Chapter Text
PROLOGUE
“Is heaven open to souls?”
Hannah nods. “I’ve received information that new souls arrived just moments after we imprisoned Metatron.” She smiles at Castiel. “All the angels are returning, and the souls that were trapped in the veil are arriving as well.”
“Thank you Hannah,” Castiel dismisses Hannah, leaving himself alone in Metatron’s library. His library now. No, not his library. He should burn it. It’s too much power to be held by any one angel. He should burn all of heaven to the ground and destroy all the angels but he doesn’t have the strength. Hannah hinted that he could steal grace, probably from Metatron, but there’s no point.
Dean is dead and he can’t bring him back.
Castiel crumples to the ground amidst the stacks of books and begins to weep.
~
Dean stands from the bed, looking at Crowley. “What have you done to me?”
“I, I’ve done nothing. It’s the curse of the mark. Murder taints the soul, dearest squirrel.” Crowley holds out his hand. “Come with me.”
Dean holds out the First Blade between them. “Why should I?”
“Because now that you are dead, the mark is useless,” Crowley smiles. “You keep it until it’s passed along, but you can’t use it anymore. You’re like a little carrier monkey for the murder virus.”
Dean drops the blade and walks over to the mirror in his bedroom. He looks at himself and sees black pools for eyes staring back at him. “I have the anti-possession ink, how did this happen?”
“You died, once you are an empty meat suit that little tramp stamp is meaningless. Now come on, let’s go frolic in the night,” Crowley extends his hand.
Dean looks at Crowley. Something is different, something has changed. Crowley is letting his emotions show, he looks almost happy. Dean steps back. “Fuck you. No, no way I’m NOT ONE OF YOU! I AM NOT A DEMON!’
“Hate to break it to you sweetheart, but you are.”
“D…d…d…”
Dean and turns to see his brother standing in the doorway, face red from crying and mouth open. He braces himself on the door frame before sliding to the floor.
“SAM!” Dean goes to his brother and cradles his now unconscious form. “I’m so sorry Sam, I didn’t do this on purpose, I’d rather be dead.”
“You are,” Crowley says, crouching next to the brothers. “Don’t you think we should leave?”
“I’M NOT LEAVING SAM!”
“Dean, Dean, Dean. You can’t be here like this. Sam will end up making a deal with me, or worse, to get you back to your old squirrel self. Not that I could even do that, the Mark’s damage is irreversible. If you leave now you save the giraffe a whole world of pain. He can go on with his life, find a Misses Giraffe and make lots of very tall babies.”
“Since when do you care about making people happy Crowley?” Dean bites.
“Since I main-lined human blood and grew a heart,” he says quietly. “Are you coming?”
Dean looks down at his brother, quiet in his arms, and doesn’t care if Crowley just wants to keep him to himself. He can’t do this to Sam. Sam will always be in danger, from other demons and hunters. From angels, if Dean sticks around. But Dean just can’t leave Sam alone, on his own, vulnerable and unsafe. Like hell is he going to run with Crowley and the rest of the hounds. Dean holds his brother tightly, kisses his forehead quickly and stands. “I won’t be your slave.”
Crowley shrugs. “All my followers have free will.”
“The freedom to choose being tortured in the pit or follow orders. Go.” Dean looks down at his brother. “I still have the Mark and the blade is right over there.”
Crowley sighs. “You know my number squirrel.” With a snap of his fingers, Crowley is gone.
Dean takes a deep breath and walks out of the room.
~
“Do you feel that?”
Michael lifts his head. “Yes. There has been a shift.”
Lucifer smiles. “There has indeed. I think we may be going topside rather soon, brother.”
~
~
~
CHAPTER 1
Four years later, somewhere outside of Somerset, Wisconsin…
He thought riding a bicycle would be a good idea. He wouldn’t have to stop and siphon old gas from even older cars. He could move through abandoned vehicles on the vast stretches of crowded highway—even pulling a makeshift trailer full of supplies, and it moved fairly quietly through the landscape. After the third day, his ass hurt and thighs cramped whenever he laid down to rest. He had maybe one day left to go on this thing to get back to camp. He could do one more day. The cramps should stop and his ass, well, it’ll get better soon enough. The first snow should come any day now and he’d rather get back before it does. Once the heavy snow hits there is no way to go on these supply runs.
Sam Winchester peers through the grime on car doors as he rides by, looking for the perfect birthday gift for Cas. Not that Cas had a real birthday, but after he found out Sam’s birthday he picked October 20, tomorrow. He said he liked the leaves in late October and thought the colors would be festive. Sam hasn’t seen anything that he thought Cas would like. It’s all rather depressing things—photo albums, camping gear, the occasional teddy bear.
Cas has been in a particular slump lately. During the last hunting trip, two of their men were infected by Croatoans—people infected by Pestilence. Cas lost his grace nearly four years ago, after managing to complete a spell that could drain the last of it away without killing him, permanently sealing his human form. He couldn’t save the sick, so instead Sam and another camp member had to take them into the woods and execute them before they brought the disease back to camp.
Sam thought he would have the upper hand having dealt with the horsemen before. But after Lucifer and Michael freed them, they rebelled and bound themselves to each other and became free agents. The end of the world is messy and everyone is out for themselves. The couple dozen people back at camp where the only ones willing to trust in another human being. Sam was never able to find out how Lucifer and Michael got out of the cage, but he supposes that it was something Metatron had set into motion long before Cas imprisoned him. Or maybe it was someone else, dumb like he had been, who opened the gates back up. The death of Abbadon left demons divided and they may have figured out how to open it. Maybe it was Crowley.
But whoever it was hadn’t counted on Michael becoming Lucifer’s ally. All that time in the cage and Lucifer had worn Michael down, convinced him to join his cause. Now the all of humanity was toast.
Sam stops when he sees something catch the sun from the front seat of an otherwise empty Jeep Wrangler. Popping open the door, he sees it. A small glass prism on the end of a string. Cas would enjoy the patterns of colored light on the walls of his bedroom in the morning. Cas always enjoyed the simple things and he would be very appreciative of this. Cas was always hopeful. Even after Dean died and he sealed his grace out permanently, he always talked about what to do next. Sam caught him crying in his garden after Sam had recounted a story about Dean as a child. Cas doesn’t talk about him. Cas doesn’t even mention Metatron. In fact, Sam noticed that the day Cas came to him and told him he was human, that his eyes were just a little less blue than they had been before.
~
“Sam.” Cas approached the man as he walked up to the abandoned house the two men shared.
Sam hugged him back. The man felt tired and all too skinny against him. None of them really gets enough to heat, what with all the physical exertion trying to hunt and build and farm requires. He looks down at the bicycle behind Sam. “Did you ride that?”
“Yeah,” Sam goes back and retrieves his overnight pack and another small backpack. Small enough that it looked like it belonged to a child. He approaches Cas and hands him the bag. “I found a couple of bars of soap. I gave most of them to Mick but I kept two for us. I also found an empty canteen we could sterilize. And in the front pocket I found you something else.”
Cas takes the bag and immediately goes for the front pocket. His fingers find a small hard object and pull it out. “What is this?”
“It’s a prism.” Sam gently takes it. “You hold it up to the light and see?” He holds the prism up with one hand and uses his other to catch the rainbows. “You put it in the window to catch the light.” He hands it back. “Happy Birthday.”
He takes the prism and cradles it in his palm. Sam must have gone through considerable effort to find this for him. That fact alone makes it precious. If Sam had brought him a beer cap it would have meant just as much. “Thank you, Sam.”
Sam nods. “I gotta lay down, I feel like the seat of that bike is in my colon.”
Cas nods back and takes the backpack and sits on the steps leading into the house. He waits until he can hear Sam’s footsteps on the creaky stairs leading to the second floor before he holds the prism up to the slowly vanishing evening sun. He can see his breath. It could snow any day now. He spent all day with Laura, Mick and Debbie collecting every last edible plant, fruit or vegetable from the garden for canning tomorrow. Cas tried to learn to can last year but he accidentally exploded three jars and that was a lot of wasted food so this year he’ll go around to the homes in the camp and make sure they are weatherized as best they can be. He knows Sam is tired and will need a break, and he’ll tell Sam to take a day off, but by lunchtime Sam will be right next to him helping
Cas doesn’t like to tell Sam that he reminds him so much of his brother. He both enjoys and abhors his company. Sam is familiar after all these years before and after the second coming of the End of Days. But sometimes he smiles like Dean did, or rolls his eyes like his elder brother. Just enough to make Cas’s eyes fill up with hot tears at random times. He told Sam it was allergies, that Wisconsin had lots of tree and plant pollen during the warmer months. He still can’t believe Dean is gone. Everything he did was for Dean. When he swallowed the Leviathans from purgatory, he did it to become the God that Dean had no faith in, to change the world and make it a place that Dean could lead a normal life. Dean wanted to kill Metatron, so Cas did what he could. He was too late, but he did eventually lock him up. Dean would have been happy, right?
It was a good thing Dean died before he could see the second End of Days. Shortly after Cas heard of his passing, the cage was opened. Michael was able to tap into Angel Radio and dialed up the angels, announcing his new allegiance to the leader of Hell. It was only a few days later that word came of strange deaths, demons killing demons. Cas came down to investigate with Sam and confirm his suspicion—that the Horsemen had returned and War was making his way through. Famine soon followed, and it wasn’t until Pestilence rode through town that they found out that whoever let them out gave them a spell to bind themselves to each other. They were not under the spell of Lucifer, but under their own control. They showed no Mercy, and they had become even stronger under their own rule. Castiel had no idea how they got their rings back, nor who let the free, but that didn’t really seem to matter. He had sold the last of his grace to Crowley for that information, not that he would have told Sam the truth.
He looks to his side to see the faint glimmer of green and yellow bouncing out of the prism and onto the peeling siding of the old house. He hears the two children in the camp giggling in the yard next door. Laura’s children—Christopher, who is ten, and Luke, who is six. Cas stands and finds a nail sticking out of the top of the small overhang above the front door and hangs the prism before going inside to boil water to sterilize for the bath that Sam will want when he wakes up.
As he closes and locks the door behind him, Castiel remembers that Dean was four years old than his brother too. He bites the inside of his cheek so hard that it bleeds but at least he doesn’t full out cry. He doesn’t want to wake Sam.
~
Old gunky grease drips down from the engine and onto his cheek, but he doesn’t even wipe it away. He knows he’ll never actually get this car purring again, but he needs something to do to distract him.
Tonight is the Anniversary.
He gets the oil pan off and sees animals chewed through the damn wires again. He pulls his body out from under the car and throws the wrench across the garage. Sure, he could just leave and find some more wires. And oil and gas. But he hasn’t left this cabin since he got here. He saw the news reports before the TV stations went off the air, he knew it was only worse after all these years. He’s not sure how many years have passed, he knows at least two winters. Only because the first one it snowed black ash along with the snow and last winter was the coldest one yet. Even his bones were frozen.
He stands up and strips off his jumpsuit before leaving the garage. He doesn’t care about making a mess in the cabin, but he does it out of respect for the person who used to live here. The person who had a knit blanket on the back of the couch, probably because his wife made it for him. The guy who had a beer bottle opener installed in the wood frame of the kitchen doorway. The guy who had a great collection of anime porn comics. He didn’t even know they made print anime porn.
Dean Winchester makes his way to the couch and plops down, staring at the ceiling. He probably has another hour until sundown. He has to wait until sundown. And he has to make tonight count because it’s his last one. After this there is no more. He did such a good job at rationing it out, such a good job at not cheating. It’s even harder for him to control his impulses since he died. Died, he huffs. Sure doesn’t feel dead. He wishes he were. He begged Crowley relentlessly to kill him, but something about the Mark made it impossible to die. Until he gives the Mark to another, he’s stuck in this body, mostly demon, until there is nothing left. He wasn’t about to give the Mark to anyone else, nobody else deserved this hell.
Only he did.
Dean looks over to the table and sees the summoning gear still there from six months ago, covered in a fine layer of dust. Since he doesn’t have to eat, he doesn’t. He doesn’t have to take a leak or eat or any of that human stuff, so he doesn’t. He knows the world is hell and he hasn’t left this place for anything. Last time, Crowley brought him the car as some sort of bribe to join him as second-in-command.
He sits up on the couch and grabs a small wooden box from the coffee table. He puts it in his lap, not entirely sure if he wants to open it. He knows exactly what’s inside the box, a nametag that says “Steve.” After Castiel threw it off Dean went back and picked it up. He never really understood why he carried it around, but he never felt right throwing it away either. It’s the only object he has to remind him of the angel, and yet he never looked at it. He always held the box, contemplated the contents, but he can’t remember the last time he actually looked at it. He sets the box back on the coffee table.
Mementos were stupid.
He lays back down and stares at the ceiling again. In the beginning he tried to sleep because it was what he always did, got his four hours. But all he saw were images he wanted to forget. He could hear those damned hellhounds screaming away and see Castiel’s face and Sam’s tears and he just couldn’t take it anymore. So for however long this has been going on, he’s been staring at the ceiling. He knows he could distract himself. Just because he doesn’t need to eat doesn’t mean he can’t. He could go hunting for a deer, or try to find a new place to live. The only being on the planet, heaven or hell who knows he is here is Crowley and honestly he wouldn’t mind losing him. At least Cain had his bees.
Cas loved bees. He wanted to keep bees too. Once while they were in the impala, Dean noticed that Castiel had captured a bee in his palm at some point during the trip and was watching it climb on his hand with the kind of wonder toddlers have watching Teletubbies. There were a lot of things Cas wanted to do with Dean that he wishes he would have done. Play Twister. Finish Sorry. Sit him down and show him movies and explain why they are the best things ever. Dean wanted to apologize for every single thing he did wrong and all the right things he didn’t do. Dean wanted to admit it out loud how much Castiel meant to him, even if he doesn’t really know what that means. He wanted to thank him for giving up an entire faction for him. Dean wanted to forgive him. And himself.
This is what the Anniversary always did to him. All the thoughts he manages to keep at bay on a daily basis come flooding back all at once and it nearly breaks him. Last year he went to the lake behind the cabin and walked into the very middle of it. Sitting there on the bottom of the lake, watching the fish swim through the nearly black murky water, he waited for almost a week down there. Waiting to die, knowing full well he wouldn’t. He should have stayed there.
Dean watches the sun set and remembers the fish, the rocks, the old rusted bumper. He remembers as he floated towards the surface, how as he went up and up the water acted like a prism, catching and throwing colors of light into the murky depths. It was so beautiful.
Finally the sun is down. Dean nearly jumps off the couch and over to the fridge. Seemed as good as any place to keep it. Crowley gave it to him as a gift, said it was given to him as a deal and that everybody’s favorite angel had decided to ditch the wings for good. The only way he could conceptualize how that bit of information made him feel was that it broke his heart. He doesn’t care how that may sound to anyone else, but it what it is.
Dean doesn’t open the small plastic container until he’s back on the couch. He wanted nothing to interfere with the feelings he’s about to have, and that includes walking. It’s such a euphoric high for the first day, all the love and peace. He even smells him. It’s like Cas is wrapping him in a giant hug that will never break. He gets comfortable and opens the small plastic box. He pulls out the syringe containing the very last small bit of Castiel’s grace.
For this last time, he plunges the needle directly into his heart.