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When Dean wakes up, he’s cold, afraid, and oh so lonely. His last human thoughts are still crashing through his head like a train derailed, Protect Sammy, Love Cas, a suicide mantra that had left no room for dying wishes or long, drawn out goodbyes.
The first thing he notices is that all of the carefully constructed walls that he’d built through years of denial and self-sacrifice and, as he now sees, pure and utter stupidity, are gone. The snarling beast is out of its cage, but so is that little boy so full of love and joy that he’d buried too deep to remember.
The first thing he does is start to pray. Dear Castiel, I love you and I want to spend the rest of my life with you. He doesn’t mention that the rest of his life is no longer just the year or two until he’s stupid enough to get himself killed, or the two or three decades it’ll take for his liver to give up on him if he quits hunting tomorrow.
He can hear Sam down the hall, so he turns to Crowley. “Deal with him,” he orders.
Crowley smirks at him, as if he knows a secret Dean doesn’t, and looking back, he had known a terrible, horrible secret that Dean wouldn’t figure out until later.
He tries to think about what he’s going to do next when Crowley leaves, but his mind short-circuits and his thoughts flow like molasses and it’s difficult to string together more than a few fragmented words and emotions at a time.
In the end, he manages to think - need, love, Sam, Cas, protect, want, keep, love. Somewhere along the way, his love for Castiel gets confused with his love for Sammy and they become one and the same, once brotherly love morphing into lust and desire and fantasies of long walks on the beach and scattered rose petals that he’d never dare to admit he secretly harbored even now.
He waits until Cas arrives, out of breath, ecstatic, beaming, before he makes his presence known. Crowley is gone, because he knows what Dean is about to do even if Dean himself isn’t sure yet. Sam is the first to hug him, and he smiles and hugs him back. Cas is next, whispering, I love you, too, Dean, into his ear, and Dean kisses him then Sam.
Sam pushes him away with a shout of, “What the hell, Dean?”
“Sit down, Sammy,” Dean orders. One clear, shining, golden thought passes through the fog of his mind. I love them too much to loose them ever again. “You’re going to stay with me now. Both of you.” He smiles at them as he pushes them down into adjacent chairs.
“Dean, I have work to do in Heaven, I can’t just-” Dean slaps him.
“You’re both going to stay with me.” He rubs a soothing hand over the red mark he’d left on Castiel’s face. He laughs at the look of betrayal on his angel’s face. “Don’t look at me like that, Cas. I promise you that I won’t hurt you again if you can be a good little angel for me.”
Sam reaches for a gun and Dean shakes his head. “The same goes for you, Sammy. Be good and I won’t punish you.”
“Dean, what’s going on?” Sam asks, looking so dejected and helpless that Dean can’t help but grin.
“You will obey me,” he says, closing his eyes. “For I am your Master.” When he opens his eyes, they’re black, gleaming and glittering and shining with a completely new kind of life.