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CASTIEL I.
when it comes to jack, well. it’s a chicken or the egg situation. castiel was there with kelly for the longest of all of them. jack chose him in the womb. god to the virgin mary. jack called for him, resurrected him with only a request to the universe. yes, that is it. there’s a discussion to be had there. before he is castiel’s or kelly's or even lucifer’s, jack is a child of the universe, of the world.
this world, however, belongs to the winchester brothers.
when castiel was dead, they took jack in. he’d been grateful at the time. happy, even. sam and (most importantly) dean had taken care of jack for him. for castiel. that is what he saw. dean was rough with the child, and sam not being catatonic ninety percent of the time castiel considered a miracle. they had done it, despite.
call him naive, but this created an illusion. he managed to believe, for a while, that jack might be it. the thing that finally intertwined him with the winchesters. with dean. the thing that allowed him to become part of… whatever they were. he had mostly accepted that sam would always be a part of that equation, because dean would never unsink his teeth from his flesh. on some days castiel was content with this. him and sam shared a friendship, if a twisted and disloyal one. on some other days castiel thought of breaking down another wall and leave him catatonic on the floor, dislodging his taint from the righteousness he rebelled for all those years ago.
castiel knew better than to do that. he’d learned. and he’d thought he’d been progressing, and he thought, this might be it, he thought, stupidly. this might be the bridge i’ve been longing for.
JACK I.
when he is born, he sees. a father? not a name in his mind, just a figure, a feeling, a memory etched into his molecules.
sam, this is.
sam is kind. he stops the other man with the large weapon in his arms. his voice is calm, soothing, his smile is warm. if sam makes jack upset he apologizes, which is nice of him. he teaches jack things, answers his questions. he believes in jack. he wants jack to be useful, dean said. sam said he wanted jack to be good. jack can do that, if it means sam will be kind forever.
admittedly, he thought it was meant to be… someone else, but this should do.
sam feels like safety when he’s instructing jack on how to make the bed. a gentle voice and soft blankets, they take him back to easier times when he was floating and smaller. sam smiles at him when he gets it right. yes, when jack gets dean to like him, this should do. quite nicely.
DEAN I.
john’s voice rings in his ears. kill sammy.
“if i’m right,” kill sammy, “and it comes to killing you,” kill sammy, “i’ll be the one to do it.”
he almost expects jack to let out a, “yes sir,” as he leaves the room.
when jack saves sammy, dean decides to give him a break. when cas comes back, that's his reward. when cas leaves again, and dean doesn't know where he is. well, mom is missing too. jack is missing too. dean and sam have other priorities at the moment.
CASTIEL II.
“i don’t understand. can’t you bring sam back? why didn’t you bring sam back?”
DEAN II.
jack asks him, too. dean cannot speak. he needs to get his mom, get sammy’s body, get him back. somehow.
jack says, “maybe, if we found the body, i could try.”
dean cannot speak. cannot muster the slightest of smiles, but he can nod, not softening but something close to it. jack has always, after all, won dean over by protecting sam. castiel never did manage that protection aspect, so dean’s fondness for him is a curious thing.
his fondness for jack, well. both improbable and extremely predictable.
SAM I.
castiel tells him on one of those nights where sam doesn’t sleep in favor of deluding himself into the belief that he has any lead whatsoever on dean. castiel is none to judge. what does he know about sleep?
castiel says, “about jack, you’re not alone. i can handle him just as much.”
the prompting, sam will not remember. he’ll remember the feeling. a tame and small thing in the weight of everything else. like a realization without revelation.
jack and his grief and his power and his health, it’s one of the many situations sam has been assigned (by popular demand, by mom, by circumstance, by choice). now he sleeps about four hours a day, but he does his job and his duty to his family, the hunters, nick. it’s not that jack and the loss of his powers doesn’t worry sam, it does. it’s not that sam doesn’t think it his responsibility, he does. it’s not that he thinks he can handle it all by himself. not quite. rather, it’s castiel that has not been a… factor.
not intentionally. castiel cares for jack, too, that is quite clear. he cared before sam himself. castiel helped kelly before, and he helps sam now.
and that is the crux of it, really. to sam, castiel helps. a generosity. temporary aid with something that ultimately, is only on sam’s shoulders for sam to handle, not sam and castiel. not sam and mary, or bobby, or charlie, or anyone else. (dean, perhaps, were he something other than missing or a meatsuit at the moment.) not equally, at least. it has been this way, for an entire year. the assumption is force of habit.
just as much.
“i know, cas,” sam smiles. he knows. and in his bones, he does not believe it.
after passing through jack’s room and finding him deep in dreams, moving one of his locks from his face, pulling his covers higher up, sam sleeps two hours that night. castiel doesn’t know about sleep.
JACK II.
every night during the apocalypse, jack looked up at the thundering sky and lied down next to mary. i’m doing good, helping people, he’d think. sam and dean would be happy. he’d fall asleep to that thought. every night.
he didn’t get to kill michael. he lost his powers, his body is cannibalizing itself, because he is more of a creature than a human. inherently wrong in his very nature.
selfishly, he hopes they will still manage to remember him fondly, despite his late uselessness.
dean and castiel leave the room and jack is unsure why, but it’s alright. sam stays. sam was the first person he ever saw. sam is the last person he will ever see. and jack, well. jack is pretty good with that.
SAM II.
jack dies before his eyes, because of course he does. he’s alone in a room with his dead child, but he’s been alone in a room with his dead child his whole life, in some ways. his brother is punching walls in the corridor, and the man jack woke up from the dead to take care of him ran after dean like a trained therapy dog. like sam always does.
sam is not angry. he’s been too tired to be angry since he was (one hundred and—) twenty-seven. twenty-eight? years and years. he cries a bit, and indulges himself in kissing his dead baby’s forehead before dean returns.
he’s been stagnant for so long, he feels the dirt in his blood as it starts to rot. he decides to build a pyre.
CASTIEL III.
sam and dean are hunters. they are known for enjoying it when dead things stay dead. they have only ever made that exception for each other. resurrections are common amongst the brothers’ circle, but they don’t actively seek it, unless it’s each other whom they’ve lost. this is a hard rule castiel understands. angels fly, demons corrupt, and sam and dean are each other’s only and singular exception.
their grief is often an ugly thing, even when it’s not for each other. but tonight, they drink with castiel. in this sense, he is a part of them. their family, their friend of years, of a decade. it passes quickly. afterwards, they retreat back into themselves and each other. they murmur and comfort each other all over the fucking bunker. sitting next to each other in silent support. they are grieving jack like a fucking married couple.
when sam suggests a resurrection strategy for jack, castiel has the nerve to feel surprised. glad, but surprised. even moreso, when dean’s only issue with the plan is lily sunder. when it’s an entirely indulgent plan. sam and dean know nothing of heaven or the empty. they simply cannot tolerate jack’s absence.
they have opened this thing up to jack, even if not completely. more than they have to anyone else before.
castiel, indulgent, sins and wonders how they will react, when the empty finally takes him. he decides not to wonder too long, for the answer has been given to him many times before.
DEAN III.
there was an audacity with which castiel came to dean and his brother and told them he’s kept a secret of this size about their kid. something burned hot in his lungs at that moment, in his throat. he felt the need to yell at castiel until he spilled everything, or beat him until he got the hell away from dean’s family. you're dead to me. you have no right.
dean was no saint, and he’d treated jack with his worst poison in the past. but the thing about dean, is that only he gets to inflict ruination on his people.
(it was a silly thought, in retrospect. of course cas is family. he’s simply not sam. he’s not dean’s kid. he’s not dean’s mother. that’s all.)
but he had a right to know. dean and sam both had a right to know. more right than anyone else in the entire world. this secret killed their mom, this secret made their boy kill their mom. it’s a twisted, twisted thing. dean will throw it all into the ocean before this week is done.
SAM III.
sam tried. the hardest he ever tried at anything in his life, it was here. with jack.
now jack is running around, undead, soulless, drawing power from cannibalization, from self-mutilation. sam sees himself letting his brother get turned into a vampire, locked in the panic room, unclean in the biblical sense, and cannot move. he cannot move a single muscle. he has to follow dean, or he drowns.
he keeps thinking about jack with mary’s empty shell in his arms. the misery in the eyes of ruin. him and dean tried to resurrect mary, too. sam can’t forget jack was first.
there is a purity in misery. a mercy. jack is enacting these punishments and sam wishes, wishes he could bear them all. another futile attempt at cleansing his rotten veins.
he wants to tell dean, “i could never have saved him, because i’m just as cursed as he is.”
an abomination. a boy with demon blood. with the devil's blood.
he says nothing. heaven is in his house, and has no interest in anything sam wants to say.
JACK III.
lucifer and duma tug him all around, like a stupid child. they both direct his hands towards destruction. they say it’s all in the name of sam and dean.
hearing sam’s prayer feels like his lungs are opening up.
dean and i, we just to talk. we want things to go back to how they used to be.
jack also wants this. it’s all he ever wanted. he follows sam’s voice home.
he follows sam and dean’s voices into a box. the other voice, the voice that follows jack says stupid, stupid child.
castiel is nowhere to be found. by the time he arrives, jack is already lost.
CASTIEL IV.
being a winchester is a closed practice. they close it, sometimes, even to their kin. sam and dean have opened it up to jack in ways castiel hasn’t ever witnessed before. only to jack. castiel's idea of it is tinted with idealism, he's aware. he knows the reality of this favoritism resembles a protective shield just as much as a pair of shackles. jack is their favorite, for better and for worse.
this is how it happens. the chicken cracks the egg.
dean’s pretty green eyes are filled with fire and his pretty mouth is two seconds away from spitting out, ‘it’s my kid. i put him in a box if i want to.’ a whole patriarch, brought up on alcoholic poison and gunpowder.
sam looks dead. catatonic, of course. a doormat wife.
castiel screams his lungs out at dean and loses, and jack leaves, and dean kicks castiel out of his house, again, like an overstepping mistress.
later on at the graveyard, there is once again dean. he stands tall and with a set jaw. he has a gun in his hand and the lord intends for him to use it.
castiel does not tell jack that he doesn’t have to be like castiel. that he doesn't have to die like this, at the hands of a winchester. not for lack of intent, no— he is simply blasted away.
DEAN IV.
jack inherits the box in which he was going to throw himself to the bottom of the ocean. he understands this, in a drowned out sort of way. he does not acknowledge it.
but suddenly he’s twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one. he’s locking up sammy in the panic room. he’s pushing his broken, battered, moribund soul down sammy's throat.
he's pointing god's gun at his two-year old. despite everything, jack comes to him again. sweetly, docile.
well. at least he dies human.
dean's hand begins to tremble.
JACK IV.
dean is two seconds away from spitting out ‘it’s my kid. i kill him if i want to.’ he doesn’t. jack hears it anyway, and he agrees. he kneels down. he wonders—
jack hears sam calling his name. his voice is loud and desperate. alive.
SAM IV.
there was fear in chuck’s eyes. sam has feared this child, too, but this is his child.
nowadays, he only ever prays to jack. this is how sam reasons with himself, as he points a gun at god and pulls the trigger.
for dean. for jack. reckless and stupid, this is what winchesters do for family.