

“He got through about a third of the records,” Cas continues, like Dean’s not struck down the middle with grief all over again, thinking about Sam in here, in the dark, while Dean was— where was Dean? Why didn’t he ask for help? “His cataloguing system is— well. We both know Sam was very smart.”

“Is,” Dean says, frozen still. “He ain’t— dead.”

Cas freezes, too. “Of course not,” he says gently, and that, more than anything, cuts deep. Dean’s too soft for the truth now. “Sam is very smart.”

Dean waits. Cas takes his glasses off, puts ‘em in his pocket. Dean kinda liked the barrier.

“I think he wanted to see what would be worth digitizing,” Cas says. “He’s been— well, the best way to describe it is that he’s been treating it as a library collection, rather than an archival one. Adding subject terms, transferring information from finding aids into a single spreadsheet. I think he’s created his own thesaurus.”

“Sure,” Dean says, ‘cause fuck if he’s got a clue what Cas is saying. He knows a bit about archival research, what with their work, but he usually flirts his way into getting the nice ladies at the local history museum to figure out their inventories for him.

Cas huffs. “It’s not important,” he says, and he looks— he looks so human, with his head bent over a glowing fucking iPad. He looks so human, and he’s picking up where Sam left off— shit. Christ alive. Dean might— Dean might actually, might actually need him. He’s known that for a long time, known that he’s got something in him that goes after Cas the way a stray dog goes after a beating ‘cause it’s the only contact it knows, but now he really, really knows it.

“Cas,” he says carefully, ‘cause he can’t fuck this one up. “I don’t— you know I don’t—” and his voice fails him. But he tries. If there’s anything Dean Winchester knows how to do, it’s try. “I’m sorry I left,” he rasps, eventually, feeling it like a gut shot. Saying sorry means someone can agree with you. Can say, yeah, you really did fuck this one up. Can say, I don’t accept your apology.

Cas, though. Cas knows him, good and true, and he’s kinder than he should be. “I’m not angry,” he says, and that just—

“It’s—” Dean tilts his head, frowns like that’ll keep the tears from coming. “I don’t know— I don’t— Cas, I don’t know how to, how to do— how to be a person, without. Without Sam.”

“Dean,” Cas says quietly, walking towards him, “of course I understand.”

“Yeah?” Dean blinks at the space behind Cas’s shoulders. He’s crying. Oh, fuck. “Jesus, this, any of it— I shouldn’t even be—”

He breathes, heavily. Cas puts his hand on his shoulder and Dean just— goes, head straight for Cas’s chest like that’s where it belongs.

After a minute, maybe two, Cas says, “Whether you love Sam or not is hardly in question. We both know you love him well.” And then, hesitantly, he adds, “Doing— having what you want doesn’t take away from that.”

Doesn’t it? Dean knows who he is. Knows what he’s for. Everything has a balance, this or that, here or there. He’s on Dad’s side or he’s on Sam’s. Dean’s never kept a family together before. How does he know this won’t jinx it, huh? Committing to Cas like he’s ready to move on? That ain’t right. It ain’t right at all.

“Dean—”

“I can’t stop lookin’ for him,” Dean says. Here he goes, angry again. “I can’t. You can’t make me.”

Cas inhales sharply. “I would never stop you,” he says. “Do you think I would?”

Yes. No. Maybe. Dean pulls back, scrubs the back of his wrist over his eyes just to hide from the world for a second. Imagine, he’d been ready to build a new set of lights in here, in this room where Sam hid from him, because what else would he have been doing? Why else would Sam have wanted to hide in the archives without telling Dean, without asking for Dean’s help — Dean ain’t smart, but he can do grunt work, sure, could’ve poked numbers into a spreadsheet. What was the reason, if not that Dean’s angrier than he is anything else?

“Was it snowing when you came in?” Cas asks, and it’s enough of a nonsequitur that it pulls Dean out of his funk.

“I— uh. No?”

“I checked the weather,” Cas continues, stepping back, graceful and broad as ever. “I think we’re going to have a late winter this year. We have a warm week.”

“Okay.”

“Maybe it would be a good idea to go out and— look.” Cas’s hands flex. “I thought you might— I mean, I didn’t get a chance to call, when you were gone. I found a ritual which could help us find Sam.”

“Okay,” Dean repeats, feeling the anger rise in him again. “And you just— what, decided it wasn’t worth mentioning? Nothing urgent, huh. Got a break in the missing Sam case, no biggie.”

“Do you want to try it or not,” Cas says tiredly, and Dean exhales. Fine. Fine. He can be civil.

“Yeah,” he says, “unless you wanna waste more time in here, man.”

Cas looks away. Dean watches the line of his jaw clench. “Let’s go,” he says quietly, and Dean follows him out.

Cas changed the channel to fucking acoustic folk rock. Dean’s shoulder hunches in, higher and higher, while Gordon Lightfoot sings long before the white man and long before the wheel—

The impala rumbles along, accompanying ol’ Gord. Last time Dean heard Gordon Lightfoot was back when he was in a car with an old Canadian hunter, angry and mesmerizing for it. Dean, nineteen, a week out from the last time he'd seen Sam since Dad wanted Dean to start taking on more solo cases, had opened his window obligingly while Cormick powered through half a pack of smokes, swearing through his teeth about the price of gas. He’d tilted his head for Dean to put a tape in, and Gordon sang the lake it is said never gives up her dead and Cormick told him about the time he almost drowned in Lake Michigan, about the guys he knew who'd never mess with anything out of Superior. And Dean had just sat there, missing Sam.

There’s things, boy, he’d said, things you oughtta steer clear of, cigarette hanging out of his mouth clinging for dear life. His hands had clenched on the steering wheel. He'd had so much power coiled inside him, so much rage and the muscle to back it up, and Dean remembers thinking: I want to be like him. Dean, with his soft features and his floppy hair, the kind of kid girls wanted to make wear their pink satiny panties— no one'd ever think a thing like that about Cormick. Cormick would never get looked at the wrong way in a bar, no sir.

Cas huffs out a sigh. Dean blinks out of remembering Cormick. Right, Cas. As if he wasn't the one who chose guitar pickers for background music, as if it's Dean's fault Gordon's singing and many are the dead men too silent to be real.

"You wanna change it, change it," Dean snaps, holding the wheel tighter. Cas hums, but doesn't make any move to change the station.

Cormick’s hands had been tight on the wheel, but he’d never directed that rage at Dean, not once. Maybe — or maybe Dean’s reading it too hard, but — maybe there was something in Cormick that remembered being like Dean, and maybe Cormick had showed Dean how to pull himself out of it, the way Dad was never really able to. Cormick had kicked it about three or four years after that one truck ride, taken out by a vampire nest. Sloppy of him, Dad had said, still mad about the fact that Dean called Cormick first when he got into trouble with some vetala a few weeks earlier. As if Dean wanted his dad to see him half-naked strapped to a chair in a warehouse — and Cormick answered Dean’s calls more often anyway.

But it wasn’t Dean's place to ride his old man for being disrespectful. And anyway, it was sloppy, getting killed on a vampire hunt. That’s the way Dean plans it if he ever needs to make his exit quick and written off easy, but he hasn’t thought about that in years.

They drive past a sign that says YAKIMA VITICULTURAL AREA. “Wasn't that a crossword clue you had one time?” Dean asks, looking wide-eyed at the green around him. It never gets old. They don’t have trees like this out east, not this tall, not this dense. Not this— this wet, looking full to bursting with water.

“Yes,” Cas murmurs, looking out. “Funny. They spell it differently again.”

“Right.” Dean clenches and then relaxes his grip. He shouldn’t have asked. Like they have time for whatever the hell is going through Cas’s head. “So. You, uh— how do you think it’ll go?”

“If I knew, then we wouldn't have to do the ritual, would we?” Cas frowns at the road in front of them.

And what did you do to that reaper to get this ritual, Dean wants to ask. He doesn’t ask. It scares him, what he made Cas into — someone who’s still as terrifying as he was the day they met, but following Dean’s calls instead of Heaven’s as if Dean’s the kinda guy who deserves to have an angel at his heels. “Yeah, yeah,” he says, trying not to think about it. “Still.”

“It’ll go well, I hope.” Then, suddenly, “Here. Take the next exit.”

Dean takes a right and then they’re— they’re in a forest. This far west, winter means rain more than snow. The only leaves left are the evergreens, and even the trunks have moss on ‘em, green on green on green. “Up,” Cas says, squinting. “We need to get to higher ground.”

“All right.” Dean follows the road, aiming up as much as he can whenever they hit a fork, until they get to a small gravel turnoff.

Dean pulls over before Cas can even say here. The two of them get outta the car without a word, looking up at the path.

“If we had motorcycles we could ride up there,” Cas says.

“If you can fit our crap in a motorcycle trunk you can ride whatever you want,” Dean says, and only hears himself after the fact.

Right. Yeah.

“Good to know,” Cas says, and then pulls a duffle onto his shoulder to hike up. “Coming?”

“Yeah,” Dean sighs, trailing after him.

It's not so bad, the walk. The road is pretty easy, and Dean’s only halfway out of breath by the time they get to the peak of whatever this is, a mountain or a cliff face or just a really big hill.

The view’s spectacular, unsurprisingly. Honestly, Dean fucking hates Washington. The mountains are terrifying, the trees are too big. Give him land he can see across. Dean looks out at the neighboring peaks under a clear blue sky, forests as far as you can see, while Cas spreads out the junk they brought with them. A piece of paper, from who the hell knows where, and a fuckton of crystals and bones.

Cas starts quiet. “Air,” he says. His voice rings out soft but clear and crisp, slicing through the open space. “My love, who has the perfect right to be. Strong stone. Running water and molding swamp.” Cas lights the powder around the bones in front of him, all of it contained in a crystal bowl. He spits in it. “Vulture, who eats the dead. Mushrooms and crows.” He turns the whole mess upside down, presses it into the earth. “Lightning.”

Dean jolts as a carrion bird drops, dead, from the sky, right in the middle of their piece of land, crushing the bowl Cas overturned. The air darkens, gets— gets heavier, thicker, kinda soupy. Dean breathes it in and coughs, tasting that sickly acid rain in the back of his throat, the taste that happens when you have your windows open next to a city garbage truck. The grass dries around the bird’s corpse, which is bigger than Dean thought it’d be, maybe three feet head to claws.

Crunch. A hand comes out — Dean flinches — through the bird’s skeleton, crushing it, squelching muscle and tearing flesh. It comes up through the bird’s body, grasps at nothing, grappling, curling like a spider, like claws, like— it grabs, suddenly, at the air in front of Cas. Fuck. Dean watches — his breath catches, he— it ain’t right— its palm slams onto the ground, its fingernails rip up the earth.  “Cas—”

“I don’t—” The hand is attached to a necrotic arm, which starts to elbow out of the bird. Cas tilts his head to look at it, leans in closer. Thoughtfully, he says, “Dean, do you think—”

“Shut it down,” Dean yells, even though there’s no sound but the wet gulp of tearing muscle rasping over dead feathers. The fingernails split and tear off against the ground, brittle, the hand shakes and begins to spot and dehydrate, the arm— the arm moves disjointedly and Dean can’t— Dean’s—

“Lightning,” Cas recites quickly. “Crows and mushrooms. Who eats the dead? My love. Molding swamp and running water. Strong stone. Who has the perfect right to be? Vulture. Air.”

The hand retreats immediately. It crawls back into the bird, sinks down until it’s… gone. Dean leans over the bird hesitantly. All he can see is blood and guts, organs, a liver split into pieces, lungs splayed over the bird’s feathers. A hole, where the hand used to be.

“What the fuck was that,” Dean breathes. He looks at Cas. Louder, he asks, “What the fuck was that, man?”

“No need to yell,” Cas says, which, well.

“You don’t get to pull that crap on me right now,” Dean spits, prickly with his own fear, he knows. He looks at Cas, who might’ve been— he doesn’t wanna imagine what it woulda been like if that hand had grabbed at Cas, had made contact. “‘Wah, don’t yell at me, I’m so sensitive,’ well, fuck, Cas, you’re the one who killed this fucking vulture—”

“Don’t yell at me,” Cas says forcefully, standing up. “I did this for you. I found this ritual for you. What I did—” He blows out a breath, and says, “I summoned a reaper for this. Just because you’re afraid—”

“Yeah, right—”

“You don’t want to admit it,” Cas hisses, stepping closer, and Dean steps back. He must’ve looked like this when they first met, Dean thinks. Not in that barn, but in the pit, a memory Dean will never get back, when Cas must’ve seen him for what he was and burned a hole in him so Cas could hook himself through Dean’s soul like metal through a pig carcass and drag him back up to the slaughterhouse—

“That was Sam’s hand,” Cas says.

Dean freezes.

Cas touches him. His shoulder, first, and then he slides down, until Dean’s looking at Cas’s hand clenching in the fabric of his shirt, grasping over his heart. “It worked,” Cas says. Christ, his eyes. Dean doesn’t know what he feels, except that his skin is crawling up and down his spine and his heart is racing. “What I did. It worked.”

“That wasn’t Sam,” Dean croaks.

“The split here,” Cas says, voice sliding into something almost absentminded, almost like he’s talking to someone else behind Dean, even if his face is in front of Dean’s face and his breath is on Dean’s mouth. “The split at the vowel, making a two-faced creature like me—”

“Cas—”

“That’s what the reaper meant,” he says dreamily, and Dean goes cold. “Yakima, Yakama. Struggle and split. Sam will do better on land named only once.”

“Dude,” Dean says, because all he sees in front of him is the guy who harvested his own honey and showed up naked on his car, covered in bees. He’s not making any sense. “Cas— Cas, man,” because maybe if he says his name enough he won’t leave again, won’t— won’t— we were getting better, Dean thinks nonsensically. Weren’t we?

“I could do it better,” Cas says, suddenly lucid. He meets Dean’s eyes. “I can fix it. A vulture is nothing. I’m an angel, I could— it’d be right, it would be Sam. It’d be him. We just have to do it at a better place. The right place.”

A vulture. An angel. Oh, God— Dean shuts his eyes, pulls Cas in that last inch so he can put his mouth against his cheek. “No,” he whispers, imagining Sam crawling out of Cas’s corpse, imagining— imagining how relieved he’d feel. How sick he’d feel over it, too, sicker and angrier the more relieved he felt. He squeezes Cas tight, feels him in his arms, pulls him in until Dean’s nose is in the bend under Cas’s ear, at the hinge of his jaw. “No, Cas, no— I ain’t—” I ain’t choosing him over you. I just can’t do it. I can’t choose anything anymore.

Cas shudders. “I miss him,” he says, and he grips Dean tight around the back. Dean keeps his eyes closed so he doesn’t have to see the mountains, the trees, the dead bird and the salted ground. He just smells Cas and feels the muscle under his shirt, his stubble against Dean’s cheek. “Dean. I can get him back.”

“Not if you kill yourself for it.” He can’t fucking believe he just said that. He’d kill anyone for Sam. But— “We’re not— we’re not doing that anymore.”

“Really,” Cas says. It woulda been a question, except he said it like that, flat as a Wyoming prairie. He pulls back, out of Dean’s grasp, and Dean— Dean lets him. He just lets him. Cas looks away from him, turns until it’s just that profile, that sharp nose Cas stole from ol’ Jimmy Novak that Dean has only recently come to admit he likes so much. Did you build Jimmy? Dean never thought to ask before. Did you see what would be, and did you shape the bones that would come? Did you pick his parents and his grandparents and his great grandparents just so he’d fit you well? And, the most sickening question out of all of it: Did you do that for me?

“Are you saying no because you don’t want to sacrifice me,” Cas asks, “or are you saying no because you think it won’t really be Sam?”

“What does it matter?” Dean asks, even though he knows damn well that it matters. He just doesn’t have an answer, and he probably never will.

Cas sighs. “It matters because I want to know if you’ll consider it next time, or if you’d rather not know.”

“You think there’s a way? A better way?” Dean’s heart clenches. It’s hard to describe who Sam is to him. He’s a different category from everybody else. He might be a different category ‘cause of God, or Dad, or the audience at home, but whatever it is, it’s real. Here, in this world, it’s real. His hands twitch for remembering Sam’s laugh in those short years after Jessica but before Hell. We didn’t have much time, he thinks, and it was shot through with grief from the get-go, but at least you laughed. At least you laughed.

“No,” Cas says, “but there might be.”

“I don’t wanna fight with you on a maybe,” Dean admits, exhausted, suddenly, with the weight of his aloneness.

Cas nods, and, well, that’s that. Dean follows Cas down the mountain, back to his baby, shiny and new-looking in all that old growth green. They leave the bird on that mountaintop, opened up for whatever comes its way.

In a motel room just outside of Butte that night, Cas lies down on the bed next to Dean. Dean can feel him, the heat of him, can smell the clean shampoo smell of his hair.

Dean rolls over, and there they are, looking at each other. Dean studies him. He’s always looking at Cas, it feels like, but today — today broke something that Dean didn’t know he was holding. How many layers Dean’s gonna keep cutting through ‘til he gets to the core of himself, even he doesn’t know.

“I want to ask you something,” Cas says softly.

His voice is so quiet. He even looks quiet, in his boxers and a T-shirt right in the dark. “Yeah,” Dean says, cut up from secondary loss. As if they actually had a shot at getting Sam back today — hell, maybe Dean really is as delusional as every demon likes to say.

Cas asks, “What do you want, with the two of us?”

Dean inhales and then he— he can’t breathe, he realizes. Somehow, he wasn’t expecting this, even though— even though he should’ve figured, even though his chest hurts every time Cas looks at him wrong, even though he’s the one who bulldozed his way into Cas’s room that night and then hightailed it outta there the next morning like it was a crime scene.

He rolls onto his back so he doesn’t have to look at Cas. “Are you— are you seriously asking about our relationship status?”

“I… I suppose I am.”

“Shit.” Dean closes his eyes. He can’t fucking look at himself, at what he’s done. “Do I— do I really gotta say it, man?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Cas says.

“How many—” Dean’s fingers twitch, and he forces himself to exhale. He opens his eyes, looks up at the ceiling. One of those shitty popcorn ceilings just asking for cobwebs and dust. “How many ways do I have to say I need you?”

Cas doesn’t say anything for a long, long minute, until he finally says, softly, “I’m sorry.”

“No—” Dean rolls back to his side so he can look Cas in the face. “Damn it. I don’t want your goddamn apology—” I’m the one who owes you an apology, if this is what you think of me. Shit. Fuck. “Cas,” he says, hoping this’ll say it, “you’re the— you’re the only person who sees me like this. My parents are dead. Bobby’s dead. Sam is— fuck.”

“Dean—”

“I’d never bring this shit to Jody’s doorstep,” Dean says, rushing into it, chest thumping, “I’d never dump my— my crap on the girls like that either—”

“I know that,” Cas says, all nice and understanding and shit, and Dean just—

He can’t look at him. How’s he supposed to look at him? “You know, huh?” Dean asks, looking straight at Cas’s collarbones ‘cause he can’t meet his gaze anymore. “If you know so much about it then what else do I gotta say to you?”

“You don’t have to say anything to me.” Cas sounds disappointed. Of course Cas sounds disappointed. Dean’s never done anything right his whole life. He’s got no clue what Cas expected out of this conversation because Dean’s not built for nice and easy the way Cas wants, the way Cas deserves.

“Obviously I do,” Dean replies, prickly, “if you think we aren’t— we aren’t anything.” He looks at Cas, risks putting a hand on his shoulder. If he nudged forward their toes would touch. “Do I gotta say it again? I need you.” His grip tightens. Just cloth, in his hand, as if Cas is— as if that could be enough to keep Cas here. “I need you here, Cas.”

“I know.” Cas comes forward and— Dean flinches away from it, but Cas keeps on going, right until he kisses Dean’s forehead. Dean exhales into the skin of Cas’s throat, closes his eyes and curls into him the way he— the way he should, maybe, if that’s what Cas wants. The way he might want to, if he was the kind of person who was allowed to want things. “I shouldn’t have pushed,” Cas murmurs. “You have said it.”

“If I said it,” Dean says, not sure what the hell it is, not sure what the hell he can do other than beg on his knees the way he has done, the way he’s always done for Cas, “then you wouldn’t ask, would you?”

Cas doesn’t say anything, which is how Dean knows he’s right. He swallows. He says, into Cas’s chest, “What do you need to hear from me? I’ll say it.”

“I don’t want you to say it just for me.”

“Say what?” Dean’s hand slips down from Cas’s shoulder to his chest, then his waist, and then Dean— Dean loses his goddamn mind, he slides in close and hooks his head under Cas’s chin just so that he doesn’t have to look at the disappointed turn of Cas’s mouth.

Dean feels Cas kiss his hair. And then Cas kisses his hairline, just at the top of his forehead. And Cas says, “I love you.”

“Oh,” Dean exhales. Shit.

Shit.

“I didn’t mean that you need to say that,” Cas clarifies. “I mean that I love you. I wanted you to know.”

Dean shivers. He’s never— well. He’s never heard that before.

“That’s why I asked,” Cas continues, as if Dean isn’t still bluescreened over Cas saying I love you. “I want to know if we feel the same way about each other. I want to— I want to temper my expectations.”

Dean blinks. Cas. Cas wants to settle. Cas wants to settle, for Dean, for what he can get out of— out of Dean— how fucking— how goddamn self-flagellating is this guy. “What would you do,” he says, out of morbid curiosity and maybe that instinct in him that he’s never gotten rid of, the one that made him look when he saw that pile of kids near that motel when he was just a kid himself, the one that makes him meaner than he ought to be just so he can feel it hurt inside himself too, “if I said no. If I said I didn’t feel the same way.”

They’re so close that Dean can feel him swallow. Can feel him freeze, a little, until he relaxes again. “It’s a good question,” Cas says thoughtfully. “I suppose you’re right to ask it. Maybe it doesn’t matter. I… I wouldn’t do anything differently.”

“Really?” Dean is, genuinely, shocked. Cas is fucking nuts.

“I’d just… I’d just know.” Cas strokes down the back of Dean’s scalp, fingernails running through his hair, gentle-like even with— even with this. “It wouldn’t change us. It wouldn’t change anything.”

“That doesn’t make any fucking sense,” Dean spits. He rolls away from Cas, sits up at the edge of the bed ‘cause Jesus, he can’t fucking— what’s he supposed to do with that kind of responsibility? “You’re fucking— Cas, man, that’s crazy.”

For the first time, Cas sounds angry. “I’m not crazy,” he says. “I know who I am. I know what I am. And now I know where you stand, too. And that’s—” His voice goes soft as he says, “That’s all right. That’s what— that’s what I wanted.”

Oh, Jesus. Jesus. Dean turns back to look at Cas. Castiel, angel of the fucking Lord, breaking Dean’s heart. “This?” he croaks out, gesturing at himself, at the turned-out curve of his thighs and his fucked up knee and the ugly scratch along one side of his stomach. “This is what you want?”

“I wanted to know,” Cas says, still lying there, as if he’s comfortable. As if nothing’s wrong at all. “Now I know.”

Dean ruined him. He pulled him down to Dean’s level, made him think— made him think Dean was all he could have. Isn’t that what he does, holds on so tight to people that they tell themselves this is who they want out of sheer self-preservation— and especially when— “Don’t stick around just ‘cause of Sam,” he says hoarsely, because he knows what he was like, in the early days after, when Cas was the only person who could make him eat and drink and sleep. “I been alone before. You think I—” He looks at his fucked up knee, looks at his crooked knuckles. “You think I talked this way after Sam died at Stull?”

“No,” Cas says quietly. “No. I don’t think you did.”

“So you know I’ve survived before,” Dean says. “You know I’d make it without you.”

Cas nods. He sits up, too, and he looks— “If that’s what you want,” he says quietly, “I’ll— Dean, I didn’t mean to push you. I’m sorry.”

What? “Cas, man, what do you think is happening here?”

“You’re telling me you don’t need me here,” Cas says, and Dean blinks, because didn’t he just say— didn’t he just say he did, didn’t he— “I understand. I know I’m— I know I’m not who you want here. I’m sure it’s—” Cas blinks, and Dean— oh Christ, is he, is he crying, is he— “I’m sorry,” he says hoarsely. “I thought I was helping.”

“For— for fuck’s sake, Cas, I’m— I’m trying to tell you that you can go wherever you want.”

“But I want to stay here with you.”

“Then stay.” Good Christ. Dean looks at him, the guy who just said I love you and got met with a hypothetical rejection, the guy who did something he won’t talk about to a reaper on the off chance that it might get Sam back, the guy who walks around like any other ant, any other creature, belly to the ground, and— and likes it. And wants more of it. “Cas, man. I just— I just want you to go where you want. Where you really want. I need you to be sure.”

“I’m sure.” Cas looks a little shellshocked, wide-eyed. Maybe— maybe they know where they stand now. Or maybe they don’t. As if Dean’s got a clue. “This is where I want to be.”

“Okay.” Dean exhales, and lies down again, on his back, facing that shitty stucco. Cas lies down, hesitantly, and Dean— he can’t speak, he can’t say a word, but he reaches a hand out, and Cas takes it. And Cas’s hand is warm in Dean’s, and his broad fingers curve gently around Dean’s scarred-up palm. And Dean doesn’t have to hold so tight, ‘cause he can guess, now, that Cas probably won’t let go.

Seven months in, Dean figures he might as well acknowledge that Sam’s gone, and he’s not coming back by any power known to man.

He imagines his dad. He can see him in the doorway there, right in Jody’s front door. He picked Jody’s place for this because it’s more comfortable than the bunker, because it’s a real place where someone might want to be remembered.

He imagines his dad in Jody’s front door, saying the things he said to Dean all those years ago. “Where’s Sam?” he’d said. Cold, like. Colder than anything. As if it didn’t even matter who he was talking to so long as he got an answer, as if he was drawing water from a stone. “You lose him?”

“Yes, sir,” Dean had said, head hung lower than anything, the shame beating down on the back of his neck. He’d wished he was a stone. Wished he couldn’t feel anything, the twin defeats of Sam’s disappearance and Dad’s anger almost too much to hold in his reckless, fumbling hands. He hadn’t even tried to apologize. How could he? What words could change the truth of it?

After a second that Dean still can’t recall, Dad was right up on him, choking him out. Dean hadn’t fought him, couldn’t have, just took it, and Dad hadn’t said a word, wasn’t even breathing heavy. Just set his hand on Dean’s throat and pushed him up against the wall and put all his anger into his fingers, his furious thumb burying into the skin under Dean’s jaw. Righteous, that wrath of his.

Then Donna walks through the door and Dean blinks out of it. He’s not a kid anymore. And Sam isn’t in Flagstaff.

“Oh, Dean,” she says, carrying some kind of food item that she sets down on the table. “How’re you holding up?”

“It’s— s’all right, Donna,” he says, honestly enough. He’s got what’s left of his family around him. Cas and Eileen are back in the kitchen, probably holding court with the girls, while Jody’s trying to Tetris enough liquor for a house full of hunters into her fridge.

She pulls him into a hug and he can’t help it, he leans into it. Closes his eyes. “I’m sorry, Deano,” she says, sniffling.

Dean clutches her tight, and then pulls away. “Yeah,” he says, a few tears in his eyes, too, fuck, it’s not even five. But he knew it’d be like this. He knuckles his tears away with the back of his hand. “Yeah, I’m—” He clears his throat. “I’m sorry, too.”

“Now. Should I put this anywhere? You got food set up?”

“Yeah, yeah, just— just over at the back there.” Dean watches her carry her maybe-casserole to the table which is already piled high with pity snacks from Jody and the twins, who’d rolled in early this morning to help them.

Dean’s anxious about it all. It’s risky, to have so many hunters in one place, not to mention the fact that Dean knows he’s not going to handle it well. He’s sure someone’s going to make some crack about how those Winchesters always come back from the dead anyway, and he’s just as sure someone else is gonna poke at him for being such a girl about the whole thing, not mourning the way his dad taught him to mourn, but fuck. Fuck. It’s Sam fucking Winchester. He deserves to be remembered.

Cas escapes the coven in the kitchen, slides a hand over Dean’s shoulders, safe and easy. “Have you had water, Dean?”

“Huh? No, I—” Dean startles as Cas hands him a glass. “Thanks, man.”

“It’s important to stay hydrated.” Dean can feel Cas watching him as he downs the whole glass.

Cas takes the glass back from him and puts it down, gently, on the table. “What were you thinking about?”

“I— I was just sayin’ hi to Donna,” Dean says.

Cas nods. “If you need anything at all today…”

“I know, Cas.” Dean scrubs a hand through his hair, already on the verge of tears again. He’s gonna be a goddamn mess tonight. “You got me.”

“Yeah. I got you.” Then Cas pulls out his phone. “I think people might start to arrive in about ten minutes. What do you need to prepare?”

“Looks like you guys got everything set up.” Dean looks around. Extra chairs pulled out of the girls’ bedrooms, enough food to feed a small army out near the back door, the aforementioned liquor store hiding in Jody’s fridge. And the woman of the hour herself. “Hey, Jody.”

“Dean.” She comes to a stop next to him, looking around the place. “It’s looking good. I think people are going to be really glad to be here tonight.”

“It’s stupid,” Dean says, low, only able to admit it to Jody and Cas. Cas looks at him sharply, but Jody knows what he means. “The number of times Sam and I have… y’know. And Sam wasn’t even— there wasn’t even a—” He runs a shaking palm over his mouth. How the hell is he supposed to say anything if he can’t even admit Sam’s gone? “I should be looking for him. Not— not whatever this is.”

“You’ve tried.” Cas puts a hand on Dean’s shoulder, keeps him calm, still. “And we’ll keep trying. But you deserve a moment to grieve, surrounded by your friends, your family.”

“Yeah. Yeah.” Dean breathes in, sharp, tries to keep the shake out of his voice. “Shit, I’m not gonna make it through tonight,” he laughs wetly.

“C’mere.” Jody pulls him into a hug, probably the third one today, Christ. He buries his face into her shoulder, closes his eyes. “You tap out anytime you need, you hear me? The point of this isn’t to— it’s not a party. The point is to remember Sam. To cry, if you need to. That’s the point.”

“Shit,” Dean says again, trying to keep his traitorous jaw still, his eyes clear. He pulls away from Jody. “You’re right. I know.”

“I’m always right,” Jody says, pulling a smile out of Dean, and she sits him on the couch. She eyes Cas. “Okay. People aren’t gonna know what to do when they come in, so I’m putting you on Dean duty. You sit next to him, and if Dean wants to talk to the person who comes in the door, you make eye contact with them and smile. If he doesn’t wanna talk, you keep him in conversation, make it look like you don’t wanna be interrupted. Got it?”

“A simple but effective strategy. Understood.” Cas’s brow furrows like he’s making mental notes, and Dean grins.

“Hey, buddy, it’s not that complicated. And Jody, c’mon, I don’t need a babysitter.”

“I’m not putting you through your brother’s wake alone, kid,” she says, and yeah, all right. It’s sharp, but a good sharpness, cuts clean through him. That’s the truth of what this is, after all.

Dean nods, and Jody pats him on the shoulder, and leaves him with Cas.

“You want a drink?” Cas asks. “Maybe some more water?”

“Yeah, okay, water,” Dean says. And then — he hates himself for it, but he asks, “Can you— a beer, maybe?” Maybe if he sticks to beer he won’t end up a wreck on Jody’s bathroom floor at four in the morning, but that’s wishful thinking.

Cas doesn’t say a word about it one way or the other. He just comes back with a glass of water and an ice-cold beer, and Dean chugs the water just to be responsible and then has a sip of his beer. He’s going to be fine. Everything’s going to be fine.

“Are you nervous?” Cas asks.

“Yeah.” Obviously.

Cas sits next to him on the couch. He has a root beer. Maybe Cas is planning to be Dean’s designated sober buddy. God, that sucks. “I wish I could find him,” Cas says bitterly. “I wish I wasn’t so—”

“What?” Dean puts his beer down. “Hey, you’re— you’ve been the only thing keeping me alive these last few months. You gotta know that.”

Cas nods. And he says, “If I were a full angel, I could— I’d have more power. More access. Maybe I could’ve figured out— I don’t know. I don’t know, Dean.”

Well, shit. The only thing to do is to put his own hand over Cas’s back, warm and solid, trying to keep him here, keep him together. “I know. You think I don’t wish we were — I don’t know, that I still had Crowley on speed dial or something? Or if the angels were still, you know, the way they were back then, during Apocalypse 1.0? But we’ve got— shit, fuck, you know I miss him. You know that.” Dean shakes his head. “But what we have, the way things are. They’re good. I don’t need you beating yourself up over being yourself when bein’ an angel’s never been much good for you either.”

“At least I was useful then,” Cas snarls, and then visibly calms himself, taking in a breath. “But. I see what you mean.”

“You know you don’t have to be useful to me,” Dean says softly. Cas nods, looking away. “You know that.”

“Yes.” Cas drinks his root beer. God, Dean wants to give the guy a real drink.

The first people to walk in are, funnily enough, Jesse and Cesar. Turns out they’re doing just fine out on the ranch, quiet and peaceful. They actually fucking made it.

“And you came out here anyway,” Dean says, trying to take small sips of his beer to pace himself but desperate for the social crutch. “Man. I appreciate that, you know I do.”

“Of course we came,” Cesar says, Jesse just clenching his jaw next to him. “We were— Dean, we were really, really sorry to hear about what happened to Sam.”

Dean nods, and that seems to be that. Cas offers them a couple of drinks, and then Jody’s front door spends more time open than it does closed. It’s strange. Dean didn’t think so many people would care to show up to Sam’s not-funeral. Everyone knows who they are, of course, but it’s not like they made many friends in the hunting world, not as kids and certainly not as adults. But there’s the guys who’re still alive out of the group they used to practice pool with at the Roadhouse all those years ago, and some of Claire’s hunting buddies, and even fucking Krissy. Dean spends some time talking with a couple of hunters they met up with near Boulder a while back, and loitering out around the back door are some people Dean doesn’t know at all but who Max and Alicia seem real friendly with.

By the time it hits nine, Dean is on beer number seven, half the food is gone, and Jody and Cas have spent about every minute ferrying drinks in and out of the kitchen. Dean’s heard the words I’m sorry about your brother more times than he can really stand it. He figures they’ve got about as big a crowd as they’re going to have, and he promised Cas he’d do it, so.

He stands up. He clears his throat — like hell is he going to fucking clink his glass or whatever. Everyone goes quiet; they’ve all got the instinct that tells you to look up when the most dangerous man in the room wants your attention. Alex crosses the room to get to Eileen, so she can sign for her, because no way is Dean going to get through this looking up high and clear enough for lip reading and like hell is he giving a speech without a drink in his hands.

“I, uh.” He swallows. “Seems dumb to make a, a speech, or whatever, but. This is a wake, so I figured we should, y’know. Maybe talk about the man of the hour, at least just the once.” There’s a few chuckles, like he planned. He exhales. “Thanks for coming. Thank you for comin’ to remember my brother. Sam.”

All of them are looking at him. Waiting for him to say something profound. He’d tried to think of something earlier but nothing would come to him, and nothing still is coming to him. His voice cracks right in half as he says, “I don’t know what to say.” He chugs down the rest of his beer, knows it’s not a good look for him, but he does it. Christ. “I know what we’re like. Our reputation. Messin’ with angels, demons, this big— all this crap that we brought on ourselves, on all of you. I was surprised so many of you came, seein’ as we’ve burned half our bridges and had the other half burned for us. But you did. An’ you didn’t— you didn’t come because of me, you came for Sam. Because Sam was a good guy. You could see it in him. The things he went through—”

Dean closes his eyes. He didn’t mean to mention it. He didn’t want to think of Lucifer. Lucifer’s hands on his brother. Hit after hit, and Sam always got back up, even if he left a bit of himself on the ground every time.

“And he was still, you know. Gentle. The kinda guy you’d— you’d wanna spend time with, a guy you’d trust. Smart, too. Smart as hell. You all know that, especially after— after Bobby passed, when Sam started fielding those research calls.” He keeps looking at the wall, far above everyone else’s heads, because he can’t look at another person’s face. It’s only Sam’s face he wants to see and it’ll break his heart to know he’s not there.

“But that’s what you know. That’s what Sam did for you. He took it. He carried all of it. He just—” Dean laughs. “It was different when we were kids, y’know. When he was little, he knew what he wanted. He stood up to our old man about going to college. You folks know that? He was gonna be a lawyer, before the angels came down. Got a full ride to Stanford. I was so—”

He chokes on it. As if he has the right to say anything about it, considering the way they left it, midnight on that road when Sam went out west. But still. No matter what Dean said in the moment, the shit he spewed just to keep his dad from punching someone, this is the truth: “I was so impressed by him. There I was, some punk kid with not a single legitimate qualification to his name, but the one good thing I did — all those years, the one good thing I did was raise that boy to know what he wanted. He was so certain that he didn’t deserve to be swallowed up by this life.”

Dean wants another fucking drink. Instead, just to finish it, he says, “This life wasn’t good to him. But he— at the end of it, those last few months, I thought. I thought I saw somethin’ in him. Like maybe he was figuring it out again. Seeing how he could— y’know, things like doing research, instead of killing.” He looks right at Eileen, tears pouring down her face and Dean just the same. “Fallin’ in love again. Thought maybe I’d never see it happen. Fifteen years, it's been.” He shakes his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know if there’s any good in it, that he was learning how to be at peace when he went— or if maybe that’s worse, that he was taken before he really got it. I don’t know. I just miss him.”

He knows he’s crying, can’t do a damn thing for it but swipe a hand over his eyes. He remembers he’s supposed to be making a speech for the public or whatever, so he adds, quickly, “Thank— thank you all, thanks, for comin’. I know it woulda— it would’ve… meant a lot…” and he trails off and he can’t speak at all, and everyone very respectfully looks away and clears their throats and makes a hell of a lot of noise clinking their glasses and having soft murmuring conversations to cover up the shame of Dean hightailing it to the kitchen.

He can’t breathe in the silence there. His shoulders hurt with how tight he’s holding them. He misses him. He misses him. He misses him so much, all he wants is Sam back, all he wants, he’d give anything for it, take him back down to Hell, surely there’s a demon who’s got the juice. There are no more seals to break, no more swords to possess. Only Dean and Sam. It’s mundane again. It’s only him on the line. Can’t anyone out there make him an offer?

A tap on his back makes him turn around. “Dean?” Eileen’s voice is shredded, as torn up as Dean’s probably is. She signs and says, slow, fingers shaking like her voice shakes, "I miss him too," and Dean pulls her in.

He doesn’t know how long they stand like that. She’s tiny, probably felt even tinier to Sam, but strong. They’re always strong, the ones who survive getting left behind.

Max offers them both whiskey drinks when they make it back out there, and yeah, all right, he’s made his speech. He can get plastered. “It was a good speech,” Max says, low, signing good and speech for Eileen’s benefit, and Dean nods mechanically. It wasn’t, but he knows what Max is trying to do. Half-signing, Max adds, “I think you made everybody cry. In a room full of repressed hunters, that’s high praise.”

“Repressed hunters are always desperate for an excuse to cry,” Dean says and signs, almost buoyed by the banter. If he’d had another drink in him he might even have cracked a smile. “What’d you think of Sam, anyway? You only met us like twice.”

“I’m going to go see Alex and Cas,” Eileen says, “and let you two talk.” She winks at Max, for some reason, and says, “It’s nice to finally meet you.”

“Yeah, you too, Eileen,” Max says.

“You don’t gotta go,” Dean tries.

"I know," Eileen signs. She smiles through her tears. "But Cas is less repressed anyway." The fact that Dean has to ask her to fingerspell repressed twice before he figures it out just compounds the embarrassment.

“Man, she’s cool,” Max says.

“Yeah. Too good for Sam.” It comes out almost before Dean realizes that Sam’s gone, that this is his fucking wake. “Jesus Christ,” he swears, not even sure how to handle the roiling mess of emotions in his belly.

“As an older brother, you’re definitely still allowed to bully him over his crushes, even if he’s. You know.” Dean finishes his drink, and Max obligingly puts another one in his hand. “I thought a lot of good things about Sam,” Max says, as Dean sips his whiskey. “I met up with him a few more times, a few months before he disappeared, actually.”

“Huh?” Dean frowns. “I never heard about that.”

“They weren’t— it was just research questions, him asking for clarification on some of the artifacts you guys have in the bunker, that kind of thing.”

“Coulda invited me.”

Max flushes. It takes Dean a second, but then— but no. No fucking way. Max says, delicately, “Not— they weren’t really, uh, group-oriented meetings—”

“You fucked my brother,” Dean says, and Max doesn’t deny it. There are way too many things happening here. Max is a witch. Max is a guy. Max is a witch. Sam fucked a man.

“We really just made out a few times, before things got serious with Eileen,” Max says, and Dean wheezes. The last fucking thing he expected out of his brother’s goddamn wake was a coming out. A posthumous coming out. An outing, maybe, since Sam isn’t here to do it himself. “He— you know better than most what, uh, the kinds of things someone involved with Sam would need to be careful about.”

That’s too fucking much. Dean’s not going to think about his queer missing brother and Lucifer’s grimy hands all over him, that’s— that’s not. That’s not what he wants to think about. “Other than that,” he says, because if he doesn’t breeze right past it he’ll never get over it, “other than that, you— I mean. What did you guys talk about?”

“Magic, mostly.” Max shrugs. “Look. He… he was scared. Scared of his own power, scared of his own interest. Rowena would toss a spell or two his way but Sam never thought of himself as a witch until we started talking it over. Then, well. You know.”

“Yeah.” Jesus. A witch. Dean doesn’t exactly have fond memories of the witches in their lives, but he can see why the idea of it would interest Sam. Immediate and real-world applications, the rhythm of research and study, power he could at least trace to something other than demon blood.

“I didn’t mean to, like, torpedo your image of your brother or anything,” Max says diplomatically. “That’s just what we did when we met up. It doesn’t have to mean anything.”

“It’s good to know he can still surprise me,” Dean says, honest. “I mean it. He’s not— he’s not just my brother. There’s a whole world of people who— who know him, and respect him, and care about him.”

“Yeah, well.” Max finishes his drink, fast. “Doesn’t bring him back, does it.”

Dean empties his glass, too, and pours himself and Max another round. “No,” he chokes out, clinking his glass in a halfhearted toast against Max’s, “no, it does not.”

“What are you doing?” Cas asks.

Dean shrugs. “Just searching.” He clicks on the next page of results, just to say he did it, but he doesn’t look at ‘em. There ain’t a paper from Kentucky to Oregon mentions Sam Winchester, far as Dean can tell.

“I made you some tea.” Cas sets it down, gentle, just ahead of Dean’s elbow so he doesn’t go and knock it off the table. Dean looks at it. Peppermint, with some milk in it. How Cas figured out that’s how Dean takes his tea, he’ll never know.

“You gettin’ anywhere?” Dean asks. He keeps looking at that tea. He doesn’t wanna look at Cas, see him— see him standing there, broad-shouldered and thick-skinned and bent up over Sam’s disappearance near as bad as Dean is. Nobody wants to see that.

“No.” Cas sighs, and leans against the table, so Dean has to look up at him. Broad-shouldered, thick-skinned. Not so bent up about Sam as Dean thought. He looks— he looks sturdy. Cas says, softly, “Will you take a break?”

Hell, like Dean’s— like Dean’s ever gonna get a break from Sam’s disappearance. Sam’s absence is always with him.

“Please,” Cas says. He puts a hand on Dean’s shoulder, and Dean lets him, and then he— Cas drags his hand up, God, brings it warm and careful to the curve of Dean’s ear, thumbs at his temple.

Dean closes his eyes, and Cas rubs gently, rubs the tension out of him through his scalp, catches his fingernails just the slightest bit at Dean’s hairline.

“Tha’s nice,” Dean murmurs, annihilated by it. He can’t think a damn thing except for grief and wanting, all tied up in the same part of his own defective heart. He wants Sam back and he’s grieving years without Cas’s hands on him, and he wants Cas in his bed all while he’s grieving Sam. He’s sick. As if his hunched shoulders were what was holding it all in, he tips forward into Cas’s knees and just— loses it, right there, tears down his cheeks staining Cas’s jeans.

“I love you,” Cas says.

“Yeah,” Dean whispers, and he pulls Cas in until he’s got his face in Cas’s thigh and his arms wrapped around his hips. He can’t say it. He can’t say it, but Christ, he— he knows he feels it. He knows it. He kisses Cas’s knee, and then pulls back to look up at him, his angel. His— his man. “Cas,” he croaks out, blinking, “yeah, I know y’do—”

Cas’s hand comes down to his cheek and Dean— Dean lets him lift and lean down, lets him pull them together until they’re kissing. Dean closes his eyes and tilts his chin back and lets Cas hold him, lets Cas hold him down, taste him, oh God—

“You with me?” Dean asks nonsensically, but Cas says, “Yes, yes,” and kisses him harder, slides his hands down to his shoulders to dig his thumbs into the space above Dean’s collarbones. Dean’s breath hitches and chokes, and Cas comes off the table into Dean’s lap.

“Last time you didn’t know what I was to you,” Cas says, and Dean nods, because he’s right. Into the skin below Dean’s jawline, Cas murmurs, “You know now, don’t you, Dean?”

“I know,” Dean gasps, lolling his head back to give Cas room to work. Cas bites, sharp and crisp at the base of Dean’s throat. “Yeah, you’re mine, ain’t you?”

“I’m yours.” Cas leans down to kiss the skin of Dean’s chest, unbuttons his shirt as he goes, and says, “I’m yours and you’re mine, too, isn’t that right?”

“That’s right—” Dean inhales sharply as Cas bites at the skin of his ribs, as Cas’s hands press bruises into Dean’s hips. And then Cas— Cas slides off the chair and presses his face in against Dean’s fly and— and— and smells, fuck, just smells him, opens his mouth and sets it warm and wet against the denim covering Dean’s rapidly hardening dick.

“If you were made from my rib,” Cas mutters, with purpose, as he unzips Dean and pulls him out and strokes him, “I wouldn’t be satisfied. I’d remake you—”

“Cas—”

“—so you were made out of all my bones, and my skin, my muscle.” Cas licks the head of Dean’s dick and it— it’s like a spike of feeling, straight through Dean’s abdomen, into his twitching ankles. “I’d look at you and know you were more mine than God’s.”

“Fuck,” Dean says, humiliatingly turned on by the whole fucking thing, “you’re weird, aren’t you?” Cas glances up at him and Dean clarifies, “Oh, I like it, sweetheart,” and Cas grins and then slips half of Dean’s dick in his mouth. “Oh, fuck.”

Cas sucks him, warm and wet, and Dean closes his eyes and lets himself feel it, that rumble through his chest and the sudden and desperate twitch of his thighs as Cas gets him off. “Cas,” he hisses, insane over it, as if— as if he hasn’t gotten off in weeks, and yeah, he hasn’t, maybe he’s— maybe he’s been waiting for this his whole goddamn life, wouldn’t that be a bitch.

“You feel so good,” Cas murmurs, eyelids half-closed, and Dean shoves his hips up against Cas’s grip and comes, brutally, all over Cas’s face.

Jesus. Jesus. He exhales heavily, collapses against the chair. “Fuck, man,” he breathes, looking at Cas on his knees. This is the first time Cas has gotten him off, technically, but it sure feels like the logical continuation of whatever they’ve been doing for the last decade and a half. Dean’s seen Cas on his knees for any other number of angels and demons and men, sometimes, men with Enochian brass knuckles or just good timing.

Dean’s got none of that. Dean just has his rotted-out chest and his mean old mouth and his roughed-up hands, and somehow that was enough to put Cas on his knees anyway. That was enough for Cas to fall to his knees all on his own, just out of— oh, God. Just out of love.

“Shit, Cas,” he whispers, overcome with it, and Cas gets up just in time for Dean to press his mouth, desperately, at his wrist, his forearm, to tongue up his arm and bite at the skin under the sleeve of his T-shirt and then suck a hickey into his neck.

“Come to bed with me,” Cas says, and Dean nods fervently. He’d go anywhere Cas asked — and that’s a familiar feeling to Dean.

Something Castiel likes to do with Dean, when they manage to stay quiet for long enough in a room together to do it, is to read. Dean will sit in an armchair, warm and inviting, a novel small in his broad hands, and Castiel will venture into the chair next to Dean’s with his own book — a collection of essays perhaps, or a novel, too, or more rarely, a play — and they will read, quietly, together. This is one of the things that Castiel loves most about being human.

At the end of March, a few weeks after Sam’s funeral, Castiel decided to start a garden, and in the beginning of April, he does it. He asks Dean to drive him to the hardware store so he can build a little greenhouse, and then he realizes he has no idea how to make one, so Dean has to build it for him, and he makes it twice the size Castiel originally planned for. Inside the greenhouse made of Dean’s generosity, Castiel plants tomatoes, wide-leaved monsteras, the three sisters, an orange tree. None of these plants are supposed to belong together — with the exception of the corn, beans, and squash, of course — but Castiel doesn’t know that, and so neither does his garden.

By June, the sun is hot, the garden is flourishing, and the soil under Castiel’s nails is another thing he loves about being human.

Dean builds him a bench for the inside of his greenhouse. Sometimes Dean will sit in it, sweating through his T-shirt, reading. Castiel will finish watering the orange tree and then sit next to Dean on the bench, and he will pull a book out, too.

Today, the back of Dean’s neck is flushed with heat, his fingers leaving sweat stains on the page. He is reading Death of a Salesman.

Castiel looks at him. The slim Penguin edition is delicate, delicate as the thin scars over Dean’s knuckles. Dean’s teeth, gentle on his own lip. The hunch of his shoulders and the shift of his hips as he sits on the hard wooden bench.

“Should we get more comfortable seating in here?” Castiel asks.

Dean blinks up at him. He is — Castiel swallows — he is so beautiful. His jawline catches the sun, warm on him the way everything is warm on him. His eyes are greener than the leaves of Castiel’s garden.

“S’fine by me,” Dean says. He shrugs. “But if you want, sure. Didn’t wanna crowd up your greenhouse.”

“You built it, so it’s half yours.” Castiel doesn’t mean anything by it, really, but Dean smiles a little, looks down like he’s embarrassed.

In the silence between them, Castiel sits next to Dean on the bench, not close enough to feel him or touch him, but close enough all the same. He pulls out his own book. The Man Made of Words, by N. Scott Momaday.

Before he starts reading, though, Dean clears his throat. “Could make a run down to Smith Center tomorrow if you wanted, get some cushions.”

Castiel smiles. “That would be nice,” he says softly, thinking of it, Dean comfortable in their greenhouse.

Dean nods. Settles into the bench. “Cool,” he says, eyes firmly on the page.

Castiel cracks the book open to his bookmark. He reads: To tell a story in the proper way, to hear a story told in the proper way—this is a very old and sacred business, and it is very good. At that moment when we are drawn into the element of language, we are as intensely alive as we can be; we create and we are created. That existence in the maze of words is our human condition.

Next to him, Dean grunts a little, flipping back a page, perhaps to read again something that struck him. Castiel ponders Momaday’s words. Existence in the maze of words. Yes. He thinks of the Winchester gospels, thinks of God’s capricious voyeurism, thinks of the horrible universe Dean once told him about where they were all just characters on a TV show — and he thinks, too, of the first storyteller he ever met, a young person with long hair who witnessed a conversation between a beaver and a squirrel and recounted it to their wide-eyed baby. They were a real creator, Castiel thinks. In that moment they made themself more profoundly than did God.

Dean is no writer, not a poet, but he has told Castiel a number of great truths. He said, If anything’s worth dying for, this is it. He said, once, to Castiel, I need you. He wrote DEAN’S TOP 13 ZEPP TRAXX on a cassette tape he gave to Castiel which said, perhaps, more than Castiel thought it did at the time.

Make no mistake, we are at risk in the presence of words, Momaday writes. Castiel thumbs the page. The risk is great, yes, but the reward— Castiel sees Dean out of the corner of his eye, smells the rich soil under his feet, feels the sun hot on his skin. The reward is greater still.

The search goes on. Of course it does. Dean wakes up every morning with a hole in his chest, and he scours his Google hits before he gets out of bed, but it’s calmer now. The hunt has receded, given him enough room for other parts of his life, maybe. Or maybe it’s just wormed its way into all of it, changed every part of him until it doesn’t feel like he’s drowning in it because it is him, it’s the same as him. It’s been— fuck, it’s been almost eleven months. Eleven months of living.

Him and Cas don’t always sleep in the same bed. Cas doesn’t sleep all that often, and when he does he’ll just pass out, anytime, anywhere. That’s something else Dean hasn’t been thinking about because these days hardly anything is worth thinking about. Sam is gone. It seems stupid to dwell on whether Cas is his boyfriend or his partner or his fuckbuddy, considering.

This morning, Cas is in bed with him. Dean’s hand flexes when he puts his phone down. Nothing new. There’s never anything new. He looks over at Cas, at his naked back. His face buried in his pillow. Dean leans over until he makes contact, presses his forehead into Cas’s shoulder.

“Hello, Dean,” Cas mumbles into his pillow, still half-asleep, and Dean smiles into his skin. Cas turns his head and Dean pulls back, curls onto his side so he can make eye contact. Like always, he asks, “News?”

“Nah,” Dean replies, like always. These days the update is more of a ritual than a genuine search, as if by going through the motions regularly enough they can invoke Sam.

Cas’s mouth tilts up sleepily, would be a smile if half of it wasn’t squashed against the pillow. He’d say it aloud now, if he could, the thing that Cas deserves to hear, the thing Dean has never told anybody in his adult life.

Instead, he asks, “Have you ever been to the Grand Canyon?”

Cas blinks. “No,” he says, “not as a human. I’m not sure I ever saw it as an angel, either.”

“Yeah,” Dean breathes, nonsensically. He pushes in until his forehead meets Cas’s. Quietly, he says, “I was gonna go with Sam. We were gonna make a trip out of it.”

Cas just strokes a hand up Dean’s arm, fingernails trailing against his sensitive skin, and Dean sighs, his eyes fluttering shut. “We had a funeral for him. And I’ll— I’ll go again, with him, when he comes back. But I thought— I thought—”

Really, what Dean thought was, I want to see you in the sun. I want to go on a road trip with you. I want to buy you a shitty souvenir keychain that says THEY DIDNT HAVE MY NAME and kiss you somewhere I won’t be thinking about my worse-than-dead brother for five fucking minutes.

He says, “I just thought it might be nice for us to go.”

He hears Cas move. He feels him press a gentle kiss to the bridge of his nose, and then the skin under his eye, and then his temple. “Thank you for inviting me,” Cas says softly. Dean shivers under his breath. “I’d love to go with you.”

“Okay,” Dean says. He opens his eyes, and there he is, his Cas. “Okay. We’ll go.”

Castiel sees her at the Four Corners monument. She’s lying on the border between Utah and Colorado, as if she’s sunbathing, in a black swimsuit, scythe by her side. At her feet reads the circular inscription where the four corners intersect: FOUR STATES HERE MEET IN FREEDOM UNDER GOD.

“Billie,” Castiel says, pausing across from her on the south side of that same longitudinal axis, straddling the Arizona/New Mexico border.

She lifts her sunglasses to look at him. “Castiel,” she sounds out, slowly. She tilts her head curiously. “I tolerate it from your boys because they don’t have much space in their heads for new ideas, but you know my true name. Use it.”

Castiel swallows. “Death,” he says hoarsely. “My apologies.”

“It’s forgiven.” She puts her sunglasses back on, and leans back against the concrete. “Why are you here, Castiel?”

Castiel’s nose is burning under his sunscreen. He’s wearing a short-sleeved button down. Dean is— somewhere, although now Castiel is glad he’s out of sight. Castiel says, “I’m on a road trip.”

“Fascinating.”

“What are you doing here?”

As if it’s obvious, she says: “I’m sunbathing.”

Oh. Castiel sits down, then, and studies the flat monument under him. Humans are so prone to this, building statues to their imaginaries. “Do you remember when this was sandstone?” Castiel asks, smiling as he thinks of it. Red stone grown over with gray-green trees, the sun hot overhead. And only a little earlier, the ice age the humans remember.

“Borders keep me busy,” Death proclaims, slow and pronounced. “I know changes in the land better than the land knows itself. You’re young to me, Castiel. Don’t presume.”

“I won’t.”

“I brought you here for a reason,” Death continues.

Castiel pauses. He feels the sun reddening the back of his neck, thinks of the four days they just spent in the car because Dean wanted him to see the Grand Canyon. He thinks of Eileen poring over lore books for disappearances, Dean’s quiet grief which resolves itself and then cracks open anew every day. Yes, perhaps it was indeed Death who brought them here.

She asks, “Why do you think I have become Death?”

Castiel nods ruefully, realizing: this is a reckoning. “Because I killed you,” he says gravely, prepared to admit to his faults, but she cackles.

“You give yourself too much credit, seraph,” she says, still laughing. “You only gave me the opportunity. Do you think there’s no rest for reapers?”

“I— oh.”

“I became Death because I understood the law.” She stands, then, and looks across the intersection of four states to Castiel. When Castiel looks at her he sees her in metaphor, mostly. He’s no angel anymore, but he remembers her well. Death is a Black Woman and She is Thunder. “Since the end — the first end, the true end, with Michael and Lucifer and all the rest — the world has been unstable. The foundations unearthed. You and your kind have brought chaos.”

“Are you here to reprimand me?”

“I’m here to tell you to back off.” She walks forward, and Castiel sees before him the stalking wolves of the Anishinaabe north. “The truth of Sam Winchester is not my concern. Don’t summon me again.”

Castiel jumps on it. “But you know where he is?”

“He’ll come or he won’t,” she says. “The balance I hold today hasn’t been this steady since before your precious God. Don’t topple it.”

“But—”

“Enough!” Death taps her scythe against the ground, once, and the concrete ripples out like water, splits in two as once did stone under Moses’ thirst, to an awful sound. The borderline between Arizona and New Mexico remains, but the cracked line splitting Colorado and Utah degrades, corrupts the four-pointed intersection. ST— GOD UNDER FREEDOM IN FOUR reads the inscription, now, jumbled stones splayed over each other.

Out from the land, her voice sounds: “You veer close to razing the mountain, to flooding your precious canyon with your spells and your grief. Zombies are of my realm, Castiel, not yours.”

“I understand,” Castiel says, thinking of their efforts all those months ago to pull Sam from nowhere, the sinister hand which emerged from that vulture, in perhaps the shape of Sam’s callused palms but more disturbing than even the absence of his ghost. “But will you— can you help us?”

He’s so close. If he can convince her, they’ll succeed. If only it were Dean— but then, Dean reaped Death, didn’t he? They’ve both killed her. “Your kind of love opposes the truth, the honesty of my love,” Death says, standing in front of him, blotting out the sky. “I love the souls I reap. Your love is nothing to mine, for I love fiercely.”

“So you won’t—”

“He isn’t with me,” Death says. Castiel exhales. Then where— where are you, Sam? “If he were, that would be the end of it. I’m less inclined now than I’ve ever been to bend the rules for a Winchester.”

“But he isn’t with you.”

“But he isn’t with me.” She graces him with a smile. Now a person again, Castiel’s height or less than, glowing under the sun just as Castiel does, she says, “Be respectful, Castiel. I’m the only god left.”

“We won’t try it again,” Castiel promises.

She nods, and walks past him, and then— she touches him, touches his shoulder, as if she’s clapping him on the back for an accomplishment. Castiel shivers, under that four-state heat. “You may have killed more than I have,” she says, mildly enough, “but don’t forget. I know the law of Death well, for I am Death.” And then, Death releases him, and Castiel is born again into life, hot and sweaty on a riven frontier.

Chapter Text

His key still works, at least. Sam figures he’s on Dean’s shit list, what with the radio silence, but he evidently hasn’t gone full revenge mode yet.

No one’s in the library when he steps in. He makes it to his room without running into anybody, dumps his crap, and then heads over to the kitchen, where he finds Dean putting bread in the oven.

“Dean?”

Dean drops the pan. The dough spills out over the tile floor, the metal clanging against the open oven door. “Jesus Christ, Dean—”

“Sam?” Dean doesn’t seem to give a shit about the oven radiating heat or the bread melting into the floor. “What the—” Dean whips out a knife. “What the hell are you?”

Sam waits for the black eyes, thinks, damn it, shouldn’t have stowed my stuff. But Dean doesn’t turn demon. “Dean, are you— what the hell’s wrong with you?”

“You’re not my brother.” Dean grits it out, says it angry, brutal in his throat. Sam can see that he’s hurt, even if he can’t figure out where. “My brother disappeared a year ago. You’re not—” Dean swallows. His mouth shakes. Quietly, he says, “You can’t be him.”

Sam puts his hands up, tries to seem nonthreatening. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says carefully, backing up, hoping to put a table between him and Dean’s knife. Christ. Disappeared a year ago. What did Sam do? “I… I left four days ago, to drive Kaia up to Washington.”

“That was last year. That was 2019,” Dean says. “Prove to me that you’re him.”

“It is 2019,” but Sam can feel doubt creeping in. That 2020 car sales billboard. The date on his gas station receipt. “Dean. I have no idea what’s happening here.”

“My brother walked out that door,” Dean croaks, “and he didn’t come back. So either— either you’re some kinda vision, or ghost, or shapeshifter, or— or it is you.” Sam watches Dean hunch in, curl his shoulders forward, knife shaking in his hand. Like he’s sick, like he’s dizzy with it, he asks, “Is it you? Is that you, Sammy?”

“It’s me,” Sam says, as if he has any right to claim certainty here. Apparently he doesn’t even know what year it is. “You, uh— you. I don’t know how to prove it’s me. You gave Cas a Zepp mixtape and I bullied you about it for like two months after you told me. You, you, you got me a fuckin’— skin mag, that Christmas before you went to Hell. You hooked up with my prom date. Christ, I dunno, you’re— you’re my brother. You—” Dean’s knife clatters to the ground. Dean heaves himself up, stumbles as his hand hits the table. “Dean. Dean. I don’t know what the hell is happening here.”

“Silver,” Dean says, “lemme— can I—” and Sam finds a silver knife and cuts into his own palm so Dean doesn’t have to do it. “Sam,” he says, moans, and he finally — God — he finally looks Sam in the eyes, and Sam doesn’t know how he didn’t realize it before: Dean’s older, now. Sam can believe it. He really lost a year.

“Dean, Jesus—”

“Sam,” Dean repeats, like it’s all he can say, and then he’s hugging Sam, arms wrapped around his back. God. Sam hugs him back, disoriented, sick, thinking of all the things his body might’ve done without him noticing. A year. A whole fucking year.

Sam closes his eyes. “It’s me,” he says, because right now that’s all he knows for certain. Who he was yesterday, a month ago, he doesn’t know anymore — but he knows who he is now. And that will have to be enough.

Dean shakes. “A year,” he whispers, and Sam shudders, hates to think of it, the other side of it, Dean gone for a year without a word, without a sign. “I had nothin’. Not a clue. Just— gone.”

“I just went to Seattle,” Sam says helplessly, stupidly. An idiotic thing to say, but it’s the only truth he knows. He just went to the edge of the continent, and it took him a year to come back.

“You’re here,” Dean says into his shoulder, and then releases him, but keeps his hand close on the side of Sam’s neck, covering his cheek and his ear, the heel of his palm brushing along Sam’s jaw. Sam doesn’t know what he’s feeling right now, but he knows what he thinks, because it’s the same thing he thinks every time he sees Dean cry. He thinks, that’s not right. He thinks, let me hold it for him. Let me take it.

Dean pulls his hand back to swipe it over his face, and Sam looks down at the table, lets him have his privacy. “Okay,” Dean says. “Okay. Fuck. The oven.”

Sam exhales, loudly, aiming for something vaguely in the same family as a laugh, maybe. Dean walks back to turn off the oven and then leans back against it, looking at Sam.

“Is, uh. Is Cas—?”

“Yeah, yeah, he’s— he’s around.” Dean rubs his palm over his mouth, and then toes at the splattered dough on the floor. “Let’s, uh. Okay. Library? We’ll try to— we’ll figure this out.”

And it’s that — the normality of it, them in the library, working the case — that brings it home for Sam. He’s the case. “A year,” he says, voice cracking.

He feels his face tighten, the way it does when his body is about to cry. The last time he lost a year, he was in the Cage. He woke up to six months of memories of his soulless palms over women’s mouths, shotgun after shotgun in his filthy hands, and there to help him cope with it all was Lucifer, waving at him from across the room, asking if he wanted to be bunk buddies. Top or bottom. Always what he wanted, what do you want, Sam, always making it Sam’s choice in that year. Sam chose everything that happened to him that year. Sam has always chosen everything that’s ever happened to him. He asked for it.

“Sam?” Dean’s there, in front of him, hands hot on his forearms. Sam is so cold. Another twelve months out of time. Where did Sam go? Who had him?

“M’fine,” Sam mumbles, shaking off Dean’s hands as gently as he can. “Library, right?”

“Yeah,” Dean says, and follows him out the door.

There’s a party for Sam. Once they figure out that there’s nothing that could possibly explain any of it, Dean throws his hands up and calls all their friends and tells them Sam’s back and could they come by the bunker and bring as much booze as they can carry.

Through it all, Sam feels distant. Dissociated. He shakes hands with Jody and gives Claire a hug and, somehow, is also outside of the bunker, in the stars, watching himself watching the people around him. He thinks he’d do great on Mars. He’d dig a whole straight through to the center of the red planet and cover himself right up, and no radiation could ever hurt him.

“Dude,” Dean’s saying. Sam jerks. “Hey, man. Eileen’s here.”

Sam blinks. She signs, “Hi Sam.”

Having something to do with his hands helps. He signs, “Hi Eileen,” and then, “Nice to see you.” It’s weird to see Dean more comfortable with ASL than Sam — just brings home how long Sam was gone.

Eileen hovers around the snack table, and Sam blinks from one side of the party to the other, in snapshots. If you asked him the next day, he couldn’t have told you what happened or if he drank anything or what Dean made to eat. Fortunately, no one asks.

It occurs to him randomly, like the arbitrary violence of a lightning strike. He is standing next to the stovetop in his year-behind body, boiling pasta, when he realizes that he might not have disappeared. That he might, instead, have been transformed. Taken.

He starts small, remembers that he’s still in what is technically a public, communal space. He lifts the hem of his shirt to see if he can find any marks. Any evidence of a year when he was not Sam.

He stretches his quads. He lifts his knees, trying to figure out if the ache in them is more or less than it was twelve months ago (last week). He rolls his shoulders to assess his joints. He cracks his neck to see if it cracks harder than it did yesterday (last year), to see if his body was hardened by the strange stillness that comes over it when he’s possessed by an angel, by a creature who has no use of human limbs or veins. To see if he survived a year of that.

Around his feet, subtle, so subtle he barely even notices it, the kitchen floor tiles start to darken. He looks down, and thinks he should sweep later as he looks back at the stovetop. When he looks down again four minutes later, the tiles are brown.

Sam steps back. It follows him, the dark, the dirt, the— he presses his hand against the table for support and the rot spreads there, too, spilling out from his hands like dead and salted earth. “Fuck,” he whispers, pulling his hand back into himself, wishing he could stop touching anything. He stands there in his kitchen, watching the ground decay under him, maggots wriggling out from the tile, mushrooms and mold following them, fast and pungent. It smells like death.

“Dean,” he whispers, and then, louder, “Dean!”

He lurches forward like the zombie he is to turn off the stove, at least, and then he puts his hands on the counter, head bent forward. Christ. Fuck. Is this— his hands shake, and the metal counter creaks as the wood below it splinters, termites crawling out of growing holes, and the smell of it, that smell. The smell he woke up with in that cave, when Lucifer raised him— he’s dead, isn’t he, he’s been dead and he’ll be dead until he goes to the afterlife and even then he won’t live.

“Sam!”

Sam turns to look at his brother. “Do you see it,” he hacks out, the ground below him wet and buzzing with flies. “Do you see what— what this is—”

“I don’t see anything,” Dean says, and he walks right over that cursed earth, his bare feet squelching in the slime. “Just you, man. You okay?”

“I’m sick,” Sam whispers, “I’m dead, I’m rotting, don’t—” Dean reaches out and Sam flinches, “Don’t touch me.”

Dean steps back, raises his hands. All Sam can think is, I don’t want to kill you. Why would you touch Lucifer’s body? “Yeah, no problem,” Dean murmurs.

The air is heavy with sweetness, sweetness like dead fruit in parking lot dumpsters, like fallen rotting cherries in early August. That’s me, Sam realizes, looking at his loose and swollen forearms as flies multiply and buzz around him, waiting for the skin to split and release candysugar flesh.

Why would you reach out for a creature like this? He closes his eyes, wondering what desperation could bring Dean to put a hand on him. To look at him. Was it you that did this to me? Am I a corpse reanimated by your loneliness?

“Hey,” Dean is saying, “hey, Sam, buddy, can you— can you hear me?”

“Yeah,” Sam whispers, sliding down to the floor. He keeps his eyes shut, doesn’t want to see the wreckage. “Yeah.” And then, “You— you really, you can’t see— you can’t see anything?”

“All I see is my brother on the ground having a panic attack,” Dean says, from in front of him, which means he must be squatting down to look at Sam. “What do you see?”

Stupid question to ask a man who’s not looking at anything. But, Sam answers. “The ground.” He puts his hand down on the floor next to his hip, and exhales when he meets something that feels like cold tile. Still, he keeps his eyes closed. “It’s rotting. Maggots, and it smells. Like.” He laughs, then. “I know what my dead body smells like. I know. After all these years— shit, I know.”

“Open your eyes for me,” Dean says. Sam— Sam can’t live the rest of his life with his eyes closed. Well, maybe he could. But he’s— one day he could open them, accidentally, and he’d see, and it’d— so it’s better to know, now.

He opens his eyes.

“You seein’ it still?” Dean asks, and Sam looks around.

All clear, so far. Tile below, wood behind, stone above. Dean’s feet, clean. Or, well, clean as they ever get. His hands are dry. “No,” Sam says hoarsely. “I don’t see it.”

“Okay.” Dean exhales, and sits back on his ass. “Okay. Shit.”

“I— I, I don’t.” Sam swallows. His own hands, dry too, are shaking. “What happened to me?” he asks, voice cracking. His skin prickles, every day, with what’s been done to it. He hates it. “I don’t wanna be a vessel anymore,” he hisses, digging his forehead into his kneecaps just to feel something solid. “I don’t wanna be dead.”

“You’re not dead,” Dean says firmly, but Sam knows Dean’s firmness. Dean’s as firm as any shoreline at low tide. The water always comes in. “Sam. You’re alive.”

“Okay,” Sam agrees, because a shoreline that drowns half the day is better than an oil rig twenty miles out at sea, which is where Sam is now. He looks at his hands, which are still, somehow, clean. He repeats, disbelievingly, “I’m alive.”

Sam spends more time at Jody’s than he might’ve otherwise. It’s a place he can go when the bunker gets too claustrophobic, the one place where Dean won’t harass him with check-in calls once an hour on the hour, because he trusts Jody to report back if something goes wrong. Yeah, it’s weird spending most of his time with girls in their early twenties, but they’re smarter than he is and have a hell of a lot more to talk about than his shut-in brother and his brother’s recluse not-boyfriend. And things are, maybe, a little weird with Eileen. Just maybe.

He thinks about her all the time. That’s the crazy part — he thinks about her all the time even though he hasn’t really seen her since that party, when he’d said hello and then buzzed his way through the rest of the night. He’s sick with it. He was going to tell her about it all, he’d made plans to do it, he’d sat down and looked up the signs for the words violation and inside and rape and angel and light. He was going to try to say that maybe they could try kissing again, if she wanted to, that maybe he wants to try feeling good with her, if she wanted that, that maybe he misses the darkness and maybe he’d let her put her hand on his stomach if the lights were off and the curtains were closed, maybe, maybe, maybe.

It’s been a year for her. Sam knows all the things that can happen in a year — knows all the people you can meet, the resolutions you can make. She’s a hunter, through and through, but even with that baseline hopelessness you have to accept the facts sometime. She’s probably moved on. His fingers twitch and he has to stop himself from fingerspelling the name he’s practiced over and over again, L-U-C-I-F-E-R, another one of those words too horrific to sign. Devil just doesn’t cut it.

Anyhow, Patience has a nice little bookshelf set up in Jody’s living room. A few library books, mostly fiction Sam hasn’t read. He never got the escapist urge the way Dean did, buried his head in SAT prep and scholarship essays rather than Vonnegut or Gibson. A few poetry books, too, which Sam takes a look at, just for kicks. He’s not much of a poet either. Someone put a copy of the Golden Treasury of Irish Verse on the shelf, which makes Sam smile, thinking of Eileen. ‘Twas the dream of a God, and the mould of His hand, That you shook ‘neath His stroke, That you trembled and broke To this beautiful land. Yeah, right. He closes it up.

Next one on the shelf is Natalie Diaz, one of Cas’s favorites. He pops it open at random, sees a line at the end of one of ‘em, And I, light-eater, light-loving. Sam flinches. Jesus. He didn’t— fuck.

That’s how Kaia finds him, with his deathgrip on her nice paperback.

“You reading Diaz?” she asks, leaning against the doorway. “I like her poem about bullets.”

“Haven’t read it,” Sam croaks out, and he blinks down at the page. A work of all good yokes—: blood-light—: to make us think the pain is ours to keep, light-trapped, lanterned. That I asked for it. That I own it—: lightmonger. Oh, fuck. This is a love poem. How is it a love poem?

He closes the book and puts it on the shelf so he can look at Kaia. After three days in a car together, even if it’s a year ago for her, he’d like to think they know each other pretty well. Maybe that’s wishful thinking.

“How are you?” he asks, and he watches her duck her head and smile. Better, then. Better than she was when he picked her up in Nebraska, a month (a year) ago. “You’n Claire doing okay?”

“Yeah,” she says, always so quiet. She pushes back her cuticles with her fingernails, fidgeting. “I’m glad you’re back,” she says.

“Me too.” Sam sits himself down on the couch to make himself stop hovering around a shelf of words that can hurt him. Kaia sits down next to him.

“I was thinking about our trip,” she says quietly. “You know your, uh. Your brother came to see me.”

Shit. Sam can only imagine how that went. “I’m sorry,” he says, because that’s all he can say.

Kaia laughs. “Yeah, it wasn’t great. But it got me— I mean, I was the last person to see you.” She shrugs, looking down at her knees. “It got me thinking.”

“It’s not your fault,” Sam says quickly. Jesus, he knows how easy it sinks in, the guilt. At least Sam signed up for this— or, at least Sam was built for this, which is almost the same thing.

“I know,” Kaia says. “I know that. But I just—” she shakes her head. “Anyway. I was thinking, maybe it was one of the places we passed through. Maybe it— maybe it held onto you.”

Huh. The way Sam figures it — because he has been figuring it, been dwelling on it ever since he “got back,” as if this is his home, as if he went away — anyway, Sam figures that time stopped working. Sam hadn’t driven himself out of time, hadn’t left and come back; time itself had stopped following its own rules. He has to believe that he slipped out because of time’s own nauseating indifference to life, not through any fault of his own.

So he says, “I think it’s more about time. I think it just… happened. Wouldn’t matter where.” He has to believe that because if he believes the alternative — if he believes that he made a choice, that he chose to go somewhere and that choice made him so different, so monstrous, that the more brutal and less forgiving half of time-space rejected him outright — then he’ll never win his year back. God is one thing but Time — time in collaboration with the highways he has known his whole life except for the years of it that belong to the Devil — time is another thing entirely. Time can’t be bargained with, and it owes him its merciless linearity if nothing else.

“I dunno,” Kaia says. “I don’t think it’s time. It’s space. You disappeared, Sam. It was about space.”

Easy for a dreamwalker to say. “No, I don’t— I think, I mean, I lost a year.”

“It’s about the land. You went to the wrong place and it sucked you up. That’s what— at least, I think that’s what happened.”

Sam chews that over. It’s a theory, but places are… well, they’re places. “I’d know if I went somewhere,” he says — hopes. “It— I skipped a year. It’s the only thing that makes sense. If, if I was in a place, Cas and Dean would’ve figured it out.” Even if something wiped his memories, there should’ve been something — some evidence, a papercut on his knee, another gray hair, anything. He hates the idea of it, that his body could’ve been somewhere again without him. The idea that his body might be a year older than him is worse than the idea that his whole self is a year younger than it should be. He’d rather lose twelve months than his skin.

Kaia is gentle about her reply, but Sam can see the skepticism in her eyes. “I don’t think that’s necessarily true,” she says, diplomatically. “And I’m saying — I’m saying the root of it is a place, not that what happened has nothing to do with time. I’m saying that places and time are— I guess I’m saying, maybe they’re the same thing, when you get close enough to them.”

“Okay, so then how—” and he stops there, because he realizes. The whole thing is pointless. Even if it was a place, what good would it do to know? Putting up a sign would just make it more attractive to stupid tourists. And how could he figure it out anyway? Maps are only gestures to where he really was; there’s a type of disorientation that is unique to driving for too long alone, the sense that the signs are right but the road is wrong. He could’ve been in the next state over the whole time and never known it, because states are fictions anyway. 

The secret and shameful truth of it is: he wants his year back. Even if it means taking that year from everyone else. He wants it back.

Every motel in the United States looks exactly the same as PARADISO. A neon blur. Silent and monumental vehicles occupying parking spaces at random, dewy snowmelt puddles in the asphalt cracks, a vending machine next to an ice box. The air Sam breathes tastes the same as the air just off any American highway.

The shock of it hits him full-on as he crosses the threshold into the motel room where they’re staying, here, now. It happens to him sometimes, the spatial disorientation telling him that he’s lost in time, too. He scrambles for his phone and doesn’t trust the date on it, has to Google search “todays date.” He settles when he sees the year. 2020.

Sam floats around his life like this, aimlessly. He doesn’t remember the case. He’s inside Dean’s car and then he’s inside the motel room and then he’s inside the morgue and the police station and the grave hole and inside every inside is the smaller inside of his body, covered in clothing. Different kinds of clothing. Today-now in this motel, wherever it is, he’s wearing normal Sam clothing. Flannel. He’s doing a good job at being himself today, six or two or forty months after his disappearance. Maybe he’s losing another year right now.

He googles the date again. 2020. It says November but he can’t remember if that’s what it said the last time he looked.

“Is it November?” he asks. Dean’s outside hassling the motel manager over a bucket of ice or something, maybe for Sam’s shoulder, so there’s just Cas left to hear him, frowning at his own phone.

Cas looks up. “I think so,” he says, and then he squints down at his phone. He says, “My phone says it’s November second.”

“Great,” Sam says. He puts his phone in his lap. His shoulder aches. He didn’t notice it before, in the Paradiso parking lot, but he notices it here because it’s the reason Dean is gone. Getting ice for his shoulder. Sam pulled it while he was digging up a corpse. Whose corpse?

“Can you tell me— tell me what case we’re on,” Sam says, and Jesus he’s gotta thank somebody out there for Dean being out of the room, ‘cause he knows what Dean would say. Dean wouldn’t do it. Dean would say, you havin’ trouble with your memory man? He wouldn’t mean it any particular way, in fact he’d mean it to be nice and concerned, but it wouldn’t help Sam know where or who he is at all.

Cas understands him, though, at least along this particular axis. “We’re in Grangeville,” he says. “We’re looking for—”

“This was the last case I was on,” Sam remembers, “before I went.”

“Yes.” Cas continues, slowly, so Sam can hear him well, “The mother. Do you remember the mother? She was haunting her daughter, the one who killed her.”

“Because she was sleeping with her daughter’s husband.”

“Because Dean thought she was sleeping with her daughter’s husband,” Cas agrees, as if those two statements mean the same thing. “Today we were at the morgue. The daughter died a few months ago.”

A few months ago. A few months ago was August. “Was it when I came back?” Sam asks, because fuck, he really can’t remember. The case doesn’t ring any bells, not the one they’re on right now. All he remembers is Grangeville in 2019. He remembers falling asleep in the back seat of the Impala after digging that first grave, the mother’s grave. He’d been so tired.

“No,” Cas says, “it wasn’t. It was when the husband died. In September.”

“September.”

“You weren’t—” Cas pauses, and says, delicately, “Dean thought it could wait, since no other deaths came up.”

“We dug up the husband today,” Sam says. He looks at his hands that have dug up a man’s grave without remembering it. He can’t remember anything. He doesn’t know how he got here. He’s in Paradiso again. He asks, “Hey, Cas, what’s the date again?”

“November second, 2020,” Cas says promptly. Easy on command. Sam looks at him, that line in his forehead that never seems to go away anymore. “We thought the husband might’ve killed his wife. Just — out of spite, maybe.”

“So why’d we dig up the mother’s grave last year?” he asks, because he remembers they’d been so certain the mom was the source of all the trouble, starting up tractors in the middle of the night and running people off the road. “Or— well—”

Cas sighs. “I don’t know why the husband would’ve haunted his wife,” he says. “I don’t— I don’t know about any of this. I don’t know why mothers haunt their daughters so often. I don’t remember anymore why we burned that woman in her grave. I’m sure we had a good reason.”

“Yeah.” When Sam was on the road — when he was gone — he thought a lot about ghosts. He never saw a highway ghost, not once, not even after four days on the road alone, and that’s what was so strange about it. He never even felt a gas station cold spot.

When he was a kid Dean always told him stories about girls getting their throats slashed in gas station restrooms, half warning and half pornography. Dean always made sure they went to the restroom together, waited outside the door for him when it was a single stall. Sam heard crap about gas station serial killers so often he’d go to sleep dreaming about every diner waitress who snuck Dean an extra slice of pie in exchange for a smile and a wink and a half-assed lie about it being Sam’s birthday.

He’d dream about that diner waitress — always a woman — with a knife in her chest and her guts spilling out, blood all over her mouth, and then, in the dream, he would become her. He’d be the one with a knife in his chest and blood all over his mouth, not despite but because Dean was worried Sam’d get molested in a gas station restroom while Dean wasn’t looking.

Mothers haunt their daughters indeed. “So the husband killed the wife,” Sam says. “No relation to the mom haunting her last year.”

“So it seems.”

“Jeez.” Sam rolls his good shoulder, just to stretch it out, and winces when it pulls at his bad one. The hurt pulls him into the inside of his body, at least. Here he is. “You think we can wrap it up here? After tonight?”

Cas shrugs. He says, “We’ll just have to keep an eye on the house. There’s no one left there to kill.”

Sam nods. Right. He tries to pay attention to his surroundings. Motel room, motel room. He couldn’t even tell you what color the walls are. “Cas,” he says, absentmindedly, “I’m going to do something crazy when I get back to the bunker.”

Cas pauses. “Oh?”

“I’m gonna— I’m gonna go somewhere.” He scratches a line down his forearm and says, “I’m gonna have a night out. I’m gonna— I’m gonna go somewhere that isn’t a motel room or the Impala or my bedroom. I swear to God. I’m gonna do it.”

Cas says, “That’s… that sounds like a good plan.”

Sam breathes out a sigh of relief. “Jeez,” he says, and he laughs at himself. “Jeez. I thought that was such a fucking— such a fucking insane idea.”

“No, it’s—”

“Don’t tell Dean,” he says, looking up to catch Cas’s eyes. “Please. Don’t tell him. Just— I’m just gonna go, one night, and then I’ll— and if I’m not back in the morning, you can, but— don’t—”

“Sam,” Cas says softly. He tilts his head, the way he did when he was an angel, and Sam thinks, that’s my friend. That’s a holy creature who is bigger than the building we’re in, but fuck it. He’s my friend. “Of course I won’t tell Dean. Not unless we get worried.”

Like they’re his parents. And maybe Sam deserves it, considering. Sam nods jerkily, and then Dean comes in the door, with a ten pound bag of ice in his arms and two new hand towels. “Sit up, Sammy,” Dean says, and Sam sits up, and Dean fiddles with his shoulder and makes him better.

Sam looks over Dean’s head at Cas, and Cas looks at him. Sam asks, casual as he can make it, “Hey, man. What’s the date today?”

“2020,” Cas says, and Dean moves Sam’s hands for him to wrap around the ice in the hand towel and put pressure on it, against his shoulder. “The second of November, 2020.”

“Thanks,” Sam says, leaning back against the headboard.

“I forgot,” Dean murmurs, pausing. Then he puts the rest of the ice in the freezer and downs the whiskey sampler in the bar fridge. “November second, huh.”

“2020,” Sam repeats, closing his eyes. His hands stay where Dean put them; his mother stays in Lawrence; the ceiling stays dark behind his eyelids. He says, like a prayer, “November second, 2020.”

Sometimes Dean starts crying, just ‘cause. Today it happens while he’s making lunch, crisping bacon on the stove and cutting up bread for a BLT. It happens ‘cause he still— it still feels like Sam’s gone.

He’s back. Hell, he’s been back for months. But it— Dean blinks down at the pan and wonders if he really is back. If this really is his brother. If maybe he was gone so long Dean doesn’t know him anymore.

He swallows. Plates his sandwich. Sits down, alone, at the kitchen table.

In a year— in the last year, fuck, he. He wasn’t making the calls he was born to make. Wasn’t digging out earth with his bare hands in hopes of finding his brother. Instead he was— he made choices. He chose Cas. He had a fucking funeral for Sam. And, Christ, he took Cas to the goddamn Grand Canyon. He didn’t sacrifice a single thing, and— and—

And look where it got him. Sam, flinching from nothing. Sam, come back wrong.

Dean chews his sandwich and tries his goddamn best to swallow it without thinking of Sam’s hands shaking right there on the kitchen floor. Sam saying he knew what his own dead body smelled like. Sam with his tattoo rig under his bed for warding out the filth they were literally bred to take. Dean closes his eyes and remembers Abaddon holding her palm over his chest, over his tattoo, remembers her saying she was gonna burn it off him—

He spits out his sandwich before he pukes it up. He’s sick with it, his own grief. Sam, he thinks. Sam, come here. Come to the kitchen. Lemme look atcha. Lemme see you still kicking.

Sam doesn’t come into the kitchen. It’s all broken between them, Sam knowing Dean got his hands all over Sam’s stuff, Dean knowing Sam could barely keep his hands on reality even before he disappeared. Sam is here but not here. Dean misses him— his brother before last year, his brother before Lucifer the third time, the second time, the first time, his brother before Ruby, his brother before Meg, his brother before Stanford—

Dean stands up too fast, bashes his thighs against the table. He tosses his food in the trash, leaves the plate to clean up later. He misses him. He could go out right now and see Sam in the library, reading a book like it’s 2019 again, but he still misses him. Dean thinks the only true thing about him, after all the hero crap God shoved on him, the macho shit his dad pulled— the only true thing about Dean Winchester is that he was built to be lonely.

Cas knocks on his door. “May I come in, Sam?”

That’s something Sam likes about him. Cas and him have had their differences over the years, like all of them, but these days Cas errs on the side of deference and it settles the nervous energy Sam can’t shake when he’s with Dean. Cas asks permission for everything and sometimes it’s hard for Sam to make decisions, but Cas always lets him take his time.

Sam nods, and Cas settles on the chair next to his desk, the one he still hasn’t fixed up from the haphazard piles Dean made when he went through whatever grieving process he was undertaking.

“I’m very glad you’re back, Sam,” Cas says. He said it when Sam came back, too, and has said it pretty much at least once a week since, so it’s not exactly a surprise.

Sam smiles, a quick jerk of a thing that hurts his cheeks more than anything. “I— thanks, man. But if you’re worried, I mean… I knew that. We’re friends.”

“I know.” And Sam’s certain Cas does know. Yeah, Cas and his brother have something Sam’s not touching with a ten foot pole, and nothing in Sam’s life comes close to what Dean is to him, but they’re undeniably brothers in arms, at the very least. Plus, they have similar preferences in postwar Japanese art.

Cas asks, “Are you all right? Settling in?”

“I’ve been back a while, Cas,” Sam says, flopping back onto his bed. His shirt rides up a little, exposing his belly, and he thinks forcibly to himself little steps and doesn’t cover it. Cas can see it, can see that slip of skin, and… he doesn’t do anything about it, because he’s Sam’s friend.

Sam exhales, and Cas says, “Well, it can take more than a few months to acclimatize to a new situation.”

“Yeah. It’s… I’m taking it one day at a time.”

“A good plan.” Cas nods solidly, like that settles it. “I’ll… leave you to it.”

“No, wait a sec.” Sam scrounges for something to say, and then realizes this is the perfect opportunity. Dean will never be honest with him, and it’s not like Jody and Donna and the girls will know all of it. Sam asks, “What happened while I was gone?” And then, seeing Cas’s brow furrow like he’s accessing his RAM or something, Sam adds, “I mean— not like, election results, or major events, I can Google that stuff. I mean, what did I miss? Here?”

Cas pauses. He leans back in his chair.

“Dean told me something,” Cas says softly. “I don’t think he’ll tell you, but I think you should know.”

“Okay.” Sam wants to feel bad about overstepping Dean’s boundaries, but the truth of it is, whatever lines there were between them are tangled all to hell and the tightest knots will never see the sun.

“He told me that you used to ask him questions. Questions such as— why did you always have to move, or why your father was frequently absent.”

Sam barely remembers that, but he can believe it. He imagines Dean — thinks suddenly of that fourteen year old he met on that witch case, and the realization that washed over him like a tsunami that this was Dean, his big brother Dean, the Dean who’d made sure he ate his Wheaties and did his homework on the chipping formica of motel kitchen tables while Dad was off shooting ghouls or playing house with his best and youngest son.

He imagines pestering that kid with questions he didn’t want to answer, and the smile that comes to his face is more delicate than he’d ever admit.

“He said he never answered you when you asked, and that he frequently has — had — a habit of being dishonest with you, in an effort to spare your feelings.”

Sam nods. He knows that.

Cas says, “He told me that if you ever came back, he’d answer anything you want, as honestly as he can.”

Sam exhales. All right. “Why are you telling me this, Cas?”

“Because he won’t. And he deserves to let the truth out, sometimes — and you deserve to hear it.”

Sam closes his eyes. Him and his brother talk in circles, and he fools himself thinking that it’s because they don’t need words anymore, that they’re beyond that, but he knows that sometimes they just let the truth swim by them because it’s easier than trying to grab hold of it.

“How did this past year treat him? Really.” And Sam says, “I’m asking you. I’m asking you because— ‘cause even if Dean’s honest with, with me, we both know he doesn’t know anything about taking care of himself.”

Cas stands up. He says, “I think Dean learned that he can survive almost anything, if necessary.” Cas’s mouth twists and his jaw clenches, and Sam waits it out on his bed, because he’s never been good at comforting angry men. Quietly, as if he doesn’t want to say it, he adds, “I don’t think he wanted that to be true.”

And Cas leaves Sam to mull that one over, sprawled out on his bed, belly exposed, papers categorized in ways he can’t recognize and his holy water rig dried up and out of place. Yeah. It really might take him more than a few months to acclimatize.

Last week, Dean had looked up from his phone, hunched over on the hood of the Impala, and seen Cas and Sam walking towards him from a coroner’s office in Nowheresville, Iowa. Sam had looked at him, significant-like, and Dean knew, suddenly, that they’d been talking about him — specifically, about him-and-Cas. He hadn’t said anything, ‘cause what was there to say, if Cas and Sam had already talked it out.

Sam doesn’t mention it outright, of course. He just drops a comment in easy, sidelong. On a late night supply run, he asks Dean, “You been thinking about settling down?”

Dean blinks at the black road ahead of him. Jesus. Maybe he shoulda said something that day, if Sam somehow got the impression that— that there’s nothing between him and Cas, that Dean’s still looking for someone else to settle down with.

Or maybe— maybe Sam did get the right picture in the end. Dean can’t imagine Cas actually admitting that he— what. That they’re… dating? That they’re together? Fuck, and here Dean was, thinking it was all settled, thinking Cas was easy and comfortable with his goddamn greenhouse, as if Dean could buy enough lumber or hammer enough nails to earn his way into love.

Dean imagines Cas trying to sound the words out and feels a clench in his stomach over the idea of it. Does he treat you right? Sam might’ve asked, and Cas woulda had to say— Jesus, he woulda had to say, Most of the time, he tries. That’s the best Dean can hope for. Fuck, he should be grateful Cas didn’t say a word.

“Maybe,” he hedges, and Sam doesn’t bother him over it.

An hour later, they buy their salt and their shotgun shells down over the border, in that godawful Oklahoma panhandle. The only reason they make it at all is ‘cause their guy, an old hunter who has a real SSN and hunting licence and everything, is nice enough to keep his front door open past nine at night. The sun set hours ago, while they were still on the road, so it’s pitch black by the time Dean drives off in search of a roadside field to sit in for twenty or a half hour to get his driving energy back.

“I talked to Cas last week, y’know,” Sam says, about ten minutes into their stargazing. They’re kinda too old for this, or at least, Dean’s never heard of a couple of forty year old siblings still living half on the road the way they do, but hell if looking up at the Milky Way wasn’t one of the only good parts out of their childhood. He won’t give this up, not anymore. Not after a year without his brother. Not if he can put the stars in Sam’s eyes, instead of the muck of dying too young and too often.

“Uh huh.”

“I asked him about the two of you.”

Hell. Dean swallows. He looks at the stars.

Sam continues, “He said to ask you about it, if I wanted to know.” And Sam laughs, a little, from two feet away, while Dean lies there, stone still. “So,” he says. “I’m asking.”

Dean remembers — this is so humiliating — he remembers when Cassie, Cassie Robinson, when she asked him to leave. She’d been so kind about it, all things considered. She’d said— she’d said, You don’t have to make something up. You can just leave, if you’re going. She’d said, I’ve had enough crazy boys like you ripping through my life, and I don’t need another. She’d said, I love you so much, and I have no idea what the hell you have going on in that head of yours. I have no idea if you’re the guy I fell in love with, because I have no idea if that guy even exists.

Cas gives him just the same feeling. He can see it, practically, Sam saying, so you and Dean— and Cas saying, You’ll have to ask him. That’s an answer in itself. Cas saying, I have no idea who Dean is. After twelve years, I’ve just come to accept that I’ll never know.

He deserves better than that, and Dean just can’t give it.

“I dunno,” Dean says, because he really doesn’t. He kinda figured Cas would be the one to tell people, Dean being who he is. No one’d expect this from Dean, and it’d be— Cas is an angel, so it’d sound better coming from him. No one’d think to laugh in Cas’s face, or if they did, it wouldn’t matter one whit to Castiel, angel of the Lord.

Since he hasn’t said anything, that means— well, Dean knows what it means. It means he’s not worth telling people about. He already knew that.

The air’s cold tonight, in their little patch of Oklahoma. Not quite down to 60, but maybe 65. Baby’s metal is cold through Dean’s jeans, his head back against the windshield. Sam on the passenger side, like always.

“It’s not that it’s none of your business,” Dean says quietly. To the air, more than to Sam. “S’that— s’that I don’t know what it is, is all.” And that— well. He thought he knew what it was, but it turns out he knew less than he thought. He thought Cas would tell Sam and Sam would tell Dean and then Dean would know, but Cas didn’t tell Sam anything. So how’s Dean supposed to know what Cas wants?

“Sure.” Sam leaves it at that. The two of them sit there, watching satellites flicker, some of ‘em quick, some of ‘em slow.

When Dean starts getting a chill in him, Sam says, “It wasn’t a year for me.”

Dean swallows. “I know,” he says.

“Four days on the road.” Sam’s breath mists in the air. Christ, it’s cold. How’d they last out here so long? Sam ain’t even shivering. “All the radio stations were playing the blues.”

“Uh huh.”

“I could’ve been anywhere. I could’ve been— I don’t know. I don’t know, man. I took the southern route, down into California, Nevada, Utah. Through Colorado, ‘cause I didn’t wanna do Nebraska again.”

Dean turns to look at him. Sam’s looking straight up at the sky. Barely even blinking. Still as anything, still as a mouse, good God. Still like his freeze instinct got the better of him.

“Was that my problem?” Sam asks. When he speaks, the only thing that moves is his mouth, his jaw. His cheekbones. Dean looks close at this kid, the kid he raised, the kid he knows better than he knows himself. All that energy, gone. When Sam was little he was bouncing off the walls, practically, amped up over his math pop quizzes and his English essays and his stage crew gig. And then Dean didn’t see him for four years, and then Jess died, and then Sam was killed and killed again for— for years and years and years, Dean realizes. How long’s it been since that day in Cold Oak, huh? How long’s it been?

Dean watches his brother, still and sad and silent, and realizes he doesn’t know him at all.

“I went the wrong way,” Sam whispers. “I went—” and his voice breaks as he says, “I got lost, Dean. I got lost.”

“Oh, fuck, Sam,” Dean says, and he stands up just in time for Sam to crumple right into him, shivers wracking straight through him like they were just waiting for the chance. “Shit, buddy,” Dean whispers into Sam’s hair, as Sam cries it out against his chest, like they really are kids again. “Shh, shh, it’s okay, Sammy. Shh. Don’t cry, kid.”

“If I went— if I just took 90—”

“Sam—”

“—through Montana,” Sam hacks out, hands clenching and unclenching in Dean’s jacket. “If I just, Wyoming instead, I could’ve—”

“No, hey, Sam—”

“Did I do it?” Sam begs, pulling back. Dean looks at the snot all over his face. Oh Christ, Dean thinks. You’re not supposed to look like me. “The wrong highway, you think, it just disappeared me—”

“No,” Dean says, firmly, and thank Christ, Sam shuts up. “No. We’re gonna— we’ll figure it out, you an’ me, like we always do. You and me and Cas. It wasn’t your fault.”

Sam nods, and scrubs at his eyes, while Dean stands there.

He can’t see the stars anymore, just looks at his brother. He says, “You wanna go home?”

Sam flinches, but he says, “Yeah,” quiet enough that Dean can pretend he doesn’t hear the shake in it. So Dean bundles him up into the passenger seat. He turns on the radio, just in time for the start of a song he hasn’t heard in decades, that long-ass Funkadelic song. Maggot Brain.

Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time, the radio hisses. For y’all have knocked her up.

Dean pulls onto the gravel. I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe. A rabbit catches his eye, its gaze glinting in the headlights. I was not offended by it, for I knew I had to rise above it all— It crosses the road and he keeps going, in the dark, the quiet. Or drown in my own shit.

The gravel under his tires is louder than the first arpeggios. The solo hits right when they get to the asphalt; Sam leans his head against the window, and Dean taps his thumb against the steering wheel at every sublime climax, every electric opening-up, every scream of that guitar like wolves howling in the night, for the ten minutes it takes them to get back on Highway 54.

The thing no one understands about Lucifer, because no one really knows him, is that he is beautiful. Sam imagines that Lucifer is what the Victory of Samothrace would look like if she had a face. He is pure light, awe, made not in God’s image but in God’s love.

When Sam opens the door to his room, Lucifer — that gorgeous, unholy light, the only creature that inheres sacrifice, a true terror — is waiting for him. Sam can see all of him against the brick of the hallway, every striking glint of his fearful and incomprehensible face, without even a hint of Nick’s disgraceful mortality, and that’s how Sam knows it’s a dream.

ACTUALLY, THIS IS WHAT’S REAL, Lucifer says, FOR A GIVEN DEFINITION OF REAL.

Sam closes the door and turns back into his room. He knows not to engage.

HEY, Lucifer says, in front of him. What Sam can see of him occupies all of Sam’s room and, Sam suspects, the rest of him fills up about half the continent. I’M TALKING TO YOU.

Sam crawls through Lucifer’s skin-wing-eye-mouths, back into bed. He isn’t strong enough to feel afraid. He just wants it to be over.

I TOOK YOUR YEAR BECAUSE I GOT TIRED OF HOLDING UP THE ILLUSION, Lucifer hisses-speaks-cries. He is the loudest thing Sam has ever eaten. ISN'T IT NICE BEING THE CENTER OF ATTENTION AGAIN?

“Shut up,” Sam says, muffled, too weak to keep up the indifference.

OH! HE SPEAKS! Lucifer, out of sheer joy, comes back inside Sam. He pulls Sam’s left hand up and then scratches across his right palm, drawing blood. Inside him, so loud it shakes Sam’s teeth, Lucifer whispers, IT WOULDN’T MAKE SENSE FOR YOU TO JUST LOSE A YEAR. YOU THINK THE GODS OF THE ROCKIES ARE STILL AROUND? SAM, THINK, BABY. CHRISTIANITY WON THE CONTINENT. NO ONE ELSE HAS THAT KINDA JUICE ANYMORE. I’M THE ONLY ONE WHO GETS TO FUCK WITH YOU.

When he says FUCK, Lucifer hitches up Sam’s hips in a brutal, sickening parody of sex, puts Sam facedown into his pillow, suffocating him, ass up for display. He just wants it to be over. He just wants it to be over.

WE’RE STILL IN THE CAGE, SAMMY, Lucifer says. IT ISN’T OVER TILL ONE OF US GETS OUT. He drinks up all of Sam’s blood and then pumps it back into him, for fun. YOU CAN WAKE UP NOW, IF YOU REALLY WANT TO. SEE YOU LATER, LOVERBOY.

Sam, when he opens his eyes, is lying on his back. He doesn’t realize he is crying until he rolls his head to the side and notices the pillow is wet. He knows it was a dream. He knows it. But fuck, fuck— he doesn’t get to be angry, he hasn’t been angry in a long time, it’s just. He just wishes it didn’t have to be like this.

He rolls over to his trash can and vomits, for as long as he can stand, until finally the retching feels too much like the way his lungs would contract at Lucifer’s command and he has to make himself stop just to prove that he can.

Eventually, he gets out of bed. He makes it to the sink, turns on the tap, rinses his mouth out. He turns on the shower and lets water run all over his body, but it reminds him of the tips of Lucifer’s feathers and he thinks of how beautiful he is, the most beautiful thing in the universe, and he almost brains himself against the wall of his shower trying to get out.

Cas picks up on shit being wrong with Dean pretty fast. Obviously. Hell, they were the only two people living in the bunker during that awful year, so Dean’ll bet that Cas knows him pretty well.

He brings it up while Dean is stuck doing the dishes. “What’s wrong?” Cas asks, while Dean scrubs a plate.

Dean actually fucking hates doing dishes. They’re gross. But he does them because he wants to keep people fed and wants to keep his goddamn house clean. Cas doesn’t know that, or he’d offer to do the dishes for him. And then Dean would look at him, doing the dishes, the worst fucking chore in the world, and when Cas eventually leaves — because the surest thing Dean’s ever known is that everybody leaves, and some days that knowing comes back despite all the inroads Cas has made into him — Dean will be able to trace the root of it right back to that moment when Dean let him get his hands wet and grimy in the slop of their human food and drink.

Anyway. Dean does the dishes in the bunker, and Cas accosts him with unwanted questions, as is the natural order. “Nothing’s wrong,” he says, through his gritted teeth, because a piece of sauce or cheese or whatever the fuck is stuck to the plate.

Cas waits, patiently, as Dean has at it and finally gets his plate sparkling clean. “You seem distant in bed,” he says, like that’s a normal thing to say to a person when they’re wrist deep in what is functionally the great Pacific garbage patch. “Are you sure there isn’t anything?”

“What, m’not mooning over you bad enough?” Dean snipes back, caustic as hell and undeserved, he knows it. But he can never stop that mouth of his, and Cas knows that too. Face to the dishes, he adds, “Sorry my o-face doesn’t have enough eye contact for you. Add it to the goddamn feedback form.”

“I meant when we… sleep,” Cas says delicately. Dean sighs. “Maybe I’m wrong.”

Ah, fuck. Always with the puppy dog eyes, even when Dean can’t see ‘em. “No,” he admits, scrabbling around at the bottom of the sink for forks and spoons to wash. He looks at the metal between his fingers, says, “No, you ain’t— you ain’t wrong.”

Cas waits him out. Dean scrubs, one two three knives in his hands, butter knives, not sharp enough to work clean or painless. Usually the thoughts, the ideas, come when things are good. He’ll be sitting there with a nice glass of whiskey after a day in the sun and he’ll think, this glass could break sharp enough to slit my own neck. Or he’ll be here, washing the dishes, looking at the knives in his palm and realizing that the only thing stopping him from turning around and shoving them in Cas’s chest is the fact that they’d be slow and more like to break against his ribs than cut through his lungs.

He exhales through his nose. Five years since the Mark. Maybe he’ll be over it in another five. Today, though. Today he ain’t over it, but he’s going to live to see the day he is, god damn it. He puts the knives in the drying rack and drains out the water and thinks, you have a life now. So hold onto it.

“I heard you didn’t tell Sam about us,” he says quietly, watching the water swirling in the sink.

Cas leans against the counter, in his peripheral. Dean keeps him there while he wipes the counter down, until finally he can’t find anything to keep him away from Cas. He meets his gaze. “I wasn’t sure you wanted me to tell him,” Cas says.

Right. Right. “So that’s the measure of it,” Dean says, “how bad I fucked up, I mean.”

Cas’s head pulls back in confusion. “What?”

“I get it.” Dean leans against the counter too, coming in closer than he deserves. He looks at Cas. Cas is always so certain, solid in his body and his voice. And Dean made him uncertain. “I’d think that too. I know I ain’t much for bein’— hell, I don’t know. Principled.”

“Your heart guides you, Dean,” Cas says. Oh, Christ. The look in his eyes — Dean looks away from the love in it, ‘cause he can’t take that now. “You are absolutely principled.”

“So you just didn’t want Sam to know.”

“Dean—” Cas’s hand on his cheek is like a shockwave, sends heat down Dean’s shoulder in one fell swoop. Dean looks at him. “What are you talking about?”

“I gotta spell it out for you?”

“Yes.” Cas thumbs gently, softly, against Dean’s cheek, and Dean settles deeper into the counter ‘cause no way could he stand on his own right now. “I’ve been on earth for less than fifteen years,” Cas says. “I don’t understand what you’re saying to me.”

Dean slides away, and Cas lets him. “Why didn’t you tell Sam about us? Really. Cut the crap.”

“There’s no crap,” Cas says, an edge in his voice, and Dean thinks, great, you made him mad, too. “I just— I didn’t know what the line was.”

“The line?” Dean barks a laugh, feels sweat at the back of his neck, wondering how the hell he ruined this so fast. “You think I— you think I got a line? Think I’m, what, gonna feed you a PR story?”

“Calm down.”

“M’not— I don’t need to calm down, you fucking asshole,” Dean barks, echoing through the kitchen, all metal, “my brother— my dead fucking brother—” this is so stupid, look at him, come on Dean, look at yourself, hands shaking over nothing, “Jesus Christ—”

“Dean—”

“Sam is back from— from beyond the fucking veil, and you won’t even look at me.” Dean blinks at the empty space between Cas’s hips and his ‘cause he doesn’t want to look at himself either. Quietly, he asks, “So what’m I supposed to think, huh? Good enough in bed, but kind of an embarrassment when you talk to your friends. I get it. I wouldn’t wanna date me either.”

Cas steps closer, close enough to touch, forces Dean’s chin up to look at him. “Stop putting words in my mouth and listen to me.”

Dean swallows. Cas’s hand is hot on his chin, and suddenly— he feels weak-kneed and doesn’t know if it’s the anger or something else. “Cas—”

Cas shoves his palm over Dean’s mouth, shutting him up. Dean blinks at him, wide-eyed, as Cas— oh God— as Cas pushes in, walks them both into the counter, his thigh between Dean’s, his chest an inch away, his hand warm and solid across Dean’s mouth. “I said listen,” he murmurs, and Dean.

Dean’s chest heaves. Okay. Yeah. Maybe Dean has been distant. Maybe he has been a little goddamn pent up. Cas’s arms holding him down make him feel weightless.

He opens his mouth, just to breathe, and tastes Cas’s skin. “Cas—” he says, muffled, and Cas releases him. “Okay.” He breathes, in and out. Christ. Fuck. “Shit.”

“I love you,” Cas says softly. Dean nods. “I want to spend every waking minute with you. I didn’t want to have a discussion with Sam about our relationship or your sexuality without your consent. Do you understand me?”

“Well, shit,” Dean huffs. “Don’t I feel like an asshole.”

“You are an asshole,” Cas says, fondly enough, and Dean’s mouth quirks up. Cas’s hand slides into his, and Dean takes comfort in that. “And you were afraid. I understand that, too.”

“Yeah.” Dean breathes out, feeling wiped. He tilts forward, and Cas lets him rest his forehead on his shoulder, closes his eyes and lets Cas hold him, just for a while. “Shit, Cas.”

“What do you want Sam to know?” Cas asks, and Dean can feel his voice rumbling in his throat.

“I dunno,” Dean whispers.

Cas holds him. Christ, why do all of their serious conversations happen in the kitchen? Dean would kill for a bed right now.

“I dunno why I’m like this,” he says, pushing back and wiping the exhaustion out of his eyes. “Jesus, Cas, I really don’t know. You’d think I’d be over the queer crap by now.”

“Maybe,” Cas says noncommittally.

Dean inhales and exhales. He thinks around the idea of Sam knowing this about him— the idea of Sam knowing who he is. That’d be nice. If he could— he’d just have Sam know. He wouldn’t want to say anything. He wouldn’t want to choose it— he’d want it to just happen.

“We can let him figure it out, you know,” Cas says quietly. “You don’t have to tell him outright.”

Sure. He could. “You don’t think that’s a dick move?” Dean asks, because it seems too easy. Maybe he ought to take a stand. And maybe— the thing is, he’s not sure he’d like Sam to know even if Cas was a woman. There’s a certain kinda, well, public-ness about the sex Dean usually has. He doesn’t wanna dissect what he has with Cas the way he’s opened up every other part of his own bed to the world outside.

“I ain’t embarrassed of you,” Dean adds, even if he is, maybe, embarrassed about what it’d look like, Dean walking around holding Cas’s hand down Main Street. But it ain’t Cas he’s embarrassed over. “Maybe I just— want it to be us, for now. Sam’ll find out when he finds out.”

“All right.” Cas kisses him, easy. Casual. It’s nuts, that they’re the kinda people who kiss casually now. But hell, it’s true. “I’m so happy with you,” Cas whispers, and Dean nods, smiling. He’s happy too.

Most days, Sam occupies his time by answering research calls from hunters across the country. Sometimes the person on the other end of the line will say, Glad to hear you’re back or Tough few months with you gone, Winchester and Sam will thank them. Occasionally, it’ll be someone he knows — Claire, a few times. Max, once, because he wasn’t sure if Sam would still have his number and figured calling the bunker line was the most considerate way to get in touch. Usually it’s a stranger.

Eileen never calls. That’s probably for the best. When Sam showers he keeps his eyes closed so he doesn’t have to look at Lucifer’s body under his hands. He shaves without a mirror and nicks himself just for the feel of it. He knows it’s no good, thinks about fixes — practices breathing in and out real slow, goes outside at least once a day for fresh air and sunlight. He should probably fix himself a little more before trying to get someone to date him.

Still. He misses — like, Dean’s his brother, and Cas is Cas, but neither of them has opinions on whether democratic centralism would be an effective organizing practice for American hunters or if Baptist theology is more or less equipped to deal with vampires than the Pentecostals. Eileen does. Eileen gets him. She’s just— she’s fun, fuck, he misses that. He misses her.

Sam goes outside for his daily walk. He sits on a stone, maybe a mile or two out from the bunker.

“I’m real,” he says to himself, and he finds that his fingers are digging into his own forearms. He releases them. He looks at the sky, which is gray, like it always is in the winter. He put on leggings under his sweatpants this morning to stay warm but he’s still shivering.

Before Sam became the person he is today, he barely noticed his body. He wasn’t interested in girls, didn’t even realize he could think about anybody else ‘til he hit college. He kept his head down and didn’t make waves until— he did. Oh, fuck. Sam leans over, tries to touch as many parts of himself as he can just to know he’s there, to know he has a body.

He deserved so much. Didn’t he? Didn’t he deserve— Sam blinks at his knees, nauseous, wonders how many people he hasn’t met because he got taken away from himself. Maybe the only reason he never had a boyfriend was because Lucifer thought killing off a girl was more likely to bring Sam home to Hell. Sam thinks, I’m allowed to want to have a good time. He curls his hands around his wrists and thinks, I’m allowed to want sex. I’m allowed to want to eat good things. I’m allowed to say no. I’m allowed to say yes.

Maybe he isn’t. Sam said yes to a lot of things. Crucially, he said yes to Ruby, that first and most fatal yes. Lucifer followed, but he wouldn’t have had Sam if Ruby hadn’t set the stage. And Sam wanted her. And Sam wanted her blood. Maybe he’s said yes enough for himself and the whole world besides. Maybe he should stick to no. He has a body — a big, bulky, powerful body. Saying yes to the wrong thing — that could cause a lot of damage.

But maybe. Oh, god. Sam inhales and the cold air burns his nostrils. Just a little thing. It wouldn’t be so bad, if he— let’s say, for example, that he called Eileen. He tries it aloud. “Should I call Eileen?” he asks himself, and then, even quieter, “Yes or no?”

His knee shakes. He’s so cold. The context is clear — even Lucifer couldn’t take Sam’s yes for himself. Right? Feeling very, very scared, he whispers, “Yes.”

The wind whistles. Lucifer doesn’t come out from his cage. Sam remains himself. Far from freezing in that winter wind, he stands up, and the exertion of that alone makes him sweat.

The hunts they take are easy these days. Jody and the girls can handle stuff up out near their way, and the hunter network Sam’s picked back up is better at coordinating the rest of them. But sometimes something comes up in their neck of the woods and, well, they’re not that old yet, even if Dean knows he keeps mother henning over Sam’s hair looking rank or his skin paling from the bunker lights.

This time, though. This one is rough.

“Sammy!” The kids are all out, Cas shuffling them out onto the sidewalk so he can call 911 for them, but this one. Jesus. She’s drained, bad, probably the first one the changeling mother kidnapped, and there’s something impaled through her shoulder that Dean’s terrified to move. God. She’s just a kid.

Sam comes skidding around the corner. “Dean?”

“You got the thing?”

“Yeah, yeah. Is she—”

Dean looks down at the kid. “Hey— hey. You awake, kiddo?”

The kid blinks. Her eyes are brown, and wet. She breathes in, a creaky and rattling breath. Half-crying already, she asks, “Dad?”

Dean swallows. “N—no, I’m. Sorry. I’m not your dad.”

“Okay.” And, unaccountably, she— she relaxes, and Dean can’t fucking stand it. This kid — afraid of her dad, maybe ten years old if that, dying around a metal spike through her body, Jesus Christ. “Sam, are you— call 911.”

He looks up, and Sam’s already on the phone, explaining the situation. “They say not to take it out, don’t move her,” Sam says, and Dean nods sharply.

“Okay,” he says. “Hey. What’s your name?”

“Penelope,” she says, in her tiny kid voice. She coughs, and blood comes up. Oh, God. “You c’n… you c’n call me Nelly.”

“Nelly. Nelly, okay, yeah, hey. We’re gonna get you help, all right? You’re gonna be just fine.”

She starts shivering, and Dean puts his hands on her. She flinches, at first, but then she says, “No, you’re warm,” when he pulls back, so he holds her, tries to keep his hands in safe areas, one on her forearm and the other on her good shoulder. “Are you an angel?”

Dean puts his head down. This fucking kid. And then, inhaling sharply, he looks up at her. “You want an angel, Nelly? Would that be nice?”

“Uh huh,” she mumbles.

“Okay, yeah. Yeah, sweetheart, I’m an angel.”

Nelly nods. Tears roll out of her eyes. Sam says, “Three minutes. Just keep her awake.”

“It hurts, angel.” She’s so quiet.

“I know. I’m sorry, Nelly, honey, I know it hurts.” Dean holds her hand and she grips it, tight, crying. “It’s okay. There’s gonna be— a doctor’s gonna come and fix you right up, soon, all right?”

“It hurts,” she cries again, her left hand spasming as her sobs shift the thing in her shoulder. “It hurts.”

“Just hang on, kiddo,” Dean says. Fuck. Where the hell is the ambulance? Jesus, if he has to watch— if this kid dies, if she dies because Dean’s a goddamn idiot, not that it’s— not that it’s about Dean, but fuck, she’s so little. She deserves a life. She deserves to live. “Just a little bit longer, okay?”

“If you’re an angel,” she says softly, “can you make it better?”

Oh, Christ. “I wish I could, sweetheart,” Dean says. “But I’m— I’m not that kind of angel.”

“Okay.” Nelly sniffs, loudly, before she stills.

“Nelly? Nelly?” Dean pats her face, and then puts his fingers against her throat, feeling for a pulse. Jesus Christ.

Sam says, anxious, “Thirty seconds. Is she—”

“Still alive,” Dean says. “But she’s conked out.”

“Probably for the best,” Sam sighs. And then, fucking finally, they see flashlights through the window, and Sam goes out to bring the EMTs in.

“You hear that, Nelly?” Dean says, even though she can’t hear him, might die right here. Jesus fucking Christ. “Some nice EMTs are here for ya.”

Nelly shakes. “D—Dad?” she stutters, flinching in her sleep, and Dean bows his head.

Two guys with a stretcher walk into the room, and Dean steps back, lets them move Penelope and the awful thing that they can all now see is a — Christ — a hook. Probably was— was strung up on a wall earlier, Jesus, Jesus goddamn Christ. “How long’s she been out?” one of them asks.

“Bout, uh. A minute, maybe two,” Dean says hoarsely, once his voice comes back. And then, “Hey, uh. I think her dad — she said some stuff, I think her dad isn’t a great guy. Can you— can you make sure she’s safe, once she’s out of the hospital?”

The other guy — the one that’s not busy wrapping up the wound and hooking her up to the oxygen — just says, “I’ll mention it, but to be honest, man… once the immediate emergency’s over, there’s not much we can do.”

Dean nods. “Yeah.” That’s been in his favor, most of the time — going to an ER with a chunk bitten out of his arm always led to awkward questions about his dad and his work, but once he wasn’t in immediate danger, no one had the time or the energy to make sure he went home to a solid meal. But fuck. Nelly isn’t Dean. She doesn’t know what's out there, isn’t relying on the neglect of the state just to make hunting easier. Nelly deserves a real life.

“She’ll be okay, Dean,” Sam says, clapping him on the shoulder. “You kept her alive. That’s a win.”

“Sure,” Dean says, wondering in what goddamn universe a little kid with a metal hook through the shoulder could possibly count as a win.

Three hours later, Sam spots Dean in the kitchen. Clears his throat.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, hey.” Sam sits down, across from Dean. Dean’s drinking a beer — surprising it’s not a whiskey, actually, given how goddamn terrible today went. “I, uh. Wanted to ask you something.”

“What’s up?” Dean meets his eyes and then rolls his own, half a smile on his face. “Oh jeez, this some kinda intervention?”

“No, not—” Sam laughs. “No. And— what I mean is— lemme start over.”

“All right.”

Sam huffs. His mouth twitches. He says, “Cas told me you said something, when I was— when I, when I was gone.”

And then he finds he can’t continue. Dean looks at him, searching, and Sam just meets his eyes. “Okay,” Dean says softly. “You were gone a— a year. I said a lotta things.”

“Yeah, I know, I—” Sam ducks his head, laughs at himself a little bit. “He said. He said that— that when we were little, you used to. I used to ask you questions. And you’d say— you’d tell me to quit askin’.”

When he looks up again, Dean’s focused on the bottle, rolling it in his hand. “I remember,” he says hoarsely.

“Cas said that if I— if I came back, you’d answer anything I asked.” Sam smiles. “Suggested I ask something. Anything.”

Dean shrugs. “An’ why’s that?”

“He said— ‘He deserves to let the truth out, sometimes.’ And that I deserved to hear it.”

Dean nods sharply. “Yeah. He wasn’t— he wasn’t wrong.” Dean’s mouth quirks, something in his expression that Sam’s noticed only comes when they get around to talking about Cas. “And I— I mean.” Dean takes a long swig of his beer, puts it down once it’s empty. “We didn’t make a deal — like, a real one — to get you out. You know we didn’t. But I think about— I mean, the number of chances we get. Every promise I’ve made and broken that gets somebody else hurt. This time around I’m— I’m not fuckin’ around with that shit. I’m not taking any more chances with you. If I said I’d do something, I’ll do it.”

And then Dean frowns, thumb twitching against his bottle. Sam feels the weight of their missing year, the way it hits him every time he realizes that Dean grew up without him. “And, Sam,” he croaks out, his eyebrows pushing together, focused always on that one twitchy thumb, “I mean, shit, I wanna be honest with you. I’m— I’m in my forties, man. I get to tell the truth now, don’t I?”

“Yeah, Dean,” Sam whispers. He wonders what truths Dean will leave him with today — and which ones he’ll carry to his grave. “Yeah. You do.”

Dean sets his beer down and scrubs his hands over his face. “Okay. All right. What’d you wanna ask?”

It must’ve — it must’ve been the way that kid today had looked at Dean, blood in her mouth, the way she’d choked out It hurts — something about it sparked a memory. Dean, fourteen, maybe, limping into their motel room with Dad following after him. The two of them in the bathroom, the door cracked open, John whispering son of a bitch, Dean, and Dean saying It hurts. It hurts, Dad. Sam doesn’t remember what John said next.

He shakes it off. “When I went to Stanford, you know what I told my friends about our family?”

“Uh. No.”

“I said—” and Sam still hates himself for it, didn’t realize he could still feel about anything before Lucifer the way he does about this. But it’s the fact that Dean’s still here, maybe, like an old wound that’s still sensitive to a hard enough touch. “I said. I said, I ran away from home, ‘cause my whole family got it out for me, after my mom died. Seemed easier than the truth.”

Dean nods. “Okay. Yeah. Fair enough.” And then, when Sam doesn’t say anything— “Is that… is that it?”

“But you didn’t have it out for me, Dean. You were always protecting me.”

“I know I didn’t— I know I wasn’t what you needed. And—” Dean stills, for a moment, and then eventually shrugs. “I made my peace with that, I think. So long as we’re— you an’ me, so long as we’re good. Is that what you wanted to ask about? How we grew up?”

“What? No, I, no, this is— it’s coming out all wrong, I just—” Sam says, “That kid today, she— and the way she was, and the way you were—”

Dean reaches for him but Sam flinches back. “Sam—”

“All my friends assumed you and Dad were throwing me around, beating me up, even though they never said a word. It wasn’t true, even though— it explained a lot, about the way I’d wake up some nights, the way I’d react when people got the jump on me. So I never corrected ‘em.” Sam tries to look at Dean but can’t, can only look at the cabinet behind him. “I didn’t know I still hated myself for that,” he hisses, feeling the injustice of it. “Dad was one thing, but you— that I let them think you, that you hit me, when we both know you were the one who had to deal with Dad’s moods—”

“Okay, Sam, enough.” Dean finally gets a hand on him, his palm warm on Sam’s forearm, safe and easy enough to shake off. Sam doesn’t. “This was twenty years ago, Sam. Why’re you thinkin’ about it now?”

“I don’t know.” Sam huffs out something adjacent to laughter, realizes he might even be on the verge of tears. Christ— has he eaten? When’s the last time he cried out of something other than pain? “I don’t know, I don’t— it was the way that kid — Nelly — when she said, ‘it hurts.’ Made me think of this one time, you were— I was ten, so you were, must’ve been fourteen, and Dad was patching you up, and all you could say was it hurts. Scared me to shit, Dean. I didn’t even remember it until today but it scared me to shit.”

“Sam—” Dean sighs. “Sam, I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve to have that put on you.”

“No, Jesus, Dean, that’s not—” And then Sam says, “Answer me, honest. What happened the night I left for college?”

Dean freezes. There’s no other word for it — he’s not just still, but cold, too. His face is pale. Sam closes his eyes. “Dean.”

“Lemme just—” Dean clears his throat. “Was a long time ago. Longer for us than for most.”

“Yeah. Yeah.”

“You wanna hear it?” Dean asks. He asks him that. He says, “I know you can guess, from what I just— so, if that was enough for you, then that’s enough. I ain’t puttin’ the rest of it on you ‘less you ask me for it.”

“You told anyone else?” Sam wonders at him — forty-three years and he still makes pie every other week, still calls Claire to check in when she deigns to pick up the phone, lets Jody ply him with leftovers. Forty-three years on this planet, and the way he grew up, and he still lets himself have friends, have love, open himself up to heartache. He’s the strongest person Sam knows. It bowls him over, the way he feels about his brother.

“No,” Dean says eventually. “I almost— I mean.” He smiles, bitter. His voice scraping across that table, he says, “Told— Lisa, y’know. Told her to watch out for me, considering. Might act the way Dad taught me, ’stead of— ’stead of acting the way I should.”

Sam shakes his head. He thinks about Dean, saying Lisa’s name. How heavy that is, and how much heavier Sam’s death must’ve been, if he’s saying it now. “What’d she say to that?” Sam asks, although he can already guess.

Dean laughs. “She said, the day you become a threat to me and Ben is the day you’re no longer Dean Winchester.” Dean pushes back from the table. “Turns out she was more right than she thought.”

Sam sighs, figures he’s lost him, but Dean just comes back with two beers. He nudges one over to Sam, and says, “I meant what I said. If you want me to tell you, I will.”

“Would it help you?” Sam watches Dean contemplate his bottle. “I mean. You think it would make it worse, talking through it, or would it— could I help you carry it. Is what I mean.”

Dean takes another drink. “I honestly don’t know,” he says thoughtfully, “an’ all this talkin’ around it is making it even more confusing. But Sam, you gotta— even if you don’t know the details, you know you— you help me carry it every day. Every single thing about the way we grew up, you—” Dean laughs. “Shit, man. You were the one thing I had in all those years, all those motel rooms. The only thing that made sense to me, some days.”

“You— you know it’s the same for me,” Sam says, because the claustrophobia of their childhood left him yearning for out, but he always knew who he owed his first, his greatest allegiance to.

Dean downs half of his beer. He says, “I don’t think it’d do me any good to tell you what happened that night, not really.”

Sam nods. “Yeah.” He figured. “But if you ever— if you want to, or need to. I want you to tell me. Anything at all.”

“I’ll tell you something else.”

“Dean, you don’t— you don’t owe me anything—”

“It’s not— this one’s for me.”

“All right.” Sam takes a drink, too, figures he’ll need it. “Shoot.”

“Those years, when I was drivin’ around without Dad, without you.” Dean swallows. “Those were the loneliest years of my life. I just—” He blinks, watery around the eyes, and Sam has another drink just to avoid looking at it. “I had so much freedom, and I didn’t know what to do with it. It was like you were dead to me, and I know I coulda— I should’ve called you, but I just.” He sets his hand on the table, flat, steadying. “If you’d hung up on me, I don’t know what I woulda done. I really don’t. I think I was just waiting for an emergency, for a reason to— to see you, something you’d have to say yes to, because if you said to me to get the hell off the line I woulda—”

“Dean—”

“I know it’s wrong, and selfish of me. But I just get so— and look at us, look how many people we got in our lives, huh? And I still can’t help but wake up every morning thinkin’ today’s the day they’re gonna leave me.”

“I’m not leaving you,” Sam says, but even as he says it he knows it’s not true, not really. Hell. The reason they’re having this conversation in the first place is that he was gone for a goddamn year.

Dean nods, close-lipped, hand tight around his bottle.

Sam never grew up anywhere in particular. To be honest, he probably did most of his growing in Palo Alto after his decade and a half cloistered inside the same motel room reproduced across all 48, but if he had to pick a home, it’d be the plains. He knows the plains as close as he’ll know anything other than Dean, which is to say he knows it like an infomercial that runs from two to four every morning: friendly because it wants to be.

Nowhere across the great plains is this more evident than in Kansas. Kansas, once home to the center of the USA, a designation as arbitrary as Sam’s crayon scribbles on Dad’s notes. Kansas, of rectangular state borders and relentless monotony. Kansas, of stolen names. Manhattan, Stockton, Washington, Lincoln, El Dorado, Eureka, Independence. Ottawa, Hiawatha, Seneca, Kiowa. Delphos and Agenda. The sky opens up above him — and below, on folded up road maps made to represent the dirt and the rivers, lies the persuasive, uncanny familiarity of an advertisement.

It could only have been Kansas. Kansas was the only place unreal enough to welcome him back after the true gods of the mountains disappeared him. If he hadn’t had a place to come home to — if Lebanon wasn’t in Dean waiting for him, or— wait— but if he’d just kept driving, well, he probably would’ve never come home. But that’s a tautology. If he hadn’t had a home, then he never would’ve made it there. Duh, Sammy.

Today Sam wakes up and, like Kansas, knows the land of his body only through the mediation of false names. He touches his skin. Left forearm. Right wrist. He ventures towards territories with riskier and more inappropriate names — from Agenda to Seneca. Elbow to abdomen. Left knee, right ankle. Washington to Adam’s apple. El Dorado to right hip, mouth to Manhattan. Delphos, navel. Independence— Achilles heel.

But like the ghosts of bison herds tearing through Nebraska and Kansas alike, indifferent to yellow lines labeled 36 and 27, Sam is still, unbearably, empty except for violence; he's unnamed, nameless, his name taken from him. Every line of him transgressed by Lucifer’s presence, his true face like famine. Lucifer once called a stretch of skin along his thigh my holy feast in the language of angels and laughed when he would bite a chunk out of it. He doesn’t own himself anymore. His hands shake when he sets them on himself, like a faith healer who hasn’t made enough friends to earn company at the end of his life. Right thigh, your leg, he thinks to himself. That’s yours.

Lucifer’s grace is inside of him. Lucifer's smile presses close to the skin of his lower back. He slaps his palm over it, the place where he can feel it, but his own pathetic body heat is nothing to Lucifer who is inside him. Lucifer’s mouth which is also his wing trails — slices — through his torso. Stomach. Intestines. Lincoln. Cold.

He sweats through his sheets, freezing, chills wracking him. He can’t control them. The lines of his body are all wrong. He traces a fingertip from the center of his forehead to his groin, realizes belatedly that he’s naked, somehow, that he must’ve taken all his clothes off in the night. On his naked body he scratches an arbitrary line and names it an interstate.

Without the truth of it, though — without real, true knowledge of this body, without any sense of territory beyond what he can see — he’s nothing. He’ll never win. He closes his eyes. Lucifer — inside of him, running the show — says: Eureka.

“Hey,” Dean barks, knocking on Sam’s door. He’s trying not to be an asshole over it, but jeez, the guy hasn’t come out of his room in about twenty hours. Dean’s starting to get worried. “Dude.”

He waits, but Sam doesn’t say anything. Oh, Christ. Dean looks at the door in front of him and— he tries not to think about it, tries to be fucking normal but— but Sam’s— if you’re gone— “I’m comin’ in,” he says, and he tries the door.

Unlocked, at least.

The room is dark. That’s what Dean sees, a great wide span of nothing and then Sam, naked except for the sheet over him. “Hey, man,” Dean says, and Sam flinches. “Aw, hell,” Dean tries, softer, and watches Sam’s hands twitch. Dean knows a fever when he sees one. “You gotta hydrate, okay? I’m gonna go get you some Gatorade or something.”

“I’m not hungry,” Sam whispers, shivering under his sheet. “I’m just cold.”

“Okay.” Dean walks up to him, feels his forehead. He’s burning hot. “Okay, you need— you need some pills. Cold’n’flu, all right? You’ll feel better. You’re hot right now, so I don’t wanna put another blanket on you.”

Quietly, Sam says, “I hate the cold.”

Dean looks at him. He swallows. He cut Sam’s hair. He fed Sam cereal. He took care of Sam, he did it his whole too-long life and kept on doing it well past when he ought to have and— for what? For Lucifer to take him? For Lucifer to try a smile on Sam’s face, Sam’s face that had never smiled like that before, for Lucifer to take him, to take him down into that pit where only the worst of the Winchesters go—

“I’ll get you some soup,” Dean croaks out, and he leaves before he spills that whole sorry mess of feeling on Sam’s bed.

Cas finds him in the kitchen, searching through the cabinets for something. He coulda sworn he had a Tylenol 2-pack lying around, but maybe he used it all when Alex came down with the flu last winter.

“How’s Sam?” Cas asks, leaning against the wall.

Sam’s cold. “Sam’s sick,” Dean says, even if he knows it’s deeper than that. He rubs the heel of his hand over his heart, over that space that never quite healed up right even after Sam came back. Maybe if he throws enough chicken soup at the problem it’ll solve itself.

“I’ve been thinking about Sam’s return,” Cas says, serious. Christ. As if Dean needs another cosmic consequence in his lap, as if he needs— as if he needs any of this crap. His shoulders tense and he exhales, looking in the fridge for chicken and whatever vegetables they’ve scrounged up from Cas’s garden.

“You know,” Cas says, “he’s not— I don’t think Sam’s back all the way.”

Yeah, he knows. Dean rubs this thumb over the top of the fridge door he’s been keeping open for too damn long. Overtaxing their magical electricity bank.

Cas, evidently, has gotten tired of waiting for Dean to chip into this conversation. “He’s like a ghost. I mean, ontologically.”

Ontologically. Fuck, whatever. He shouldn’t even bother asking.

“Sorry,” Cas says quietly, and Dean hates that too, that he can make Cas apologize just from the tenor of his breath. He shouldn’t be able to do that. He doesn’t wanna be the kind of guy you walk on eggshells around, but he is. “I meant that— the way the world reacts to him. The world you can’t see, the world of spirits and… phenomena. The way they react is the way they react to a ghost.”

“And what the hell does that mean?” Dean finally closes the fridge door so he can go back to looking in the cabinets for his Tylenol. Fuck, he doesn’t wanna go out to the store, because he knows he’ll make a trip out of it and he’ll come back thirty minutes later and by then Sam will be all the way dead. He knows it. Sam’s gonna go any second now and Dean’s just holding it off, has been holding it off forever and ever and ever. Everybody always said he was a pretty crier and it’s true, he knows it’s true, maybe that’s why Chuck liked it so much whenever Cas kicked it because that was such an easy way to make Dean cry on camera without having to get rid of his other main character. Now that Chuck’s gone, maybe it has to be Sam, maybe they’re all still watching—

“Dean,” Cas says softly, coming over to him, and Dean just cries, right there, nice and easy the way everybody likes it, hands on the counter and his head down low. “Dean, he’ll be all right.”

“I don’t have any Tylenol,” he whispers, feeling stupid as shit. “Everything— nothing’s right, Cas. Nothing’s fucking— get your hands off me—” and Cas pulls his hand away from where he reached for Dean’s shoulder as if it burned him right back. “Jesus, shit,” he sniffs, shaking all over with how angry he is. They should’ve had some Tylenol. He had it right there, in case of emergencies, and now it’s gone, and Sam’s gonna die. That’s just how it is. Sam’s gonna die because Dean can’t keep a kitchen stocked.

“I can get some Tylenol,” Cas offers.

Dean thinks about it. He sits down at the kitchen table with his head in his hands and thinks about that, and about the year, the year they spent without Sam, the year he— and he’s going, now, again, like the Trials. Wasting away. How’s he supposed to do it? How many times— how many times—  “That thing,” he says quietly. “That thread that went, in me, when Sam was gone. You know what I’m talking about?”

“Yes.” Cas comes around to sit across the table from him, and Dean lets him take his hands. They’re nice, Cas’s hands, even if nothing can stave off the inevitability of Dean’s loneliness. “Your connection with him breaking. I remember.”

“I still feel it,” Dean whispers. He shouldn’t feel it. Sam’s here, so it’s just some holdover, that’s all. Just something that got broken permanently in Dean, and that’s all right, if Sam stays through it anyway.

Cas sighs. He thumbs over Dean’s knuckles, carefully, gently. Dean’s never been treated the way Cas treats him. “I’ll look into it. Just focus on Sam.”

“Okay.” Dean looks at their hands, Cas’s capable grip around Dean’s shaking fingers. It would be okay to let Cas look into it. That would be fine. He closes his eyes, and he asks, “Can you get some Tylenol?”

“Of course.” Cas stands up and kisses him, on the right side of his forehead, at the hairline. Dean shivers from how nice it is, how easy it feels. “Cold and flu? Drowsy okay?”

“Yeah,” Dean murmurs, and then he stands up, too, so he can look at Cas. Let’s take care of each other, he thinks, and he kisses Cas, right there in the open, just to feel him smile.

Sam’s mighty out of it when Dean comes to him with some pills. “Buddy,” Dean says softly, poking Sam’s shoulder. “Hey. Cas got you the goods.”

“Nyeh,” Sam mumbles. Eloquent. And then, “Pilllllls.”

Dean grins. “Yeah, man,” and he tries to get Sam to sit up. Hard going when the guy’s about two hundred pounds, but it goes, until Sam’s nodding off but at least propped up against the wall. “Can you take two of these for me?”

Sam blinks at the pills Dean puts in his hand. Dean doesn’t try to give him the water yet.

“If I ev’r get mad at you,” Sam says, slurring his consonants, far from lucid, but coherent, at least, “it’s ‘cause I feel bad, s’all.”

Dean exhales. He should’ve known. When Sam was a kid, his fever dreams were always about Mom or about leaving everybody behind or about how caged up he felt, always, in a motel room. Dean’s never really thought about the way he said it, but it was always a cage. Every motel’s like a jail cell, Dean, he’d say, like a bird cage. Maybe Chuck was foreshadowing.

“Take your pills,” Dean prompts, before he dry heaves.

Obediently, Sam puts the two pills in his mouth, and Dean holds up a glass of water to his mouth so he can swallow them down.

“Where’s Cas?” Sam asks as Dean pushes him back down into his bed.

“Doing research.”

“Nice.” Sam grins at him, makes eye contact for the first time. His eyes—

Dean blinks, and they’re brown again. But he could’ve sworn that, for a second, Sam’s eyes were white.

“I think you’re telling the truth,” Sam slurs, “Was always a lie when you said it for Dad.”

“Cas ain’t Dad,” Dean says, maybe a little harsher than he meant to. Those eyes—

“I know,” Sam huffs. Dean tries to see those white eyes again, or to see evidence of his own imagining, but it’s just brown, the brown of Sam’s eyes and Dean’s uncertainty reflected in them. “I’m saying. I’m saying. I’m saying— I’m sorry, m’sorry ‘bout Dad—”

“Sam—”

“—an’ I get so mad, so— so mad, the way you—” Sam closes his eyes, and Dean relaxes. “You didn’t go to college ‘cause you were too busy yellin’ at me for wanting to go.”

“Is that so,” Dean says hoarsely. This kid. This fucking kid.

“No,” Sam breathes. “No. S’cause Dad wouldn’t let you.”

“Aw hell, Sammy.” Dean brushes his hair back from his forehead, feels his temperature. Back in normal human range, at least. He oughtta get a thermometer in here. His breathing comes all funny, anxious over the thing behind Sam’s eyes. “You’re really not feelin’ good, are you?”

He sits there with Sam for a moment, thinking about those white eyes which he probably imagined, thinking about Sam talking around whatever it is he really wants to say to Dean about Dad.

Like he’s a kid again, Sam asks, “Am I dying?”

“No,” Dean chokes out, even if he can’t guarantee it one bit. But Cas got him Tylenol, and Dean made him soup. That combo’s never steered him wrong. “No, kiddo. No.”

“Okay,” Sam sighs, and he settles into sleep. Quietly, he adds, “No.”

“No?”

“Goodnight,” Sam mumbles. “Opposite of yes.”

Opposite— Christ. Good fucking Christ. Dean watches him fall asleep, watches the rise of his chest. Yes, an angel made that heart beat for you more times than you can bear to think — but the only thing worse than that, Sam, the only thing worse than seeing something inside you that was hurting you in a way I just can’t figure, was seeing nothing at all.

Whenever she comes over, Dean gives Eileen free range in the bunker. She thinks she’ll say hi to Sam, maybe coax him outside if he’s feeling up to it. Sick, Dean had signed. He has a fever. Maybe she’ll ask him if he wants her to get him some water or something. Go outside and get some fresh air. Anyone would feel like dying if they lived underground too long.

The hallway is empty. She always keeps her right hand to the tile wall when she’s by herself in the bunker, sensitive to the vibrations that come when the big guys, God and demons and all the rest, show up unannounced. The wall is still, though. Quiet, by the measurement of her fingertips.

She has no idea how the boys live here — especially Dean and Castiel, all by themselves, when Sam was gone. Maybe it’s different if you can hear noises — Dean told her once that the electricity buzzed, that the lights squeaked, that the hard flooring meant he could hear the echoes of Cas in the library even from the kitchen — but as far as she’s concerned, the place is dead. She shivers. Creepy.

Eileen turns the corner. There’s a shadow on the wall.

She stops. She turns around. No one’s behind her. She turns back. There, on the wall ahead of her, is— well, there’s no other way to say it. It can only be described as a shadow. Almost six and a half feet tall. Broad like Sam.

She swallows, stepping forward to touch it and it— the silhouette comes off, like charcoal on her fingers. Like ash. She rubs it between her fingers, watches it fall to her feet.

Someone — Sam — taps her on her shoulder, and she turns to look up at him. “Hi Eileen,” he signs. The line of his mouth is worried. He looks— bad. Wrong. “You should get away from there.”

“Why?” she signs, looking between the shadow and Sam. The shadow which is Sam’s height, and Sam’s width. “Sam…”

“It’s okay,” he signs, eyes flitting away from her. To the wall. Slowly, he signs, “You know that angels are bright.”

“Yes.”

“Lucifer is… Lucifer’s the brightest out of all of them.” He looks down at his hands and signs, “Light-bringer.”

“Yes.” Eileen steps forward, covers his hands so he doesn’t have to sign it again, just for a second. Then, “I know that, Sam.”

His mouth twitches. And he meets her eyes and pulls back, signs, “It’s kind of like a photo.”

Eileen remembers, suddenly, pictures of people— or, of the memory of people, at Hiroshima, at Nagasaki. Mannequins silhouetted against test houses in Nevada. “Like after an atomic bomb,” Eileen signs, and Sam blinks at her, shocked. She winces, and hedges, “Maybe.”

“I never thought about it like that.” Sam leans against the wall, next to his shadow, and Eileen can see that he’s sweating and pale. He really is sick. “I should clean it up.”

“You should ask Dean to help,” she signs, because she knows that the reason he wants to clean it himself is so he doesn’t have to tell Dean. But this— this is serious. He isn’t well. Something is really wrong. “Sam.”

“I know.” Sam sighs, closes his eyes. He breathes there, his shoulders pressed against that wall, and Eileen steps in close, puts her hand on his hand so he knows she’s there.

He nods minutely, the way he did a year and a half ago, when they were— when they were becoming something, maybe, when Eileen came over sometimes and descended slowly into love, cautious and measured. Oh, Sam. Eileen feels his slight wrist bones under her fingertips, and realizes— she missed him.

He nods so she knows it’s okay to move her touch upward, to put both her hands on his forearms, move up to his biceps, and then — he nods again — down to his waist, around his back, until she can step in and put her head to his chest, holding him.

He breathes, once, twice. Her ear moves with his breathing. He sets his hand, shaking, but still big, still broad, still strong, against the center of her back.

Eventually, he releases her, and she steps back just far enough to see him. He kisses the top of her head, and then signs, “Thank you.”

She nods, and then— Sam collapses back against the wall. “Shit,” he’s mumbling, “shit, shit—” and Eileen grabs him under his shoulders before he can sink down to the floor. His eyes flutter shut, and she yells, obviously loud enough to make Sam flinch, “Dean!”

Eileen cradles him there, struggling to hold him well enough to let him get to the ground safely and slowly, the two of them sliding down the wall until Dean comes skidding around the corner.

Dean starts talking to him, saying Sammy over and over again and probably something else Eileen can’t catch, but Sam’s eyes flutter shut. “What happened?” Dean asks, only half turned to Eileen but hands clear enough.

“He just collapsed,” Eileen signs and says, stepping back so Dean can get his arms clear under Sam’s armpits, hoist him up. “We were looking at the shadow on the wall—”

“What?” Dean turns to it, and staggers back from the wall, Sam and all. And then he looks back to her. “What?”

“I’ll tell you about it later,” she says, and gets one of Sam’s arms over her shoulders. “To his room?”

She doesn’t see Dean’s reply, but they start moving in the direction of Sam’s room, so she figures she got it right. Sam flops back in his bed — in the bedroom Eileen hasn’t been inside since— since before Sam went, since before, oh hell — and Dean exhales next to her.

“Okay,” Dean signs, turning to her. “Let’s get Cas in here and figure it out.”

When Sam wakes up, Eileen is sitting on the bed next to him. He smiles at her, and she smiles back, so at least that isn’t fucked. He rolls his head over and, yeah, he shoulda expected it — Dean and Cas, sitting at his desk, Dean with his arms folded over his chest like any disapproving parent.

“Okay,” Sam says. “Lay it on me.”

“You’re radioactive, man,” Dean says, signing it as he goes. Cas rolls his eyes, and Dean says, “Okay, not exactly. But you’re imprinting on the walls, dude. Your cells are collapsing.”

“Not collapsing,” Cas corrects. “But… I don’t know. Something is going wrong.”

Eileen rubs her hand on Sam’s shoulder, but he flinches, feeling it like pins in him. She draws her hand back, and he reaches for her with his own hand, satisfied, at least, with the feeling of her palm against his. Fuck. “So what,” he says, wincing at how hoarse his voice is.

He struggles up to sit against his headboard, and lets Cas give him a glass of water to chug. He tries to speak again. “How do we fix it?”

Dean doesn’t say anything. Cas looks at him, and breathes, but doesn’t say anything either.

“Spit it out,” Sam mutters.

“It’s no good,” Dean says in a rush. His hands are sharp as he signs no good. “It won’t work.”

“It might,” Cas says mildly, and Dean turns to glare at him. “I’m just saying.”

“Sam can’t decide if he doesn’t know what his choices are,” Eileen says, which is true enough. Sam’s sick of feeling half a step behind everyone else and dragged along without his own say so. He’d at least like to see the cliff before he jumps off it.

“We kill you,” Dean says, hunched over. “I— I put you in the ground, and then I hope and pray you come back. That’s our shot.”

“It’s an old ritual,” Cas clarifies, “constructed from references in the letters— someone, a long time ago, was in the same boat you are. Half out of time.”

“You might not come back,” Dean says. “You hearin’ me? You might just be— dead.”

Dead. Right. Eileen’s hand tightens around Sam’s, before he releases it to sign. “Look,” he says finally, fed up with it, “I’d rather be where I’m supposed to be, rather than living in this— this limbo.”

“Supposed to be?” Dean snaps. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Cas frown. “There’s nowhere you’re supposed to be, Sam. That’s the whole reason we took on capital-G God. You’re supposed to be wherever you want to be.”

Sam shakes his head. “There’s a difference between God’s— God’s rules, or his story, or whatever, and natural law. What’s dead should stay dead, that’s law number one.”

“But—” Dean’s brow furrows, like he’s confused, fuck, what does he have to be confused about? “You weren’t dead.”

It’s a joke. It’s a fucking riot, actually. Sam laughs. “I’ve been dead since 2006, Dean. Your crossroads deal just bought me… well shit, we’re past ten years now, aren’t we? Pretty generous demon.”

Sam knows it’s a hit below the belt even as he says it, but he isn’t ready for the look on Dean’s face, the straight horror of it. “Don’t you say that to me,” he croaks out, and Sam exhales, looks away, knows Dean’s right to pick at it. He knows what Hell is, and he knows what it means to go for something that turned out to mean nothing at all. He shouldn’t have said a word.

“There are no natural laws anymore, Sam,” Cas says gently. As if Sam’s the fragile one in this conversation; no, he’s the bull in the china shop, wrecking each aisle methodically, comprehensively. “There is only what is.”

Sam can’t accept that. Dean’s wrecked in front of him, and Sam knows it, but he can’t stop himself from talking about it. And he can, right? Isn’t he allowed to hate it, too, what living in a soap opera did to him? Why doesn’t he get to die?

“Do you really think that’s better?” he asks Cas, because he can’t let himself speak to Dean. Sometimes he can barely look at him, for all the ways they just talk right through each other. “Knowing I just have to— I just have to take it, because it’s what is? I’m out on a drive and I can just, just disappear for— for a year, and we just… we’re just supposed to take it?”

“I looked for you,” Dean croaks out. “I didn’t just—”

“I know, Dean.” Shit.

“I didn’t just take it.” Dean’s hand is shaking. “We looked for you. Me and Cas. We—”

“He knows,” Eileen says, gentle enough. Dean’s face turns away, his profile more recognizable to Sam than the front of him sometimes, what with how often Sam’s seen Dean from the passenger seat of his car.

“Well then,” Dean says, and then trudges on. “What do you mean? Because I’m hearin’ a lot of ‘anything could happen so might as well not fight,’ which sounds more up my alley, and I don’t like it outta you, Sam.”

“Well, I think it’s hopeful,” Eileen says. Dean looks up at her, eyes wide. “There’s a way through. Sam’s willing to risk it to make it through.” And she looks at him, and Sam looks back at her, and she says, to him, like she’s asking, “You want to make it, don’t you?”

Sam blinks, and he swipes a hand over his eyes before he starts crying there on his deathbed. “Yeah,” he croaks out, nodding,  “yeah, I do. I want to.”

“So that’s settled,” Eileen says, and because she says it, it is. Sam looks at her hand in his, and then he looks over at Dean and Cas.

“Fine,” Dean says, and he stands up abruptly. “We’ll get on the road, then. Get where we’re going, and hope we can bring you home.”

Sam closes his eyes, soothed out of his nausea by the inevitable motion of the Impala over asphalt. The roads here are well-maintained, real road trip roads, for tourists. Sam is a tourist here, he figures, no matter that he grew up on the road. He isn't much of a homebody.

The sun makes it easy to see why the cowboys called it God’s own country. Like every part of the land can be known — like it's all on display. The Impala crests a hill and out in front of them pours the land, small shrubland over unbelievable rock formations, red cliff faces, blacktop and empty, far as the eyes can see.

Dean's driven this route at least two dozen times in his life, Sam would bet. He grazes corners like a hawk winging along high tide, eases down alongside rocks older and greater than anything the Winchesters know.

"We're always in the suburbs," Dean says at one point, the trees growing bigger and bigger as they dip down into a valley. "How come we never get cases out in places like this, huh?"

"The land has its own rules," Cas murmurs from the backseat. Fair enough, Sam figures. He can't imagine that his own body, climbing over rock faces in his shitty mass-produced jeans, could do anything the wind and rain couldn't.

They drive along like that, some sad country singer playing out of the tape deck in a compromise between Cas's desire for music made in the 21^st century and Dean's bizarre cowboy fetish. The deeper they get into Utah the whiter the rocks get, 'til they're passing gray stone with blue-green grass popping out of it every few miles. Sam looks out of the window and wonders— is that my body? Is that what it looks like, stripped down to the bone?

"Comin' up," Dean says once the earth turns red again, before Sam is really ready.

Cas takes them down an old mining road, cutting up through the rocks needle-sharp. He steers them past middling trees, up to the top, where the rock rides bare and true against the sun.

Sam steps out, and he thinks: this is where he stands. This is who he is. He feels safe, and warm, and he realizes that he should get back in the car and drive, because the last time he felt so at home in this body was at Stanford and he isn't— that isn't who he is anymore. The sun is brittle-bright on him, prickly with heat. It’s so sharp. That's what he keeps thinking— everything is so sharp. This land could slice right through his skin, and he’s back in his body, so it'd slice through him too.

"When's the last time we were out here, huh?" Dean asks, seemingly oblivious. But Sam can see the heaviness in his footsteps, the slouch of his shoulders.

Eileen scouts ahead with Cas for a good place to bury Sam. Dean stays right there next to him, looking out at them. Cas waves over at Dean from maybe a couple dozen yards away, and Dean nods. Sam looks at his brother.

Dean says, “Go time.”

The plot — the plot for Sam, the plot Sam’s gonna be buried in — is cleared of brush. Something in the ground made it not so good for growing, or this area was a popular spot for rabbits and brush deer, or the sun was too hot on this particular patch of the earth. Whatever did it, this place is naturally emptier than all the rest of it. Like it was waiting for them.

“I don’t want any part of this,” Dean hears himself saying, hoarse. He thought he could keep it together but Jesus, how could he? He looks at them. Cas — his Cas, his love, his sweetheart. The only man who could convince him to go through with this, and even he’s failed. And then Eileen, worried but upright, sturdy on her feet. And Sam.

Sam. His brother.

“You have to accept it,” Sam says, just as hoarse as Dean is. Just as wrecked. “You— you— you don’t have to actually do anything, but you have to accept it. You can’t disagree, or— or it won’t work. Dean, you gotta get on board here.”

“I can’t—” Dean takes his eyes beyond Sam to the horizon line. The sky and the earth under it. He exhales shakily. “You’re gonna be buried. Six feet under, chokin’ on it, and— Sam. Sammy.”

“It’s not so bad a way to go,” Sam says, and Dean flinches. “Hey. Dean.”

“He won’t be— it won’t be permanent,” Cas says, stepping forward. “Dean. He’s safe. He’s with his family. We know what we’re doing.”

“I know this ain’t about me,” Dean whispers. He looks at Sam and says, honest as he knows how, “I know. I know it. But how— how can I? How can I watch you do that? When it goes against everything inside me— How can I?”

And Sam comes to him and wraps him up tight in a hug, hand over the back of Dean’s skull. He shouldn’t have to do this, Dean thinks. He shouldn’t have to make me easy over it, he shouldn’t have to coach me through it. But— “We had a funeral for you,” Dean chokes out into Sam’s shoulder, hands by his sides ‘cause he couldn’t move himself for hell or high water. “I can’t bury you again.”

Sam pulls back, keeps his hands on Dean’s shoulders. “When have you ever buried me?” he asks, and Dean looks away. “Dean,” Sam says, urgently, and Dean looks back to see a wild spark in his eyes. “You’ve never buried me once in your life.”

“What’s—” That can’t be true. But— it is. Sam, on that mattress after Cold Oak. And Stull. The ground in that cemetery was clear as a racetrack, no burial mound to be seen. And when Dean left Sam in that cave full of vampires, and he came back out of that tomb with Lucifer hot on his trail— the things Dean thought—

“It’s different,” Sam says to him like a realization. “I’m not— dying. You can’t think about it that way, I mean, I’m, I’m going— I’m going back into the earth. All those times— you never burned me. You never buried me. You never let me go. I’ve been in between so many times— this way, I go and come back. I get to go, and then I get to come back. You understand what I mean?”

Dean, who remembers being dragged to Hell by those hounds in more vivid detail than many other parts of his misbegotten life, understands what he means.

So they put his brother in the ground.

Dean watches them do it. Helps them, even — he’s the first one to shovel dirt over his brother’s face, still and quiet. Sam’s barely even breathing. Won’t be breathing at all, after he swallows enough dirt. Dean pauses, starts crying right there at the edge of that hole in the ground with his shovel halfway in the earth, staring down at Sam who already looks dead. Cas puts his hand on Dean’s back. Takes the shovel from him, and finishes Dean’s job for him.

While Cas and Eileen bury Sam alive, Dean sits, hunched over on a boulder. “Come back,” he murmurs, watching the ground pile up in front of him. His brother is under there looking for Death.

Halfway through, Dean feels it. Something going out of him, breaking clean. He’s never let Sam go in his life, was always circling around Stanford like a vulture or spiralling too far the other way to compensate. Even now he has the urge in him to find a crossroads and do something worthwhile with this body he has, this body that’s never been more useful than when someone else was touching it.

Eileen wipes sweat off her forehead. “Cas,” Dean says, and nods over at Eileen. Cas gets her attention and Dean signs, “Water?”

She nods, comes over to the cooler Dean dragged over from the Impala, half full of water bottles and the other half beer and goat’s blood. She signs, “I really hope he comes back.”

Jesus. Dean swallows. “Yeah,” he signs, “me too.”

The two of them watch Cas for a while, laboring over Sam’s grave. He shovels like he does every task assigned to him, with perfect devotion. Dean looks at him, and wonders if what he has with Cas is really any better than what he has with Sam. Dean knows what he is, can’t make it this far in Dean Winchester’s life without an easy, instinctive understanding of what the world sees when they look at you. Dean knows he’s Sam’s older brother in a wrong way, a brutal way. Toxic, polluted.

He’s with Cas because they want each other so bad not even God could keep ‘em apart, but there on the flip side is his relationship with Sam: he’s Sam’s brother because God wanted a brother-story. He’s Sam’s brother because God thought it would be interesting to make two clay figures and push them into each other and then pull them apart to make new creatures that couldn’t learn to live without the pieces of themselves that were in the other.

Or maybe he’s just Sam’s brother because that was more useful to Dad than being Mary’s son. All right, Dean doesn’t know what the truth of it is. All he knows is that now, here, he’s choosing Sam. He’s going to unbury that kid, his kid, and he’s going to learn how to be his brother in a good way. Cas pats down the last of the dirt and Dean exhales. Sam is gone. Dean can feel that, now. Sam’s gone and then — if Death treats him right, and if Sam chooses so — he’ll be back.

Dean realizes, suddenly, that he trusts Sam will come back to him.

The land is green under Sam, green as far as the eye can see — green like jade. His steps crunch brittle glass when he walks forward. The sun, directly overhead, spills high noon over it all.

“Sam,” Billie says. Sam turns around. There she is, scythe in hand, dressed in black from head to toe. But her scythe— where it meets the earth, it seems—

“Billie,” Sam says, looking at the tail of that staff in her hand. The way it mushrooms into smoke, the black mold that creeps away from it, crawls into the crisp glass under Sam’s feet.

The air tastes wrong. Sam looks around, wide-eyed, and there’s nothing living— no birds, no trees, no wind. Alien, almost, except that if he looks hard enough, there just past Billie’s shoulder, it seems like— it seems like—

“Can you read what it says?” Billie asks, and Sam squints harder at the highway sign. She laughs at him, hand curling around her scythe. “Area 20. That’s what it says.” Area 20. Area 20, what? She spreads her hands out at the land below him, the land which has hardened into a glass floor, the land that looks like the windowplates of a downtown condo. “Oh, the southwest. I loved Nevada.”

Area 20. “Nuclear testing site,” Sam realizes, looking around. The glass. He says, “This isn’t— it’s— it’s— it’s rare, for sand to get like this. It wouldn’t happen like this.”

“In all the infinite universes of my dominion,” Billie says, “is it really so unimaginable that one American president got a little overzealous with his proving grounds?”

“No,” Sam huffs, mouth twitching up into a smile. “No, I guess it isn’t.”

She strides across the field. Sam walks with her, tries to keep apace, and blinks as they walk— they walk far. He can’t explain it. They walk across the state, they walk westward across Nevada and into California and wade through the Pacific into the islands, angling straight like a missile to Bikini Atoll. Billie slides off her coat, revealing a black, two-piece swimsuit underneath; she takes a seat on one side of the Mt Bravo shot crater, and Sam sinks into the other, feet in the water like a motel jacuzzi.

She looks like the first Death. Sam watches her cheekbones hollow and rise, looks at the sharpening knife edge of her jawbone. Her ring gleams in the sunlight and her hair thins— and yet, she looks the same as she did before.

“Something happened,” Billie tells him. She stirs her scythe idly, splashing tsunamis, flooding the northeastern corner of the atoll behind her. “It wasn’t my business at first, you see. What happened was between you and the mountains. Sam, tell me you know we aren’t in the Rockies anymore.”

“I know.” Sam swallows nervously. He’s never been— he’s never been the way Dean is, able to joke and laugh with beings like this. Sam’s not the guy who sat down and had pizza with Death back during the first apocalypse. He’s not the guy who cradled the Darkness in his arms as a baby, and he’s sure as hell not the guy who went around singing with Crowley in karaoke bars. Hell, he still gets antsy around Castiel some days. Sam thinks he understands what these entities are more than Dean does, because he doesn’t see bodies the way Dean does— maybe he doesn’t see them the way anybody does. Sam knows better than anyone on this entire fucked-over planet how little a body means.

Billie sinks into the water, uses a reef as a bench seat, rests her arms back against the thin snake of shoreline behind her. “Unfortunately, you called me well. I can’t say no to an offering like that.”

“An offering,” Sam repeats.

“You.” Billie looks at him, eyebrow raised. “You’re dead, aren’t you?”

Sam shrugs. He’s sitting in a nuked-out hole in the ocean like it’s a kiddie pool. If he’s alive, it isn’t any kind of alive he’s been before.

“This is the problem with you Winchesters,” Billie muses. “See, here, it’s clean. This is my world now. It’s pure because you did it to yourselves. Death has always been closest to humans, even if all things die in the end.”

“A nuclear apocalypse.”

“Not an apocalypse,” Billie corrects. “An annihilation. No new world will come from the ashes of this one, Sam.”

Sam exhales. Fuck. This is— this is far, far out of his wheelhouse. He curls his toes in sand eleven miles below sea level.

“You’re always knocking over the house of cards that is my multiverse,” Billie says, gentle enough even with how accusatory her words are. “You and your brother, and your angel especially. I thought this might give you some perspective. Look at how little you matter, Sam Winchester, and know that your death will come.”

“I know that,” Sam snaps, because he can’t let this misunderstanding lie. “I don’t want to live forever. I don’t— I don’t want that. I just want— a life that isn’t— I can’t be in between like this anymore. I can’t— I can’t do that.”

“I’m getting there,” Billie says, slow and deliberate, and Sam shuts his mouth. Warmly, she says, “I’ve always thought you understood your place better than Dean did.”

“That so,” Sam whispers.

“You know what’s inevitable.” Billie smiles. “And you know what’s worth a fight.”

Sam nods. Sure. Maybe he does know that. Or maybe he doesn’t; he’s uncertain about most things in life, unsteady on his feet and in his soul on the best of days. Maybe Billie just likes him ‘cause he’s easy for flattery.

“Let me tell you something,” Billie says. “When your nation was built, I was there. When your house in Lawrence was built, I was there. When the first Winchester rifle was built, I was there. The line between the American novel and the American bomb isn’t long, Samuel. It’s short. It’s the shortest line there is.”

She stares him down. Sam can’t look away from her, from her gaze. She’s a jackrabbit. She’s a Wendigo. She’s the Mississippi.

“I’ve reaped God already,” she says. “I reaped him at the beginning and the end of time, because I reaped him outside of time. Before before, if you will.” She huffs out a laugh at that one, and Sam just watches her do it, entranced. “You and your brother, you’re the last threads of his story. The last fuses left to light.”

Into the pause that follows, Sam says, quietly, “I don’t understand.”

“Your death is floating around here somewhere. It’s wrong. It’s in the wrong place, distorted by grief and anger. Your death is fictional, Sam Winchester.” Billie stands up, water sloughing off her bare thighs into the sea. “You’re the last story. The last of Chuck’s stories before my stories, my books get to take over. You’re the last Western starlet dying of leukemia before they bury the radioactive waste.”

“So—”

“So, it turns out your death is important.”

Sam breathes. “Is that why I can’t die right?” he asks. “Because— because if my only option is to die here, now, I’ll do it. If it’s die or live forever like— like a ghost, then I’ll die.”

“You have more choice than that.” Billie wades across the ocean to him, stands in front of him, looking down from the sun. “I can’t give you your year back. No one can. It’s true that I can give you rest. But I can give you freedom, too. I can give you freedom like the rest of your world, like the rest of all worlds, even this one. I can give you the freedom to get sick and to get well again. I can give you the freedom to die, well and true, when it’s your time.”

Fuck. “I want that,” Sam breathes, imagining it. True freedom. No one could bring him back, no one could hollow out his body to make room for puppet strings. His corpse would have dignity even in death — and maybe, just maybe, his body might have dignity in life. So, he says to Death: “I want— I want to live. I choose life.”

Billie smiles at him. She places her hand on his cheek, a shock of cold against the tropical heat. “Good choice.”

Sam blinks. The land is green and brown around him, as far as the eye can see — mottled and earthen like the first snake who hissed in the Garden. His back sinks into the soft ground under him, wet from a rain he missed. He turns his head from the grass next to him up to the gray sky. No trinitite here.

“Sam,” Dean says.

Sam stands up, gets mud and bush brack all over his palms. He looks at Dean, who clears his throat. “You came back,” Dean says.

“Takes a little more than that to get rid of me,” says Sam.

“How do you feel?”

Sam considers his question. He looks at the short brush around him, and the gray after-rain sky, and at Cas’s sturdy form and Eileen’s hair in the wind. He clenches his fists and shudders at the wholeness of feeling in them. These are, undeniably, his hands. Death brought him back true and clear.

“Alive,” Sam says. Dean grunts out a laugh and slaps him on the shoulder like it’s a joke, and Sam lets him. But as they walk back to the car, Sam breathes in deep, all that mud smell pooling in the intimate space behind his nostrils, like it’s the first time he’s ever smelled anything like that. He wants, earnestly, for the first time, to smell something like it again someday.

A strange thing happened in Utah, when Sam was buried and unburied. Utah is, of course, not the place’s true name, but it is most relevant for our purposes as a popular and war-conceived label — places being, broadly speaking, nonexistent unless they are named on a map.

The strange thing that happened was the death of God.

Death, as any salesman will tell you, is the process by which the existential dust that all people and animals and plants and some lakes are made out of finally ceases the energetic process of expending itself. Death is when the machinery of being gives up the ghost, so to speak. Death is not the primal dumpster of slavery (to quote Patricia Williams) nor the spectral something-ness of the disappeared (to paraphrase Avery Gordon).

Death is a yielding love letter to the stars. Put another way: Death is un-American.  

Most people in the world did not notice God’s profoundly un-American surrender to the cosmos. They didn’t notice because TVs kept on playing. Most TV watchers and TV actors and TV directors and frankly anybody who has seen a camera has the subconscious conviction that nobody has ever died or will ever die again. This is the same conviction which kept Moses going through the desert, for he himself was already a ghost on a TV screen and he knew it. God was the first director and God would keep Moses alive forever.

Some people did notice, though. These people were real people who despite their realness were more like characters than actors, like Truman Burbank from The Truman Show, or Malachi Constant from The Sirens of Titan, or Jennifer Check from Jennifer’s Body, or indeed any woman from any Margaret Atwood novel. These were people who had lived their whole lives on display, and who understood intimately the link between the post-2001 Pax Americana and the Hollywood camera. Like Slow Bull who no doubt anticipated with atypical yet still-dignified glee the inevitable death of Edward Curtis, these people knew they were being watched at all times, and that their suffering made a good show.

They all felt a small weight lift from their shoulders after the otherwise inconsequential passing away of Earth’s creator.

A small star also collapsed in the distant reaches of the Andromeda galaxy, to the astonishment of some NASA employees. This was probably a coincidence, and was belatedly perceived by Earth scientists only after the second space race had been won, so it doesn't really belong in this story.

That, to clarify, was what happened.

Today, Sam’s in Cas’s garden because Cas wants oranges to make marmalade.

Sam walks around Cas’s garden like he’s the first man. As far as Sam is concerned, he is. He’s as new as the soil under his feet. He was born fully-formed from Billie’s scythe and he looks at the world around him like a baby, not worried about anything because even his ribs belong to him now.

“Did you know,” Sam tells Dean, who’s hovering a few yards away, deliberately not-looking at Sam in that way he has of looking sidelong at awful things, “that the word for storm in French is orage?”

“No,” Dean replies.

“Like aura.” Sam dips his head to look in at a strand of ivy along the poky little fence Dean must’ve built while Sam was gone. “No relation to orange.”

“Right.”

Sam pulls back to survey the orange harvest. In the new light of his wholeness, his certainty-of-being, his realness, the oranges look like nothing so much as little suns. Sam remembers a photo of a half-dozen men leaning back in lawn chairs like they were watching a football halftime show, watching nukes go off in the western desert. The light of a hundred suns.

“You got a bag?” Sam asks, and Dean comes over, and Sam pulls thirty-two perfectly round suns off of their branches and drops them gently into Dean’s canvas sack.

He can’t stop thinking about the world as if it’s a brand new thing. Sam sits down on a bench Dean or Cas must’ve built while he was gone, padded with the softest outdoor cushions Sam’s ever sat in. “I feel really good,” Sam admits.

Dean exhales. He squats down, in front of Sam, and Sam looks at him. Sam realizes he’s been not-looking at Dean just the same way Dean’s been not-looking at him, so now, Sam does him the service of seeing him.

Dean has wrinkles now. Dean looks— Dean looks exactly the same as he did ten years ago, twenty years ago, thirty years ago, and not the same at all.

Oh, jeez. Sam loves him.

“I’m happy for you and Cas, y’know,” Sam says softly, because he can’t think of a way to say the big, bright, beautiful thing bouncing inside of him.

Dean grins, and ducks his head, and then looks back up again. “Thanks, man,” he replies, just as soft. And then: “You’re really feeling good?”

“Really.” Sam flexes his hands. He has no idea where Lucifer is. If the angels are still around, or hell, if demons are still kicking down under. Maybe they are. Maybe he’ll relearn the fear, but right now— right now, Sam is not afraid. “I feel like I could say yes to anything,” he laughs.

Dean laughs with him, but it’s that half-hearted chuckle that means he’s still wrecked over something. Over Sam’s absence, maybe. Over some deep hurt Sam is never gonna know about. But he just asks, “You gonna say yes to bringing those oranges in?”

“Yeah,” Sam says. He stands up and feels his knees pop and feels alive, fuck, he is, isn’t he? He looks up at the sky, and yells, “I’m alive, you son of a bitch!”

“You sure are, man,” Dean says. Sam looks back down at him and he’s full-on grinning now. Yeah. He gets it. Putting on the accent of an old ranch hand talking to a rough-and-tumble cowboy, Dean drawls, “Three cheers to your life, Sammy boy.”

Halfway through movie night, Sam gets the irresistible urge to write a letter.

“Back in a sec,” he says, and Dean waves him off from his position on the couch, and Cas snuggles in closer. Sam figures they won’t mind if he takes his time.

He walks through the hallways back to his room. He remembers when Dean chased him through these halls, hammer in his hands, Sammy echoing like some siren’s death-call. But he shrugs it off easy. These days, he shrugs off a lot of things easy — not like some Stepford wife apathy, but more like the hard-earned serenity of someone either two or twenty years away from the end of their life. He’s lived long, and he’s happy with where he’s come, and if he goes anywhere new, well, that’d be a gift, wouldn’t it.

Sam’s room doesn’t have much by way of decor. Dean likes to settle in, get cozy, but Sam’s roots come by way of freedom. He knows a place is home when he knows it’ll still be there, waiting, if he leaves and comes back.

All that being said, his room does have a desk. He finds a piece of paper and an envelope. He scrolls through the Idaho state tax filings, which are only slightly illegal for him to access, and finds the address of a certain Luke Pollard.

Hi Luke, Sam’s letter reads.

You don’t know me. You might not want to read this letter, and I won’t hold it against you if you toss it out right now. Hell if I know why I got the urge to write it, but I did. I’m writing to tell you that I met your mom once, at her home in Grangeville.

Your mom, Jeanine, was lovely. She invited me and a few friends of mine into her home. I don’t know if she told you about this, but there was a time when weird crap was happening around her house. For example, a large tractor ran a smallish SUV off the road in the middle of the day. No driver was found in the tractor seat, and it didn’t appear to have used any gas. That’s the kind of weird crap your mom was dealing with.

The reason me and my friends went to visit your mom was because we thought we could help with the tractor stuff. I did some googling today. As it turns out, the tractor stuff did stop after we fixed up the situation. I didn’t see a single tractor-related incident report for the year between our visit and the day your mother died.

I’m sure this is a very painful time to reflect on. All I wanted to say was this: when we visited your mom, she didn’t say a lot about your dad. I got the sense that he might not have been around anymore, but I couldn’t tell whether they’d separated or if he’d died. I learned later that he actually died only about a month before your mom did.

One of the people I was with — my brother, in fact — suggested that maybe there was tension between your mom and her own mother (your grandmother, Mary Spinnerts) and that the cause of this tension was your dad. The reason he suggested this was as a possible explanation for the tractor stuff, which probably doesn’t make any sense to you. Think about it like if your grandma had rigged up the tractor to run people off the road just to annoy your mom, on account of that tension. It sounds stupid, but we thought it was a plausible explanation at the time.

And then a year later your dad died, and your mom died shortly after. I don’t know why they died so close together. There are a lot of explanations, and some of them veer closer to the kind of thing my brother was talking about. Tension and bad blood and whatnot. Maybe you know more about it. Maybe you don’t.

I just wanted to tell you that I think your mom was a decent person, at least from the brief time I met her. I think it’s possible she died of a broken heart. I think that explanation is both kinder and probably truer than anything else out there, and I wanted to say, as an outsider with an objective viewpoint, that if you said that’s what happened, I would believe you.

As a side note (I’m saying this because if you believe me, the rest of this letter might make a bit more sense to you, and if you don’t believe me, you can throw this whole letter away even easier): I used to be a ghost, and then I was brought back to the living world. Nobody deserves to be a ghost — and I thought, maybe your mom is a ghost right now, and maybe telling you about another side of her might set her to rest. That’s all.

- Sam

Sam closes up the envelope, and puts a stamp on it, and sets it aside to mail in the morning. He walks back through the hallways to the Dean Cave, where Dean is snoring against Cas’s shoulder through the credits.

“Welcome back, Sam,” Cas murmurs, quiet, so as not to wake Dean up.

A hundred names roll by in five seconds. There are twenty people on the Vancouver production crew, ten in Montreal, fifty in Seoul. The executive assistants have assistants going four layers deep. The camera operators have six handlers each and every department has three by three dozen sub-department hair and makeup technicians. The Beijing marketing team has four language specialists. It looks like it was a very impressive production.

These days, though, Sam’s kinda tired of movies. Call him pretentious, but he’d rather wake up with the sunrise and eat food he’s never seen before — even if it’s the same food as always, bread and corn and whatnot, just cut up and arranged in new ways. Sitting still long enough to watch made-up people go through made-up problems sometimes makes him feel disconnected from himself, the way he did almost all the time before that noon with Billie.

He comes to movie nights to watch Dean more than anything else. His brother always settles into the couch easy and puts his feet up and even, wonder upon wonders, rests his head on Cas’s shoulder if he’s tired. He doesn’t look like a man John Winchester raised. He looks like a comfortable middle-aged dude watching TV with his boyfriend.

“He asleep?” Sam asks, and Cas nods. Sam looks at the two of them. I could take care of you now, Dean, and you’d let me. And Sam looks at his own hands, gun-callused and paper-cut. Sam could take care of himself, too. And he could take care of everybody else if he ever got the inclination, and he does, in his own way, by putting the vampire research he’s got online and building a centralized gas fund and yeah, sometimes, by shooting a shtriga or a vetala or a wendigo. And if he ever wanted not to do that anymore, he could call somebody for help, and they’d come help him.

Cas turns off the TV.

“Huh,” Sam grunts, while Dean blinks his eyes open and stretches. And Sam adds, mostly just to say it, since he’s not really all that torn up about it: “Didn’t see the ending.”