Chapter Text
The bunker emergency lighting flashes red against the walls, pulsating once before a soft whirring noise breaks through the harsh cry of the alarm. The strip lighting flickers again, and then the overheads come back on. Dean is flat on his back, staring up the barrel of a gun, at his father.
Voice hoarse, he hears himself ask, “Dad?”
And there’s his father looking back at him, hair cut short the way he used to wear it, sight of the gun lowering a little without dropping all the way. John Winchester’s expression is tight, his mouth set in a distrustful line. His eyes are wide.
“Dean? Sam? What in the hell?”
Dean eases himself gingerly off of the floor, eyes on the gun in his father’s hands. Beside him, Sam is standing too. John follows the movement, frown dropping down to cover the look of shock playing out on his face. There’s something about him that Dean can’t quite place. His close-cropped dark hair, the slight hunch of his posture.
John stands favoring his right leg, left shoulder pulled down, same way he’d done for a while when Sam was at Stanford, and they’d tracked a werewolf pack through Montana that had gotten the jump on them. He’s wearing a jacket that Dean barely recognizes, and when he does he’d swear they’d left it behind at a truck stop, covered in blood and half torn to shreds with $50 in the pocket that he’d sorely missed, after.
Sharp as anything, John says, “Sammy, aren’t you supposed to be in Palo Alto?”
His face looks unfinished somehow, particularly when he glances over at Sam, who is doing that head-tilt thing with his brow creased in the middle. He’s got his hands raised half-way up his chest, like he’s still deciding whether or not he’s gonna be shot.
“Palo Alto?”
John gives him a once over, taking in the sharp decline of his widow’s peak and the semi-permanent little “v” on his forehead (Sam is always doing that head-tilt, brow-creased thing). His eyes flick over to Dean too, and Dean can’t tell what he sees.
Whatever it is, it finally dulls the edge in John’s voice. His next words come out harsh, but with less of a bite. Sucked in on the tail end of a sharp inhale. “You’re—what happened to you? Where the hell are we?”
A line draws itself between two points in Dean’s head. A connection sparks.
“Dad…” He says, cautiously, “What year is it?”
The cage in his head has gone quiet. Like even Michael is listening.
John eyes him sharply. Dark eyes, Sam’s eyes, narrowed in his unfinished face.
“What are you—it’s 2003.”
And Sam says, “It’s 2019.”
John’s expression goes slack. He’s looking around the bunker now, between the bookshelves and tables and back again to Sam and Dean. “No. How?”
Sam says, shifting on his feet, almost awkward,“We, uh… I—I think we summoned you.”
“Summoned me?” John echoes, but it sounds different when he says it.
Dean swallows, “Through… time.”
John cuts his eyes to Dean, a quick flash of disapproval extinguished just as it sparks. “You boys better tell me what the hell is going on right now.”
Dean opens his mouth; good soldier ready with his report. He hears himself say, “Mom’s alive.”
John’s face has gone perfectly still, color drained. Dean listens through glass as he says, “Mary… Mary’s—” and then he can’t finish, and Dean can’t either.
“We didn’t summon her,” Sam fills in, and then he adds quickly, “and it wasn’t a deal. Dean stopped the Apocalypse and—”
John cuts him off, looking towards Dean. “Where is she?”
There’s a lump in Dean’s throat. There’s a feeling behind his eyes like the door might be giving. Behind John’s head, one of the bookcases begins to melt onto the floor. Dean watches an old volume of celtic lore split slowly open at its spine, delicate pages dripping down the shelves.
He grits his teeth, breathing steady. He keeps his eyes locked on John. From the corner of his eye, he can see black ink beginning to vine delicately out across the surface of the hardwood floor. At first it looks like nothing, and then it begins to look like something. A high, shining window. The back-lit arch of a tall, white room.
It’s Sam who says, “Well—”
John’s eyes cut away from Dean’s face.
The blueprint scatters. The vision recedes.
Sam is scuffing his boot across the floor, body hunched over almost automatically. “She isn’t actually—”
Dean says, louder than he means to, “I’ll call her.”
The wifi in the bunker is not actually that great—slow in certain spots despite Sam’s best efforts and Cas’ strategic help. So Dean has a good excuse to duck into the bathroom to make the call. No excuse for turning on the faucet or switching on the fan, but he’s forty now and doesn’t need one.
Encased in the soft hum of the water, he leans his head back against the door, breathing slow through his nose.
It hasn’t been bad like this in a while. The visions. Hallucinations? Whatever you want to call them.
They haven’t been that bad.
He kneads at his forehead.
It’s not that bad.
Solid wood of the door at his back, steady rise and fall of his chest. Just a slight give to the air in front of him. A shimmer.
His heart pounds against his aching ribs. The cage rattles behind his eyes. Not enough to break but.
Enough.
He digs his phone out of his pocket with shaking hands, scrolls down through his contacts. The room around him has got that wrong-textured feeling to it. Like the elements are switching. Like he might open his mouth and breathe in water.
The line rings once, then twice, and then cuts off into Mary’s voicemail, the canned recording staticky and familiar.
Dean clears his throat. The air stays air.
“Uh, hi,” he says, “listen, I know you were planning to just go straight through on your run without stopping but something’s—” and then he has to break off so that the tremor doesn’t catch in his voice. He stands there for a second, holding his phone in one hand and the bridge of his nose in the other, head tipped back against the door, breathing.
Then he pulls himself together, brings the receiver back to his mouth. Clears his throat, quick, and says, “Listen, there’s no good way to say this so I’m just going to say it. Dad’s back,” he stops again. He breathes. “Not back back—not like you. He’s from the past, but,” above his head the little air vent whirs and whirs, “he’s asking for you.”
Dean lumbers out of the bathroom right as Sam lumbers in, and for a second they stand locked in the doorway, blinking at each other. Sam’s eyes skate off to the side, pulled by the invisible presence of John Winchester.
Glancing back towards Dean, he does the ASL sign for, how bad?
There’s a tick building at the base of Dean’s jaw. He signs back, mind your own fucking business.
Sam’s mouth tightens. And then it’s like he catches himself, because he rolls his eyes. Shoulders into the bathroom past Dean and closes the door behind him, slapping the fan on as he flips the lightswitch.
Dean turns the faucet back on. He waits.
“I did most of the tests,” Sam tells him, swiping a towel from one of the shelves and a bottle of shampoo out of the cupboard. “On Dad, just to be safe.”
Dean lets out a breath. The pressure at the back of his head lessens. “Right,” he says, “Right. Good call.”
“Yeah,” Sam is rummaging around in one of the drawers. He comes up with a somewhat suspicious looking toothbrush and a newish razor handle with a flight of fresh blades, “‘Cause I mean, it doesn’t seem like Micheal would be behind this—not exactly his style, but—”
Dean watches the pantomime of it all. Sam too-specifically going through the motions, carefully not looking at him. The way he frowns at the toothbrush before seeming to reach a verdict, and tosses it semi-casually back into the depths of the drawer. How he leaves it open a little, so Dean has to reach over and slide it all the way shut.
“How’d he do?”
Sam straightens up, joints popping. He hefts the towel and the shaving kit in one arm, then reaches forward to flip open the medicine cabinet. Dean smacks it closed.
“Do fucking not,” he says icily, “even think about messing up my system. What do you need? I’ll get it.”
Sam blows a lock of hair out of his face, “Soap, deodorant, toothbrush,” he rattles off, “and Dad’s clean. Not a demon. Not a spirit. Not a shifter. As far as I can tell.”
Dean’s hand stalls on the cabinet door. He and Sam meet each other’s eyes in the mirror. “I mean,” he hedges, “That’s good, right?”
Sam says, tone convincingly neutral, “It’s something.”
Dean turns his head to look back at him, “You think this could be another kind of trap? Something else, something—”
Sam scratches at the nape of his neck, “You know what, I think it’s actually Dad,” he says, and Dean feels it sink into the pit of his stomach.
“Oh,” he says, softer than he’d meant to. An exhale, on instinct.
Sam grimaces at him, not a smile so much as a reflection of the complicated knot tying itself in Dean’s chest. “Yeah,” he says.
Dean clears his throat. He sorts efficiently through the contents of the cabinet, but he has to do it a couple of times before he comes up with the things Sam wants. He says, low so as not to be heard outside of the bathroom, “I called Mom. She didn’t answer.”
Sam raises a considering brow, “Were you expecting her to?”
Dean’s hand slips on the cabinet, and the door closes a little harder than he meant it to. The mirror trembles. The air around it trembles too. “I left her a message,” he says gruffly, “She’ll probably check it after the hunt.”
“Right,” says Sam.
They stand there in awkward silence beside each other for a moment. Dean can hear the sound of water dripping somewhere very close by, echoed and over-loud, an endless cavern stretching out behind him. He doesn’t turn.
Sam catches the look. “Hey,” he says suddenly, hunching down so he’s crowding Dean’s eyeline, “seriously, how many fingers am I holding up?”
Dean swats at his hand.
The walls go back to where they’re supposed to be.
“You’re such a brat,” he grumbles.
“Yeah well,” Sam tells him, “you should have raised me better.”
They shoulder their way out of the bathroom, and John Winchester is still there. Standing in front of one of the Men of Letters bookshelves, dried mud from a case Dean must have either worked or heard about caking his boots. Sam proffers the towels, “Uh, here,” he says, “there’s soap and shampoo and a razor—and we can grab you something to wear from—”
“Fine,” says John.
Sam hesitates. His eyes dart over to Dean, and Dean gives him a little what look. Sam gives him one back, eyebrows raised and lips pressed.
“Are you hungry, we could—”
John cuts him off, “I don’t much feel like going out,” he says, “Not until you boys explain what happened here.”
And Dean opens his dumb, traitor mouth and says, on autopilot, “I’ll cook.”
John goes from looking at the bookshelf to looking at Dean. If there was a pin to drop, they’d hear it.
Sam clears his throat, “Oh yeah,” he says, “this isn’t really a town for take-out. Especially on,” and Dean watches him mentally flick through the calendar, “… Mondays.”
There’s an awkward beat. A lull. Dean feels the prick of sweat rising at the base of his neck. John is still looking at him. Dean’s eyes water. He doesn’t look away.
And then it’s over. John is turning back towards the bookshelf, and he’s palming the deodorant and saying something flippant about how it’s been sixteen years and Dean (because it’s Dean’s, of course it’s Dean’s) hasn’t changed brands, and Sam is doing that awkward ah ah ah laugh that he pulls out at crime scenes and funerals.
Dean breathes. His vision blurs. For a second the conversation becomes an unintelligible rush of muted words, the brutal slam and crush of a walk-in freezer door. And then he’s back and John is saying, “—the ritual.”
Dean says, “What?”
John rolls his eyes a little, but it’s in good enough humor, “The summoning ritual,” he says, like he’s repeating himself, “where did you get it?”
“Oh,” says Dean. He still feels half a step behind, “uh, an antique shop.”
“Right,” says Sam, “We were working this case, and then we…” and then he trails back off and looks at Dean, and something in the way he does it makes Dean wonder just how much of Micheal he can still see in him.
Dean clears his throat. He starts to speak. He swallows.
But John is turning away from both of them, nodding his head absently as if he’s had his question answered. There’s a sick, swooping feeling in the pit of Dean’s stomach, same feeling he got as a kid, about to get caught with a secret.
He watches as John drifts closer to the bathroom, and he opens his mouth to tell him the rest of it. And then he closes it again.
And then the bathroom door is closed between them and there’s the muted sound of the shower running, and Dean still hasn’t said anything.
Sam clears his throat into the silence, “Ooookay,” he says, “well I guess I’ll just—”
Dean rubs at his eyes, “Don’t start,” he mutters, “I’ll fill him in, I will. Just. Later, okay?”
“Sure,” says Sam, “whatever.”
Dean cuts him a look, “I mean it,” he says weakly, “I will tell him. I just. Not yet.”
“Sure,” says Sam again, easy.
Dean squints at him.
Sam raises his hands, “Hey man,” he says, “Dad told you to kill me just because Azazel fed me a little demon blood as a baby, so yeah, no, I don’t think we should rush to tell him you’re possessed by an archangel.”
Dean makes a sound somewhere between a scoff and a laugh, “That’s not—” he starts. John on his deathbed, hand at the base of Dean’s skull, telling him he’d have to be the one to do it “I mean, he wouldn’t—”
Sam rolls his eyes. But there’s something there too, guarded.
“Dean,” he says, “I was a baby. I didn’t even have a choice. You let a whole-ass archangel crawl inside your skull and use your body to incite the end of days.”
Dean flinches.
Sam bitch faces, apologetic.
“Facts are facts, man. As far as Dad knows, angels are just one more thing we’ve gotta put down. And I don’t think he’d take any better to the idea of you saying yes to Michael than he did to Azazel putting his mark on me.”
They lapse into silence. The implication sits heavy in the air between them. Dean exhales, shaky. He clears his throat, trying to make his voice sound light. “You very much did drink demon blood,” he says, “on purpose.”
Sam’s eyes roll, “Yeah,” he says, “and we’re not gonna tell him that either. Jesus.”
Silence falls again between them. Dean breaks it after a beat with a feeble, “Guess we should make a list, huh?” He tries his best, but the joke doesn’t land, “everything we’re not telling Dad since he came back from the dead.”
Sam mutters darkly, “You first.”
From the other side of the bathroom door, the shower shuts off.
They stare uneasily at each other, shifting a little on the hardwood. Dean brings a hand to the back of his neck.
“I mean,” he says, and his voice sounds rough in the echoed silence, “it is good to see him.”
He clears his throat. Then he clears it again. Something happens inside the cage. Not a blow but like. A weight shifting. Like Michael is listening. His postures sways, and he takes an awkward half step forward to correct it.
Sam gives him a strained smile, brow pulled tight with concern.
“Yeah man, of course,” he says quickly, and Dean hates how fucking soft he says it, “of course it is.”
Coming out of the bathroom, John says, “Where’s my car?”
And. Oh shit.
“Uh,” Dean stalls, “right, well—”
John runs a towel back over his cropped hair. They’d given him a mix of their clothes to wear, but none of them fit quite right. He laughs.
“Don’t tell me you got rid of her.”
Sam scoffs, quick on the trigger. Gun shy. “As if,” he says, “Dean’s obsessed with that car.”
Dean says, “Cas has it.” Staring straight ahead, speaking low out of the side of his mouth like that’ll help him.
Sam says, “What?”
Dean takes in a breath, eyes fixed forward. “Cas has the car. I told him he could take it. For that case that he’s. Yeah.”
“Oh,” says Sam, and they both freeze again. That weird, deer-in-the-headlights thing they’ve been doing since John got here.
Sam rallies quickly, glancing back between John and Dean with a kind of weird, frenetic energy, “Well, then, it’ll be back soon, right? No way he’d ever crash it. He knows you love that car.”
Dean nods, brief. He starts to turn towards the kitchen.
John says, “Who’s Cas?” Dean feels his throat stick. He doesn’t turn. Sixteen years later, and John’s footsteps are clear as anything behind him. “Another hunter? You sharing cases now?”
Sam says, “Yes,” right as Dean says, “No,” and then they look at each other again with those same wide eyes. Dean wonders in absent horror if he should just let Michael in now and be done with it. He says, “You’ll meet him later.”
John says, “When he brings back the car,” like it isn’t a question.
“Right,” says Sam, he scratches at the back of his neck, “uh—also, he lives here.”
Dean gives up on wishing for immediate angelic possession and just closes his eyes. He can feel John’s stare hard on the side of his face. Somewhere deep in the cage, he can feel Michael push experimentally against one of the walls. Dean is going to open his eyes and then he’s going to have to—
John says, “Where’s Mary?”
Dean’s eyes come open. The room around him distorts briefly, then resolves.
He swallows. His voice doesn’t shake. “I called her.”
Dad’s eyebrows raise, waiting for the rest of the report.
Dean nods, automatic. “I’ll try again.”
And then he’s in the kitchen, back to the door.
He breathes in. Once. Twice. Sharp through his nose and out slow through his mouth. Once. Twice—
He picks up his phone.
Cas answers just as he thinks the line is going to ring out to silence. Dean can hear the scuffled sounds of a fight in the background. Cas’ voice is labored as he says, “This is not really—”
Dean says, “My dad’s back.”
There’s a sudden, crackling buzz, the sound of bodies falling, and then Cas says rough into the silence, “I’m coming back right now.”
Dean grips the phone, tight like he might be drowning. “Okay,” he whispers.
There’s a pause, a muffled, shuffling sound. Then Cas’ voice comes back on the line, clearer this time. “Do you want me to stay on the phone while I drive?”
Dean pinches the bridge of his nose. He breathes in sharp. “No man, you gotta focus on the road—and I’ve got. People to feed so—”
“Sam can help with that.”
Dean laughs, shakily, “We both know he cannot.”
There’s silence on the other end. Dean shuts his eyes.
“Really,” he says, quiet, “I’m okay, just—” he swallows, “come home.”
Cas says, “I am.”
The phone clicks off into silence. Dean lets out a breath into the empty room.
“Okay,” he says, “okay.”
The last time Dean had seen John alive, John’s hair had been longer and his cheeks had been fuller. Right before he died he’d had that scruffy, unwashed look that meant he’d been living rough and hadn’t had the chance to shower in a couple of days.
The “up” John. The high energy John. The guy who’d drag you through three different towns and four different cases in the span of one week. Who was great at poker and quick to laugh, sharp-witted and quick-thinking, easy to talk to. Generous with his time, focused in his attention. Dean’s greatest ally, his closest friend.
This John, 2003 John, is thinner. Meaner. With his shaved head and that haunted, hollowed out look to his eyes.
Dean can’t remember exactly what cases they’d been working back in February of that year.
If he prods at it, there is a memory of an empty stretch of highway through the iced over windows of the Impala, the shitty, leather biker gloves he’d worn that winter. Made him look tough but left his hands numb and aching. A lighter flicked on against the glow of a cigarette. The rough exhale of smoke. He’d quit after he’d picked Sam back up from Stanford (fire, Jess), and quit again last year. But sometimes he still gets cravings.
He’d partnered up with some other hunters for a while that winter. Guys a little older than him, a few women. He remembers the lights of different roadhouses gleaming through the snow. Cold breath exhaled in empty parking lots. Red, open mouths. Laughing over the lip of his beer. The warehouse where they’d found that nest of ghouls. Ash ground out against cement.
Dean’d liked those guys.
The memories are hazy, disjointed. There and not there. Just a string of different motels and roadhouses, and then the next hotel room after that, empty. He can’t even remember if they’d said goodbye.
He knows he had to go scrape John off of the rotting floor of some shit-hole motel soon after that. But it’s hard to place exactly when. It could also have been that he’d peeled him off of a barstool in a dingy dive bare. Maybe picked him up bleeding drunk in a frozen alley. He can’t remember.
Either way. One of those times must be—he’s got the right look for it. The motel or the alley, the bar. Whichever one it was must have been right before John got snatched forward to the future. Or else right after he got back. Because he’s got that same stray hangdog look in his eyes.
Starving.
The kind of hunger you can’t even get close to.
But Dean tries to get close to him anyway.
He comes out of the kitchen, sliding his phone back into his pocket, and there’s John. Sitting in the library, staring off at the wall in a familiar, unfocused way and— God . It hurts. Dean’s got that ache in his chest already as he walks over towards him.
“Hey Dad,” he says quietly, and he lays a hand on John’s shoulder. John starts a little and turns to him without malice or scorn, ghost of a smile pulling at his hollow cheeks. The jacket feels familiar under Dean’s fingers, the same as it did all those years ago.
Weight of a revolver in his palm, finger on the trigger, he asks, “You want something to eat?”
John’s calloused hand comes up to rest atop his own. “Sure, son,” he says, “that’d be great.”
The hammer clicks. The chamber is empty. John pulls his hand away.
Dean can see him looking around the library, tracking over everything like he’s just now taking it in. He watches his dad’s face as it settles. The slight change in expression. The way he holds his head. The commanding officer ready for action, shouldering his coat back on.
John says, again, more clearly, “Where’s Mary?”
“I don’t know,” says Dean. And then, “On her way.”
His eyes sweep over the table and he catches Sam looking up from his book, watching them. Sam raises his eyebrows imperceptibly. Dean gives him a hard, narrow-eyed stare, ‘cause exactly what the fuck is he supposed to do?
Sam shrugs a little, and goes back to his book. Dean squares his shoulders. He fishes his keys out of the fresh-washed pocket of his flannel, and raises his voice in Sam’s direction.
“Hey man, you want pie?” Sam looks up again, a little startled. He blows a lock of hair out of his face.
“Oh, uh, yeah,” he says, glancing over at John, “Yeah, pie sounds great.”
“Awesome,” Dean tells him, and heads for the garage.
The last time John had seen Dean before they’d pulled him forward in time, back in 2003—Stanford Era—Dean had been. God. It’s hard for him to think about it. Younger, sure. Thinner too. Unfinished. Tracing the delicate ridge of his elegant cheekbones in a grimy truckstop bathroom. The slight softness of his cheeks. The splash of freckles. Trimming down his eyelashes with the little pair of scissors that had come in his shaving kit, fine blond hair falling to chipped porcelain. The faint scar on his left eyelid. Touching his bloodied mouth in the Impala’s rearview mirror, obscene and messy. The aching crack of his knuckles against the jaw of the man who’d told him so.
He’d had a lot of split lips that winter. He’d been told a lot of things.
He remembers the way that his hip bones had jutted out beneath the waistband of his torn jeans. They’d made him scrawny as a kid. Awkward and lanky with everything sticking out in the wrong direction. But then, he’d been suddenly—how his body had looked a little like the bodies of the women he’d started picking up sometimes in half-empty bars on lonely highways. Who’d started picking him up.
Then he wasn’t as lonely.
He was something else instead.
He’d filled out more by twenty-six, the last time Dad had, or would, see him alive in that graveyard. Broader shoulders and thicker thighs. The weight of a gun and the weight of a shovel. Less easy to take in a fight. Easier to take, maybe. In other ways. But at twenty-three he’d been—it’s hard to think about.
2003.
He runs a hand back over the bottom half of his face. The catch of stubble against his palm, his wide, full mouth.
He needs a fucking meeting.
He shoulders on his jacket—not an old one of John’s. Something nice that Cas had bought him for Christmas. Dark green that brought out his eyes, which no one had mentioned. Kissing unobtrusively under the mistletoe when he was supposed to be getting something from the kitchen, fisting his chapped fingers around Cas’ tie. Cas’ nose still cold from a last-minute run to the grocery store.
The rest of it. Jack’s adamant insistence that it might still technically be possible for Santa to exist, Dean and Sam making pointed eye contact above his head. Cas frowning up at the angel on the top of the tree. Sam insisting on baking gluten-free, vegan cookies and then bitching when they turned out bad. Because, duh. Cas and Sam giving eachother the exact same book, followed by their solemn and inevitably futile attempts not to laugh. Cas’ gift to Jack. A coat in an identical cut as Dean’s, but a different color. None of them acknowledging this either, except Jack with a huge, delighted grin.
Cas has the Impala. So Dean takes one of the trucks. Something that Cas stole, or found. Maybe something they’d picked up on a case. Abandoned by the victim of the week. Borrowed under a false name and never returned. Who knows.
The tires give a dull crunch as he pulls out of the garage and onto the gravel driveway. There’s a slight ringing in his ears as he does it, a thin, mosquito whine that builds at the base of his skull as the car coasts forward.
For a second it’s like he’s wearing headphones, like all the sounds around him have been shut suddenly off. A heavy, settled weight blocking out the world.
Then his ears pop and there's the rush of his own blood, his breath in his lungs, the air pressure shifting.
He shifts his fingers on the steering wheel.
There’s this statistic he thinks about every time he leaves the bunker. About how most car accidents happen within ten miles of home. Another one about how most workplace accidents happen in the last ten minutes of a shift.
He has no idea if they’re true, or if it’s just something people say. But it feels true. He always feels the most fragile, the most vulnerable, the closer he is to home.
And he knows that’s not what it’s about. He knows that it’s about how people tend to kind of just check out mentally when they’re on the final leg of their drive or at the end of their shift. Heading towards home or thinking about it. Their mind somewhere other than the road or the work they’re doing.
But to him.
He used to think that he got it. Of course people fucked up when they weren’t paying attention. Of course they made mistakes. Easy. Uninteresting. Filed away somewhere unimportant.
Now.
He’d had no idea, really, what any of this could be like. Cas. Jack. Sam. He’d never. He’d never had anything like this before, he didn’t know. How could he?
Ten miles until the next hotel room, ten minutes before he can stop shooting this werewolf or digging this grave. What’s the difference? Hell, make it twenty. Thirty. A hundred. No matter the distance, no matter the time, he’d always hit the target, he’d always make the shot. One minute before. Thirty seconds. What’s the difference?
He didn’t get it.
Now, though?
The road in front of him bends slightly, it wavers.
Now he feels like he’s always just ten minutes from the end of his shift or ten miles away from home.
He fists his hands on the wheel and he feels it well up inside of him.
This life he has that he doesn’t get to keep.
Christmas and birthdays and Cas’ hand discreetly on the small of his back when no one else is looking. Teaching Jack how to do an oil change. Learning about the geopolitical history of quinoa.
All of these things that he can’t keep because—.
The walls of the walk-in freezer bow insidiously outward. Michael testing the cage. Testing, testing. Always testing. Finding that ten minutes from home feeling and pressing down on it. Looking for cracks.
Dean steadies himself.
He draws in a breath and lets it back out.
And then he drives.
It’d been a mild enough winter, but he still hunches his shoulders against the chill as he waits for the truck’s heater to kick on. Feels like the cold gets to him more now than it used to, aching muscles and stiff joints. He can’t imagine sleeping in the backseat on the side of the road anymore. Well. He sets his bare hands on the cold wheel. Of course he can. But. He shakes it off. It doesn’t matter.
Winters are mild in Lebanon and the roads are clear, little drifts of snow settled on the sidewalks. He takes the familiar route towards the meeting, turns and stop lights, all on autopilot. It isn’t the closest hall to the bunker, but after a couple tentative months poking around (and one particularly close call) it had been the one he’d washed up in, doing his 90 meetings in 90 days, miserable and shaking in the weak morning sunlight. That six am meeting had saved his ass, back when he wasn’t sleeping and couldn’t really eat or hold a fucking pen, let along a goddamn gun.
They’d had plenty of cases too (heaven and hell don’t rest long enough for you to catch your breath, nevermind getting sober) so at first Sam and Cas had switched off on who went out and who stayed in, and then Dean had told them both that he didn’t need a fucking babysitter and then of course he’d been left by himself in the empty bunker. Too many ghosts and no one to blame but himself. And this random meeting hall with its faded blue carpet and long, scarred wooden tables, scratched and initialed with the sharp side of a key or blunt end of a ballpoint. The signs hanging on the walls: Let Go, Let God. One Day at a Time. Easy Does It. The Meaning of Life is to Give Life Meaning.
What a litany for scorn and derision. What happy, fucking idiots. But he was desperate, so he had stayed. And then other things. Things people said. Things he could’ve said himself: I don’t know what else to do, because what I do is drink. Then things he wished he could: Thank God I didn’t get what I deserved.
It hadn’t happened all at once, the long, slow trudge. The six am and then the ten am and the noon. The two and the five. The six again and then the nine. Ten o’clock. Midnight. Staring sleepless up at his ceiling, just to get up the next day and do it all again. Too stubborn and too desperate to give up without a fight. Ready to pray with nobody listening.
And then it had. Yielded.
Then it had eased.
Here in this ancient community hall, with its wall full of stained coffee mugs and the train going by every twenty minutes, rattling the walls.
Except it—.
Dean pulls into the lot. He puts the truck in park. Headlights cutting bright through the thin, sudden fall of snow slowly blanketing the pavement. He pushes open the car door, hanging his body out into the cold night so he can get a better look at the meeting hall that. Isn’t there.
There isn’t anything. Just an empty lot across the street, vacant and silent. Covered slowly in snow. Silent the way that winters sometimes are. Everything muffled and quiet.
Dean stares at the lot, a chill running up his spine. The snow falls gently around him, thin flakes melting across his face. One catches in his eye-lashes and he blinks it away. Sliding slowly back into the car with the door shutting softly behind him.
He fumbles his phone from the inside of his pocket, pulls it out and scrolls down to the first name prefaced with the little “A” emoji, dials and waits. The number comes up not in service. His ears have started to ring. He tries another and gets the same automated message. Again, and this time it’s a voice on the line but not the one he was expecting. Whoever has answered doesn’t know who he’s looking for. He apologizes and hangs up.
And then he—there are at least thirty names in the column, all people who know his name. Who know his story. The guy he’d sat next to every day for his first three months, who’d caught him outside his first meeting, debating whether to go in, and agreed to meet him there every morning at the absolute ass-crack of dawn. The teenage girl who’d started out living in her car outside the meeting hall, whose wedding he’d gone to last fall. The one who always stole his cigarettes and brought elaborate, box-made cupcakes from the dollar store in questionable flavors.
Dean’s sponsor. His first sponsee. The woman from Home Depot. The group of men he’d picked up from the sober house every Wednesday, when he’d been told to get a service position. Everyone from every potluck he’d ever been to, every painstaking business meeting he’s ever sat through. Every two am phone call or highschool graduation. Every milestone and every loss. The woman who’s casserole dish he still has back at the bunker. The guy who’d gone back out during his first year who had overdosed, who Dean had never been able to delete from his contacts. Just about everyone who knows him out in the real world.
And they’re all—
He stares across at the empty lot for a long time. Until the snow has completely covered the windshield and his hands are cramped and cold on the wheel. Then he shakily shifts the gear out of park, pulls out of the lot, and drives back towards the bunker through the falling snow.
He gets as far as the nearest grocery store, then he pulls into the parking lot and cuts the engine. There’s a low buzzing in the back of his head that he can’t look at too closely. He flexes numb fingers on the handle of a shopping cart. He compares sale prices on different cheeses and realizes he’s already got a couple in the basket. He puts them back.
The location of the store is about where he remembers it. But the layout feels off, and the name above the entrance is different than it should be. He walks up and down the long aisles. Then up again. He can’t find the brand of toothpaste they usually get. There’s a different milk alternative he doesn’t recognize. His hands are shaking.
He’s approaching the bunker, wheels gliding slow over the icy pavement. He’s thinking about what he always thinks about, how most accidents happen within ten miles from home. Ten minutes before a shift ends.
And he knows it’s about getting careless or being on autopilot, but the wheels crunch through the thin layer of snow, and he thinks about being ten miles or ten minutes away from what you love, about becoming more and more vulnerable the closer you are to what you want.
There’s an ache blooming deep in his chest, fire unfurling from the heart of an explosive. It feels like an accident. Like something has gone horrifically wrong and he’s just far enough away that he can’t do anything about it.
What you want.
He pulls into the garage, foot easing down on the break as he rolls to a gradual stop.
The closer you are to what you want.
He sits for a minute with his hands on the wheel, drawing the familiar callous on the inside of his thumb over the steering column.
The more vulnerable you are.
John is still sitting at one of the small reading tables in the library when Dean comes in, with Sam sitting across from him. There’s a set chess board between them, but somehow Dean gets the feeling that they weren’t playing.
“Hey!” Sam’s smile has still got that slightly manic edge to it. He half raises out of his chair when Dean comes in, and then his eyes skate back over to John, and he freezes in this awkward half-crouch, hovering a little over the seat of his chair, “how was your—” and his gaze goes back to John as he finishes, “...thing.”
Dean says, “Come help me with groceries.”
Sam trails him out to the garage. His eyebrows shoot up when he sees the pile of snow-dusted reusable grocery bags in the truck bed.
“Damn, dude. Do you think you got enough stuff?”
Dean says, “The hall’s gone.”
“What?”
Dean hefts one of the bags out of the back and passes it over to him. The weight keeps his hands from shaking.
“The meeting hall. My home group. It isn’t there anymore. It’s gone.”
Sam slings the bag easily over his shoulder and automatically reaches out for another. “So like it… moved? Or…”
“No,” Dean turns to grab another bag. And then “The whole building is gone.”
As he says it, he can hear the walls go out around him again. The echo of his own voice somehow wide and endless, like space and time have opened up beneath the roof of their spartan, industrial garage and might slowly start to suck him in.
Sam is looking at him directly now, and (because he isn’t talking) Dean can see the worry in his face, a step behind the joke or platitude or cheap reassurance. This game they’re playing, where he isn’t dying, and Sam isn’t watching him.
Dean hands him another bag on autopilot.
“Everything was different with the grocery store too. Like the whole building had changed. The name. The layout. I didn’t stop to look too closely anywhere else but it seems like there were other places too. More stuff that’s changed in town. Probably everywhere. Maybe.”
Sam says, “Shit , ” very quietly. And then, “ it’s a fucking time paradox. ”
“What?”
“A time paradox, it’s—”
Dean rolls his eyes, “I know what a fucking time paradox is, asshole. Why do you look like that? What are you thinking?”
Sam’s eyes shift off to one side.
“You’re thinking we fucked everything up bringing Dad back, aren’t you?”
“I mean technically we didn’t—”
“Okay so you’re thinking I fucked everything up by—”
Sam throws up his hands, “Fuck. Jesus . That's not what I meant. I just. That pearl has gotta have some pretty serious weight behind it, to do all this. Not just bringing Dad here but actually changing the timeline around him after he disappeared? That’s powerful shit.
We’re talking the whole world, Dean. Hell we’re probably talking a whole alternative timeline. Like a separate dimension. If it can do all that then it can definitely—”
“Don’t.”
It’s too painful. Too much. Right on top of the list of worthless phone numbers, the still sharp sting of loss.
This was their one chance.
His one shot.
And he blew it.
Sam is still talking, like he’s working it out as he goes. “Maybe there’s another way? I know, just the one wish. But maybe if we could figure out how to reverse it? Send Dad back to 2003 and—”
Dean says, automatic, “We are not sending Dad back.”
Sam rolls his eyes, “Fine,” he says, “sure—just. Hear me out.”
Dean feels grief rise up inside of him. He bares down on it. Letting the words come out harsh and low under his breath.
“Is that really what you want?”
Sam says, “Jesus Christ,” and starts unloading the truck.
Dinner feels more and more like a ghost of itself, the longer they wait for Mary to call.
“Uh, so—” Sam starts, hunched over one of the little pre-packaged, heat-from-frozen meals that Dean keeps on hand in case of emergency, “when’s Cas getting back?”
If Dean could close his eyes forever, he would.
To his credit, Sam’s face looks like it’s heating up too, just a step too slow. He flicks a look towards John, then opens his mouth to add something else. Dean cuts him off at the pass. Voice as neutral as he can make it.
“He didn’t say.”
And then he really does close his eyes because. Fuck.
“Right,” says Sam, “right yeah. He didn’t tell me either. When we talked. Earlier. Uh—.”
Dean is going to have to kill him. He’s just going to have to kill him.
John cuts into his unidentified portion of meat with quick, efficient strokes. He says, like he’s following a script.
“Who exactly is this Cas?”
Dean shovels in a forkful of nondescript veggies.
“Uh,” Sam says, glancing over at him and then quickly away, “Cas is our friend. He lives here. Helps us with cases. That kind of thing.”
John is looking at Dean, gaze level. “You said he wasn’t a hunter.”
“Yeah,” Dean says faintly, he licks his lips. His own voice sounds very far away, a tape of himself played with the volume a notch too low, “because he’s an angel.”
Dead silence rings out over the table.
Sam clears his throat. “Uh, pass the salt.”
Dean hands it wordlessly over. He chews his food, shoulders crowded forward around his plate. In a diner. In the Impala. Waiting for what John is about to say.
John says, “So how’d I get here?”
Beside him, Sam’s posture changes, shoulders pulled down with relief. Like he’s bracing for something too.
“We’ve been working this case,” Dean begins. He runs his hand back through his hair; Micheal delicately peels back a corner of the freezer’s insulation. Listening. Dean steadies himself. He takes a breath, “It was an off-chance but. We’re in that, no stone unturned phase, so—” He blinks the lights in and out of focus.
Sam wades in to help, “We got a tip about an artifact. This pearl actually. The lore—” Dean kicks him under the table. Sam kicks him back, “Well, basically we read that it’s able to grant a wish to whoever uses it so—”
John finishes, flat and condemning, “You used it.”
There’s silence for a second. There’s tension in the air. Yes sir .
John says, very distinctly, “But why am I here?”
Sam opens his mouth. He looks back over at Dean.
Dean looks down at his plate. Clearing his throat, he picks his fork back up. Gruff and unperturbed, a familiar performance. Just enough but not too much.
“I guess what I really wanted was to have you back. So.”
John leans back in his chair. Dean is still looking at his plate, but he can feel John’s eyes on him. And, god, can he still see the way he used to look? Who he used to be? Half-formed and yielding. Freshly cut.
He must be able to.
Because for John it can’t have been that long since Dean was in front of him, not a child anymore, not quite a man. This half-born tangle of calculated and quickly growing skill, undercut by the desperate knot of his messy, boyish need. Half made for this world and half too soft for it. Not shaped for anything else.
When he was still just a dull knife maybe. A tool, a blunt instrument. Someone to take the wheel on long drives for a couple of hours. A flare in the dark, an unloaded gun.
If he had made this kind of mistake back then…
John says, not grateful, not angry, not kind, “There’ll be a price for this.”
Dean (the gun, the blade, the hammer) says, “We’ve paid worse.”
After dinner, John installs himself in the library, “Dean,” he calls, “come have a drink with your old man.”
Dean’s eyes go to the bottle, caught in the warm glow from the overhead lights.
He sees it like a reflection. Both of them hunkered over the dirty counter of some grungy dive bar, John laughing gold like the liquor glinting in his glass. Dean nursing a split lip against the mouth of his beer, grinning just enough to make the cut bleed. Loose-limbed on the barstool, heads bent close like conspirators, outlaws, the last men on Earth.
He remembers drinking like that every night—that world-ending, last day alive type of drunk. Waking dry mouthed and shaking, booze still leaking out of his pours. Hangovers and long, nauseous drives. Waking every morning with his head pounding and gut wrenching. Lying awake each night staring up at the dark ceiling of a different motel, room spinning behind his eyelids thinking— why do I keep doing this? And then doing it again.
Remembers being in a room surrounded by people who have no idea about the world he lives in, in a town he knows he’ll leave tomorrow. The number of some waitress he won’t call crumbled on a napkin in his pocket. John tipped back in the seat beside him, boots propped up on the rungs of his stool. How he’d be leaving all the same things behind that Dean would.
Sometimes they’d meet hunters working alone and Dean would think, how lonely that must be. What an awful, miserable life. But not him. Not Dean.
And then.
How a bottle had looked just about the same in Dean’s hand as it had in John’s. And how there was always a bar or a cheap motel. Somebody else’s bed. He didn’t need another person to be an outlaw. He didn’t need anyone else to drink.
But.
How lonely that had been too.
John tips his glass in his direction. His smile is warm. His eyes glint like whiskey. Dean stays where he is. Feet planted, throat working. Sam had started to put all that stuff away after Dean’d quit, but he’d told him not too. If he was gonna drink he was gonna drink. And he hadn’t.
He starts to say something, then stops. And starts again, “Uh, I don’t actually…”
“Dean,” Sam cuts in like he hasn’t been listening, “why don’t you go get a room ready?”
Dean mouths a silent, thank you at him as he leaves the room, and Sam claps a hand on his shoulder as he passes.
Dean lays awake that night, long after the others have gone to bed and the bunker has settled into silence. He stares up at the dim ceiling, and he counts up to a hundred and then back down again. First in English, then in Spanish, then Enochian. He tries for Latin and gets to fifty. He tries for Greek and gets to ten. He’s losing focus. He starts over. Then he does it again.
Somewhere in the distance comes the metallic creak of the bunker door opening. Dean holds his breath until he hears the distinct click of feet descending the stairs. Of shoes on hardwood.
He listens in the dark to the familiar sound of Cas hanging up his key without turning on the light. The scuff and click of his shoes on the doormat. Silence broken by the shuffle of bare feet, Cas’ soft curse as he bumps into the little table in the corner of the living room.
Dean slips silent out of bed and goes to meet him in the hallway.
He can’t tell what temperature the air in the bunker is, but Cas is flushed hot and breathing hard, and his skin tastes like salt. The soft light slanting in through the crack of their bedroom door catches each of them in turn.
Dean thinks it’s like they’re fighting, only the way that Cas manhandles him up against the wall is carefully tender. Broad hand cupped around the base of Dean’s skull to keep his head from hitting too hard, forearm braced across his sternum. Dean’s got the light in his eyes for a second, and then the weight of Cas’ chest crushed up against him, and Dean’s got the taste of his skin on the back of his tongue, the burnt spark of a severed powerline. Crackled electricity and salt.
Cas is already shoving Dean’s sleeves up past his wrists, running efficient fingers over his chest and down his sides. Checking him for damage the way that he might check him for wounds. Deft, blunt fingers working efficiently at layers and buttons. He catches Dean’s face in one hand, palm cupped to the square of his jaw, and levers his face down so that he can look from one eye to the other, turning his chin from side to side, weighing whatever he finds there between the palms of his hands.
“I’m alright,” Dean tells him, “I’m okay.”
He watches Cas’ pupils dilate subtly, the movement of his breath from his open mouth.
Cas takes a half-step back, and the light from the bedroom illuminates his outline. Thick stomach and muscled arms. The bulk of him beneath the trench coat. There’s a delicate fleck of blood across the front of his white button down.
“You got hit.”
Cas says, hoarse without looking, “It isn’t mine.”
He grips at Dean’s biceps, then his forearms, and then slides his fingers down to his hands. Dean slots their calloused palms together.
They stay like this for a while, Dean with his back pressed against the wall, his hands pinned at his sides. Cas’ weight on his chest. The bunker is quiet and dark around them, interrupted only by the faint sliver of light from their bedroom, and the rise and fall of both of their breathing.
Dean whispers into the darkness, “How was the hunt?”
Cas says, low, “That isn’t what I want to talk about.”
But he doesn’t talk at all. Instead he dips his head down, until his open mouth drags hot against Dean’s throat. Dean gasps a silent breath. Cas’ nose bumps against the underside of his jaw. The air around them smells like it’s about to rain.
A sound comes muffled from down the hall, and Dean feels the sudden weight of Cas’ Angel Blade against his own wrist.
There’s an instant where they stare wordlessly at each other through the dark, heavy beat of Dean’s heart quick in his seizing chest.
Then they’ve tumbled into their room with the door closed and locked behind them, and it’s Dean who’s got Cas’ back against it, and Dean who’s shoving roughly at his clothes.
He kisses over the knot of scar tissue at Cas’ hip, knees throbbing sharply as he kneels down. He crushes the blunt line of his broken nose into the crease between Cas’ thigh and pelvis, breathing in sharp and turning to mouth at the bowl of his stomach, dragging his cheek through the familiar dark line of coarse hair cutting sharply towards his groin.
And then he’s clutching at the soft flesh of Cas’ muscled thighs, and Cas is cupping his rough hand to the square hinge of Dean’s jaw, and the ragged sounds of his breathing fills the quiet space of the room around them.
Afterwards, Cas asks, “How did it happen?”
Lying next to him, Dean says, slowly, hesitating like the words have to queue up individually behind his teeth.
“We found this… enchanted object. A pearl that’s supposed to grant your deepest wish, and we thought it might—”
But Cas’ hand has already tightened in his. “The cage,” he whispers, “Micheal. You thought it might work to exorcize him.”
Dean swallows up at the ceiling, eyes starting to sting. “I don’t know why it—” and then he has to stop talking.
“Dean,” Cas says slowly, “I wasn’t there but… You and your father. I know you think that Michael is going to kill you. That this is going to be the end. I know that you don’t fully believe that we’ll be able to solve this. If this is your last night on Earth, so to speak, it makes sense that you’d want to resolve things with your father before—” and then he can’t speak anymore either.
Dean swipes at his eyes, “It’s stupid,” he says, “It’s so stupid, I—” and then all of the breath goes out of him. He fists his free hand in the sheet, staring up at the ceiling above both of their heads, “Cas, I’m so fucking sorry. This was supposed to fix everything and I fucked it up and now I— we’re—”
And then he’s really crying, face turned to press wet into Cas’ chest. Cas breathing steady against the top of his head.
“It’s okay,” he says, “it’s okay. You didn’t do anything wrong. It’s okay.”
Dean hits his closed fist against Cas’ broad chest, close enough it can’t land with much force.
Voice breaking, he says, “I’m never going to see you again.”
Cas pulls away enough so that he can see his face.
“Dean,” he says seriously, “We’re going to figure this out.”
Dean stares back at him, trying to memorize everything that he can. The cage in his head is a fragile thing. Tenuous and brittle. A crack appears in the concrete just behind Cas’ head, splitting the wall down the center right between them. Dean blinks and looks away.
A sound comes from somewhere down the hallway. They both twist around to stare at the door. Dean’s heart is pounding again. The sound gets louder for a second—footsteps, maybe. And then it fades back out into silence. They stay where they are. Not moving. Not speaking. Dean’s skin hot where it presses against Cas’. Cas with that faint electric tinge to him. The room is quiet.
They wait in the silence, but the footsteps don’t come again.
Dean clears his throat, but his voice comes quiet. Thick and disused. “It’s probably just Sam,” he says, “He must have been studying late,” he blows out a breath, “I know he thinks we can still fix this.”
“We can,” Cas says seriously.
Dean doesn’t look at him. He licks his lips. His throat is dry. He still can’t meet Cas’ eyes. “Listen,” he begins, “I think we should—”
“You think I should go,” Cas surmises.
Dean grimaces. He palms a hand over his mouth. “Sounds bad when you say it like that, it’s just, my dad. He doesn’t—”
Cas lays a hand on his shoulder, “It’s okay,” he says, and to Dean his voice sounds impossibly gentle, “I understand.”
Cas rises stiffly. Dean props himself up in the bed, watching as he collects his clothes and puts them on. Dean’s got the sheets pulled up around his chest. The room isn't cold, but he can feel himself start to shiver.
Once dressed, Cas pauses in the doorway. Hand on the frame he says, quiet. “If it does come to it. If we don’t find another way out with Michael. If you use the box—you know I’ll—” he breaks off.
Dean stares back at him. Impossibly lost in their empty bed. The sheets must smell like Cas, but it’s been a long time since he was able to tell.
Cas gives him another long, searching look. And then he leaves.