Chapter Text
He felt nothing. But that’s never been true.
Billie seized his heart and lungs inside his chest as Cas dragged him through the bunker halls. A rat race. Another moment where death was inexorable. Where Death became fatal.
They tumbled into a corner, a little room with one entrance and one exit. A sigil in blood was on the door and Dean heaved as the pressure left him, coughing and choking on the floor.
“Did it work?”
He lifted himself from the ground, biting back bile. Somewhere, Dean found it in him to nod his head.
Cas said something else. Deafening white noise prevented Dean from hearing it, but the look on his face was enough. A smile was far from him right now, but the hopefulness that he found in his unconscious search of the angel’s eyes brought the memory of one to the surface.
“...can wait her out.”
Naivety mingled with longing in Dean’s head. But he couldn’t do that—he couldn’t do this right now.
“And if we can’t?” Calculation. Pessimism. The shell, it had returned.
“We fight,” Cas said, that valiant, soldier’s look, increasingly tempting to follow, fixed on his face. Though it slipped the more Billie clawed at the weak protection he’d created for them.
“We’ll lose.” They both knew it. “I just led us into another trap…”
The tendency to blame himself that he still couldn’t ignore. He was rambling.
“Dean.” But him.
“It was Chuck all along. We shouldn’t have left Sam and Jack. We should be with them right now. Everybody’s gonna die, Cas.” It was on his name that Dean’s voice broke. “Everybody. I can’t stop it.”
He lost oxygen, but he forced another breath, solely for self-deprivation. Truths they didn’t need.
“She’s gonna get through that door.”
“I know.”
“And she’s gonna kill you,” Dean balked at the realization. That alone was what ruined him. “And then she’s gonna kill me.” A tightness closed his throat. “I’m sorry.”
He’d never meant anything more.
Cas had that gaze, into a spot in the corner.
“Wait, there is… there is one thing she’s afraid of. There’s one thing strong enough to stop her.”
The tone in his voice was alarming. Dread seeped into Dean through his bones.
“When Jack was dying, I made a deal to save him.”
“... You what?”
“The price was my life,” he forced on. “When I experienced a moment of true happiness, The Empty would be summoned, and it would take me, forever.”
Dean’s grief was immediate. How could I not know, we could have fixed it, we will , we can. There was too much not said. He hasn’t been happy since… Too much distance between him and Cas.
Then another wave of panic overloaded him. He looked into Cas’ eyes for the first time in a while and found them red and tired.
“Why are you telling me this now?”
Please don’t tell me it’s taking you now. Please. You can’t. I can’t.
“I always wondered, ever since I took that burden, that curse, I wondered what it could be?” Cas bored into Dean’s soul, not for the first time. “What my true happiness could even look like. I never found an answer because the one thing I want... It's something I know I can't have.”
You can have anything. Let this be over. Let me break a few more mirrors and work myself out. I will do anything for you.
“But I think I know... I think I know now,” he said. “Happiness isn't in the having, it's in just being. It's in just saying it.”
Saying what, Cas?
But even now, Dean failed. He shut down.
“What are you talking about, man?”
“I know.” The air punched out of Dean’s lungs; he was sure one glance at his face would have proven that Cas did know everything. But the realization wasn’t there.
“I know how you see yourself, Dean,” he choked. “You're destructive, and you're angry, and you're broken. You're ‘daddy's blunt instrument.’ And you think that hate and anger, that's... That's what drives you, that's who you are.” Dean breathed, or tried to. They both did. “It's not. And everyone who knows you see it. Everything you have ever done, the good and the bad, you have done for love.”
He didn’t believe that, not all of it. But he was starting to. Dean regarded Cas with a soft side he didn’t have ten years ago. He’d been regarding Cas that way for a long time.
“You fought for this whole world for love,” Cas demanded, like it was the most honest thing he could say. “That is who you are. You’re the most caring man on Earth. You are the most selfless, loving human being I will ever know.”
The love in those sentences almost made Dean double over. An exhale escaped him, masked by Billie pounding on the door. He’d pour over how he could have stopped this, right then, right there, if he had enough courage to to let more than a breath leap out of him in that moment.
Cas wasn’t done. “You know, ever since we met, ever since I pulled you out of Hell... Knowing you has changed me. Because you cared, I cared. I cared about you.” It hurt. “I cared about Sam, I cared about Jack... I cared about the whole world… because of you .”
It hurt.
But he failed again.
“Why does this sound like a goodbye?”
He wasn’t talking. Dean wasn’t even there. The question was desperate, as close as he would let himself get to dropping to his knees in front of Cas and pulling on the ends of the trenchcoat, begging him not to. The dread pounded in his ears and his jaw tingled, nausea threatening.
“Because it is,” Cas said, with the saddest, brightest smile on his face.
Dean came back to himself, shaking his head in small increments as those three words sunk into him, teared into his brain.
Three more destroyed him.
“I love you.”
If he were ready, if Dean could ever be ready. He’d waited and waited on those words. Waited to wrench them from his own heart and throw them at Cas himself, but he’d beaten him to it. And fuck, of all the ways it could have gone, all the ways it could have ended, all the happy endings Dean dreamed for himself that started or finished with Cas saying those words to him, it had to be–
The ax came down.
“Don’t do this, Cas,” Dean begged. There was so much emotion that went unseen. The pain he couldn’t express through childhood recoiled to a migraine, leaving only the soldier’s expression and very painful tears on his face.
He didn’t have to look back to know what lay behind him. He did anyway. Vital moments for Dean to memorize Cas, from the trenchcoat to the hair to the blood on his palm. Not that he hadn’t etched every detail into his memory by now, including the love that exuded from him.
Dean hadn’t known it was love at the time. Dean only knew now.
“Cas–”
“Goodbye, Dean.”
He was still smiling. Still happy as he shoved Dean away to the wall, and Billie died, and Cas died. Still loving in that last moment, as they locked eyes for what they both thought was the last time.