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Dean’s second life started on Tuesday. He didn’t know it then - that something had just ended, that something had just started, that it was a Tuesday. It didn’t feel significant, back then. It didn’t feel like something he would want to remember, to celebrate. But he counted it back later - they reached Bobby’s place on Sunday, it took them two days to get there and it took two days for Sam to decide Dean had enough of moping in their hotel room and something had to be done. It happened on Tuesday.
On Tuesday, they summoned and killed Eve.
On Tuesday, the world as they knew ended and Cas died.
When Castiel didn’t come back that night nor the next one and there was no message from him or other attempt of communication, Sam packed them both, put their bags in the Impala’s trunk and called Bobby to say they were coming over. Dean had absolutely no intent to go, to leave the motel where he had seen Castiel for the last time, afraid that if he left, Castiel wouldn’t be able to find them, so he kept laying in his bed, not even looking at Sam as he was walking around their room, gathering their things. Abandoning that place – because that’s how it felt to him, not just checking out and heading to their next destination, but abandoning it – sounded too much like abandoning Castiel himself and Dean just couldn’t do it. He couldn’t, and he knew that Sam knew better than to expect something like this from him.
He also knew that he wasn’t the only one with a sinking feeling that their worst fears had come true. They didn’t know what had happened; Heaven was silent and no ritual or spell they used got them any closer to figuring out just what effect killing Eve had on the situation in the realm above. They tried to summon Balthazar and other angels they knew, they tried to summon Castiel himself, they tried to summon anyone, and nothing worked. After twentieth fruitless summoning ritual in a row, Dean was desperate enough to almost suggest summoning some demon too.
Sam must have felt it because he just looked at him with that look of half surprise, half understanding on his face, his eyes full of sympathy. Somehow it was worse than anything he could say, his look cutting through Dean, making him feel exposed and helpless under Sam’s scrutiny. He couldn’t stand it - the way Sam was looking at him, the way it made him feel. He couldn’t stand thinking of the reason they were in that motel room, hollowing out their stock of herbs instead of hitting back the road and leaving the memories of the past few months behind them, buried in a small clearing somewhere in the woods of Palouse National Forest.
Dean had just cleared his throat then and reached for another portion of herbs needed during the next ritual, avoiding his brother’s gaze.
Sam was mostly silent during those two days; he kept finding new spells and rituals they could use and didn’t say anything that wasn’t connected with what they needed to say and do to make them work. Dean was grateful for that, he really was, but then he knew it had to end sometime. So when in the morning of the third day Sam got up and started packing, Dean wasn’t surprised. If anything, he was amazed Sam gave him this much time.
“We have a job to do,” Sam said calmly, standing next to Dean’s bed and looking at him with such a serene face, Dean felt almost offended. Sam had no right to look so calm and peaceful when nothing, absolutely nothing made sense anymore and there was no hope left for them.
“He would like us to keep fighting, you know that,” Sam added, his right hand starting to twitch as if it couldn’t wait to be able to do something, anything. “You know as well as I do that he would tell us to keep doing our job. So get your sorry ass into the car - we’re going to Bobby’s. We have a lot to talk about and a lot of calls to make before we start the operation.”
Dean knew that tone and he knew that gleam in Sam’s eyes - Sam had a plan and nothing could stop him from following through. Even on a good day, it would take him a lot of time and effort to talk Sam out of whatever he intended.
It wasn’t a good day.
Dean was too tired to even think of fighting anymore and – even though he had no idea what insane plan Sam had in that crazy head of his - an hour later he found himself sitting in the Impala’s passenger seat, Sam driving them towards the interstate. Dean kept looking outside, at the wheat fields on both sides of the road, not quite believing they looked the same as four days ago when they were driving that road in the other direction, still as gold and ready for harvest as then. It felt wrong, in a way that nothing seemed to have changed. It felt wrong that they were surrounded by a calm, golden sea when there was supposed to be a storm in it, a hurricane, anything to show that something had happened two days ago - something huge, something important, something that Dean never wanted to take place.
The air was hot, smelling of summer and earth, and its heavy scent was overwhelming Dean’s senses, making him feel as if he was choking with it. The soft rustle of the ears of grain swaying back and forth in the wind grew to a deafening roar in his ears, making his head hurt. When Sam tried to put on one of the tapes, Dean just put his hand over Sam’s and shook his head, saying “Don’t.”
Sam nodded and put his hand back on the wheel, not asking.
They both knew Dean wouldn’t tell anyway.
Dean knew that Castiel had agreed to this. He knew that Castiel was aware of the spell’s possible outcome; he knew that both Sam and Castiel were sure there was no other way to kick Eve back to the purgatory. But he also knew that when he read what it might cost to use that spell, he hoped that this time they wouldn’t have to pay. He needed them not to and somewhere along the line he got himself convinced they wouldn’t.
That one time he let himself hope that everything would be alright but he got fucked as usual. And that thing, that right there, was even worse than the fact that out of the three of them, he was the only one eligible to cast the spell.
Telling himself that at least the spell worked and they had the job done, wasn’t doing it anymore. Nothing could make it better when he knew he had killed Castiel.
When the colors and sounds around him started fading slowly, the colors becoming bleaker and bleaker, faded out, the sounds quieter and quieter and less discernible, Dean almost sighed with relief even though he knew Sam would freak out when he noticed. In the flurry of thoughts whirling and battling inside his head, his senses were giving him a much needed break.
Dean could honestly say he had never seen so many hunters in one place, not even in the Roadhouse. How Sam and Bobby managed to gather all of them there, together, was beyond him - just as the reason why they would want to do such a thing.
When Sam went out of the house and stopped at the head of the stairs, looking around with a clear sense of purpose, and then started talking, Dean didn’t listen. He just looked at them - at Sam, at Bobby, at the hunters standing in front of the house. They were all listening intently, nodding to themselves whenever they agreed with whatever Sam said, and when the frequency of those nods increased, Dean – to his surprise - found himself listening too.
“We have to show them where their place is, we have to show them we won’t let them fuck with us and that whoever tries, will pay for killing our brothers,” Sam was saying, his voice strong. “We can do that. United we can do anything – we can make sure our friends, our families are safe. We can make sure those of us who died are avenged. We can do all of that and more – we just have to do it together. So I’m asking – are you with me?”
Sam’s eyes were full of passion, his gestures grand, his whole posture full of strange charisma, but there was also some boyish charm that made Dean think of how Sam looked all those years ago when Dad went missing. He thought he would never see that Sam again, not after all that had happened to them, but here he was, with exactly the same smile and sense of purpose he had back then.
Dean wasn’t surprised when the hunters started cheering. If he was able to actually care, he would cheer too.
It took him four months to fully register they weren’t at Bobby’s anymore and the only times he got to drive Impala was to the airport and back or to the grocery store whenever they run out of something Sam deemed absolutely necessary. It was as if he was in a haze, with the world around him clouded and every sound muffled. Everything seemed grey, washed-out, only the blood of the creatures they killed a vibrant red, only Sam’s voice strong enough to get to him and make him listen. Sam seemed to know this and kept talking to him, telling him it was all a side effect of the spell he had cast, that it would pass and as soon as it happened, they would hit the road again.
That promise, the vision of him and Sam in the Impala, eating the miles and arguing about the tape they would listen to or the direction they wanted to take, was what made him get up in the morning. That and the satisfied look Sam got every time they managed to track down and kill yet another creature.
“We’re gonna be done soon, Dean,” Sam kept saying.
Aiming at creature of the day, Dean hoped Sam was right.
Later, Dean couldn’t believe just how much Sam had done in those few months. He knew, of course, than Sam hadn’t thought of all of that during their drive to Bobby’s. He knew that Sam had been thinking about something like this for years, trying to figure out the best way to implement his plans, the best way to get people to listen and see the merits of what he had to offer. He knew that some of those ideas came from what Sam heard in Dean’s many rants and from what he had read in Dad’s journal. He knew that in a way it wasn’t Sam’s plan, but theirs, the Winchesters’ vision of what could be done to improve their lives and line of work, to increase the chances for their survival and in that way – the survival of those who were unfortunate enough to learn that the monsters under their beds were real.
When he came around, it was as if a whole new world was there. It felt more livable, somehow, more his and more Sam’s and – for the first time in years – he felt as if someone other than the two people he considered his immediate family actually gave a damn about his work and all the effort he had put into saving the world and the people in it.
He liked it.
Having his senses so muffled proved sort of inconvenient during hunts. Even if his sixth sense telling him if there was some creature hiding behind the corner was stronger than ever, from time to time he still got surprised, barely avoiding claws or sharp teeth. And sometimes – sometimes he wasn’t that lucky.
When he was actually able to think about it, Dean wondered why Sam kept taking him on the hunts instead of just leaving him in their apartment, waiting. Seemed like the rational thing to do.
One day he really run out of luck, getting claws of another creature that was trying to run out of the country through the airport deep in his chest. Sam was next to him in a second, killing the thing – Japanese demon, Dean remembered suddenly - and kneeling down, his hands trembling when they tried to assess the damage done. “Looks bad,” Dean stated matter-of-factly, wondering if it were his still mostly useless senses or his voice really sounded that weak, while Sam clenched his fists in response, taking a deep breath and reaching for his mobile.
“You’re gonna be okay, Dean, you have to be okay,” Sam said, his voice sounding desperate before it turned calm and cold as he said into his phone, “Team One to dispatch, we have a hunter down. I need paramedics in the warehouse eleven now.”
“Look at you, being so bossy,” Dean murmured, struggling for breath when Sam’s hands pushed down, trying to stop the bleeding. “Had a really good idea with those paramedics,” he added, filling woozy. The last thing he heard was Sam’s frantic cry, “Dean, stay with me, dammit! Don’t you dare leave me!”
He woke up the next day, still a little hazy from the meds, but not hazy enough not to notice Sam’s hand covering his own, and when turned his head to the right, he saw his brother, curled up in an abysmally small hospital chair, sleeping with his hand resting on the bed. Then he noticed the distress written all over Sam’s sleeping face and something stirred in him, something akin to hope, and he couldn’t help squeezing Sam’s fingers, wanting to let him know that he was alright, that they were alright.
Sam woke up immediately, his eyes widening when he saw Dean looking back at him, and smiled, standing up and bending down to hug him, whispering into Dean’s hair “I don’t know what I would do if I lost you.” Dean shivered at the anguish in those words, closing his eyes and allowing to himself to think that maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t alone in this.
Some seven months after they killed Eve, Dean noticed with surprise that the he could see the blue color of the sky again. A week later, he actually heard the soft clink of bottles when Sam opened the fridge in the apartment they were renting and two days later he noticed that Sam had his – Dean’s - favorite Metallica’s tape on instead of whatever filled his iPod’s hard drive nowadays.
He noticed the softening in his brother’s gaze when Sam was looking at him and he smirked back. “Something on my face, Sammy?” he asked, going for his trademark innocent tone.
Sam smiled, looking back at the road. “Not anymore, Dean.”
Two days later, they did their first not-airport-based hunt since they killed Eve. When they were standing on the cemetery two states away from their apartment, looking down at the burning remains of the man that had been hunting his family for three years already, Dean felt strangely alive. All of it was so familiar – the darkness, the smell of wet leaves covering the cemetery mixed with the smell of gasoline and burning bones, Sam’s hand on his shoulder. Even though he knew they still had to bury the remains, he felt invigorated and happy, standing there with Sam at his side, knowing that Sam wasn’t leaving, that he was there to stay.
Being sure of that – for the first time in his life – was all that he needed right then.
If he was honest with himself, it was all he ever needed.
Even when the colors and sounds had come back almost completely, even when he wasn’t half deaf anymore, sleep didn’t come by easy and the nightmares didn’t stop. He was still spending half the night lying awake in his bed, listening to Sam’s calm breath, wishing he could just fall asleep and dreading it at the same time, knowing he would wake up in sweat, the vision of Castiel’s dead face fresh in his mind. After all those months of waking up with the same picture burned in his mind, it was difficult to remember Castiel not dead, even if he had never actually seen him like this. The weight of this – of not remembering someone who used to be so important to him, to Sam, to them – was starting to be too much.
“Maybe if you slept better, you’d be able to get better faster,” Sam said one morning, putting a plate with scrambled eggs in front of Dean. “I’ve been watching you, you know. If those pills aren’t working anymore, we can get new ones.”
Dean shrugged, not wanting to discuss it. Pills made everything even worse – they didn’t stop the nightmares while they did prevent him from waking up in time, so he had stopped taking them months ago, deciding that a whole night of watching Cas – or, even worse, Sam, because yes, his subconscious was that twisted - dying was definitely too much. Sam seemed to take the hint and didn’t press further, taking his seat opposite to Dean and digging into his omelet.
“I’m not dropping it, you know,” Sam murmured when he finished his omelet.
“Didn’t count on it,” Dean murmured back, rolling his eyes.
Sam smiled as he took their plates to the sink and Dean couldn’t help wondering what Sam planned to do this time. He found out in the evening, when he came out of the bathroom after a shower and saw Sam lying on his side in his – Dean’s - bed, reading, as if he didn’t have his own bed standing just a few feet away. “Dude, what the hell?” Dean asked, as close to angry as he could get. “Me not taking any sleeping pills doesn’t mean I need a babysitter sleeping with me!”
“Had some problems sleeping myself recently and since I always slept better with you…” Sam shrugged, closing his book and putting it away. “You coming or do you plan to stand there the whole night?”
“If you hoard the blankets, you’re sleeping on the floor,” Dean grunted, slipping in beside him.
He wasn’t exactly surprised when he woke up in the morning after a dreamless sleep, feeling rested for the first time since forever. He always slept better with Sam too.
Her name was Katie. She was eleven years old, she had lost her father a year ago in a car crash and had watched a werewolf ripping her mother’s throat earlier that evening when she had contacted them. They were just two hours away and when they reached the diner she had told them to stop at, she was there, waiting for them in the corner booth, untouched chocolate milkshake in front of her. She told them what had happened, her voice not quavering even for a second, her face distant, closed off, her eyes seemingly dead. She asked if they could kill it and how long it would take.
Even if she didn’t ask in the end, Dean knew she wanted the chance to watch. He could see in his brother’s eyes that he knew it too.
When they knocked on her aunt’s door in the morning, Katie opened almost immediately, all tense. When they told her that all was taken care of, her shoulders relaxed just a tiny little bit. She tried to smile, she tried to thank them properly, but it was too much and so she just slammed the door in their faces when she couldn’t hold the tears back anymore.
Dean wasn’t even surprised when Sam had suggested it; he had been wondering how many more orphaned children it would take for Sam to come up with something like this, dreading the moment Sam finally decided to ask. As much as he knew that Sam would never leave him, that it wasn’t why he wanted to ask for it, somewhere inside him was still this fear that what he wanted to make out of his life wasn’t what Sam wanted to do with his and that in the end that would be the thing that would drive them apart.
“It makes sense, Dean,” Sam said, his tone almost pleading. “There are many hunters for whom it’s not safe to hunt anymore; they could be of help to those kids though. They could teach them, they could make sure they don’t get killed on the first hunt they decide to take. They could maybe even help them not to take that first hunt.”
“You mean we could help them,” Dean corrected him. “You know as well as I do that if we do this, if we get it, you won’t be able to stay away. And then I won’t either,” he added, his tone resigned. No matter how much he would hate it, he would stay with Sam - it wasn’t a matter of choice for him. Home - family - was where Sam was. He wasn’t able to give that up anymore, even if the price was his own happiness.
Sam didn’t deny any of it; he just showed the rest of his hot dog into his mouth and chewed furiously, most probably planning another attempt to convince Dean.
Dean didn’t say anything more. But when one month later he handed Sam the title of a big farm not that far from Bobby’s, Sam’s smile told him he didn’t have to.
It was strange to have a place they could call their own, to have rooms to furnish and decorate, to fight with Sam over what appliances they should get for the kitchen and which room should be turned into library or to debate with Bobby over the design of their safe room and the system of wards to implement on their property.
Their property. Dean had to admit it had a nice ring to it.
Still, he couldn’t help the yearning he felt every time he looked at the Impala sitting in the driveway.
It took him a year to catch up with what exactly Sam was doing. He needed that much to notice that as the works on the farm progressed, they were spending less and less time there, that there were a few retired hunters living with them and taking care of the two kids that somehow started living with them too, that Sam was handing more and more responsibilities connected with managing the net of hunters he created over to Bobby, that all of that was done with one goal in mind.
Sam didn’t want to settle down completely. Dean still had troubles believing his luck, but he could see it in his brother’s actions - this whole thing with acquiring a house wasn’t Sam’s way of trying to have some adjusted version of the white picket fence life he had wanted before. It took him some time, but in the end Dean started to believe Sam when he kept repeating that all he wanted was to have some kind of base that was just theirs, where they wouldn’t have to depend on anyone else and where they would be able to help those who lost everything after encountering something they thought belonged only in fairy tales. But he didn’t want to stay there permanently; Sam, just as Dean, felt they belonged on the road, driving from town to town and taking an odd hunt here and there. That was home; that was where he – where they – felt best.
When he realized that, Dean felt some invisible burden fell of his chest, letting him breathe in freely. Because that? That meant that even though he though it impossible, he didn’t have to resign from what he wanted.
Knowing that they had a place to return to, to lick their wounds in, to get some rest when life on the road was too much? It was just icing on the cake.
Dean rolled his eyes when the waitress serving them smiled at Sam, bending down to take their plates in a way that exposed her – sizeable and quite interesting, Dean gave her that – assets. He knew that Sam would smile and be all polite, as he always was, but he wasn’t leaving with anyone else but Dean.
“She’s real persistent,” Dean noted when she left for the kitchen, swaying her hips on her way there.
“All the more reason to leave now,” Sam murmured, looking at him impatiently. “It’s late enough – we can go straight to the cemetery. That sonovabitch Sullivan needs to be put to rest as soon as possible.”
“Cemetery it is, then,” Dean agreed, getting up. “And ten bucks says the ghost won’t be a problem.”
“Yeah, right,” Sam snorted. “Forgot already how he threw you through the church’s hall?”
Dean just shrugged. “I’ll take my chances.”
With all that he had? He felt plenty lucky lately.
-end-
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