Chapter Text
Dean’s shoulders sag as he turns and watches Cas rush to close the Bunker’s dungeon door. His mind is racing but he’s so damn tired - of running, of the world ending, of the fate of the world resting on his shoulders once again. The exhaustion wars with the adrenaline that’s rushing through his veins.
He watches as Cas keeps moving, rushing to paint bloody sigils on the door. Anything to slow down Billie. Their words are clipped as they try to come up with a plan, but they both know they’re backed into a corner. They’ve faced the devil and God and everything in between, but nothing has ever felt as hopeless as this. Even Dean has to admit to himself that their chances aren’t looking so good.
Of course Billie catches up to them. Death doesn’t need to hurry. Her inevitability is undeniable. Her fists pound at the door, a death knell that shakes its way through Dean’s bones.
Dean drags his eyes up to look at Cas, searching for some sliver of hope. Even with his grace failing, Cas still holds an eternity of experience inside him.
Their eyes lock together, Cas holding his gaze as only he can. It feels like breathing, it feels like coming home, it feels like flying and falling all at the same time. It’s been so long since Dean looked, since he allowed himself to be looked back at. He’s just been so angry, and there hasn’t been time to fix the things that should have never been broken.
Dean watches as the emotions cross that familiar face, of this known-yet-unknowable cosmic being. Cas stares into Dean and the fear drains away. It’s replaced by sorrow, by regret, by a longing that burrows into Dean, digs its way into his chest. Billie taunts them through the door. The pounding is unrelenting and Dean is going to fall apart from it.
Suddenly, something shifts in Cas. The worry lines ease up, something nearing serenity spreading across his face. Cas nods slowly. Hope sparks in Dean’s chest - Cas has a plan.
Cas closes his eyes, just for a moment, but when he opens them everything has changed. He looks happy - something that has been missing for… weeks? Months? Maybe for years, Dean realizes with a shock. He hadn’t realized what he’d been missing.
We’ve just been so damn busy. I should’ve noticed.
Turns out, Cas does have a plan. As the words begin to pour from him, the hope in Dean is snuffed out. Words pour from him, a tidal wave that crashes into Dean, one that he knows he’s going to drown under if Billie doesn’t get to him first.
“Dean… I made a deal…”
Dread washes over Dean at the word, extinguishing the spark of hope as quickly as it had appeared. Deals are hellhounds tearing him apart. The power of Death at his fingertips, reaping children in exchange for his selfishness. They’re saving Sam and losing Cas in the process. They’re decades of guilt chained around his heart, dragging him down no matter how hard he tries to fight them.
Cas keeps talking, his eyes welling up as the flood washes over Dean. An inky blackness begins oozing its way out Cas, reaching up to wrap him in his own chains.
“Happiness isn’t in the having, it’s in just being. It’s in just saying it.”
How could Cas be talking about happiness in a time like this?
“You think that the hate and anger is what drives you, that it’s who you are. It’s not. And everyone who knows you sees it. Everything you have ever done, the good and the bad, you have done for love.”
Dean’s ears ring as he struggles through the pounding of Billie’s fists at the door, the pounding of Cas in his chest.
Why is Cas making this about him? And his love? His love got people hurt and killed, ripped away from him over and over. The echoes of Famine join the chaos ringing in his mind. “That’s one deep, dark Nothing you got there, Dean.” And oh, how those words had ripped through him then. They had hit their mark and settled inside him, confirming what he’d always known. What good could his love ever be, when there was Nothing inside him?
Regardless of what comes next, he’s damned either way.
Cas’ keeps talking and his words are knives and a lifeline at the same time. A lifetime of instinct is scrambling to fit the pieces together, to make it make sense.
“I cared about the whole world because of you. You changed me, Dean.”
“Why does this sound like a goodbye?” The words are ripped out of Dean. His heart can’t decide if it’s going to complete its attempt to crawl out of his throat, or if it’s going to freeze in place forever.
Cas looks up at him. He takes a shuddering breath, the tears he’s been trying to hold back finally making their way free to track down his cheeks. His voice cracks, soft as asphalt in the sunshine.
“Because it is.”
And there it is. Dean’s brain finally starts working and the pieces snap into place. Because Cas had learned love from the Winchesters, and to a Winchester, love meant climbing up on the sacrificial altar in place of the ones you loved. It meant making a desperate deal in the face of impossible odds, saying Not him. Take me instead.
It means Cas has done something incredibly stupid.
It means he’s going to die for it.
“I love you.”
A thousand responses fly through his mind. They rush into his throat and get caught. There’s not enough time to sort them out, to pick one, to say anything.
Don’t leave me again, it almost killed me last time.
If you do this, it was all for nothing.
I love you, too.
“Don’t do this, Cas.” He barely manages to get the words out, his voice breaking. It isn’t enough, but he’s choking on the storm inside him.
He’d been trying to find ways to build Something in the gaping void he knew was inside him. There was always a hunt, an emergency, an Apocalypse standing in the way of making any real progress. He’d thought after this one, once they got Chuck out of the way and were in charge of their own destinies, that just maybe he’d have a real shot at it.
Apparently he wasn’t made for happy endings.
The emptiness that Famine had seen so clearly in Dean becomes real in front of his eyes. The blackness swirls and solidifies, clawing its way up and around Cas.
Cas - his best friend, his most beloved companion outside of his brother, the one who had been the solid foundation of the last decade - stands calmly. His eyes are softer, more fond than Dean has ever seen them. He’s somehow still smiling, the last rays of the sunshine before the darkness can swallow Dean whole.
Billie won’t stop pounding, and the black tendrils are moving too fast. There’s no time to work this out now.
Cas reaches out to him, presses his palm against the handprint that had been burned into Dean’s shoulder so many years ago.
As Dean stares at Cas, the black ooze crawling up and around him and out of him, his life - their life - crystallizes. The Empty is here to claim Cas, and once it’s done devouring the best thing that’s ever happened to him, it will crawl its way and settle inside him. It will mean the rest of his life, and whatever comes after, will be nothing more than ash.
“Goodbye, Dean.”
Dean closes his eyes. Knows he should be watching, Silently he prays, begs, pleads with the universe, with any god or power able to hear him, to give him just five more seconds. After everything he’s done, everything he’s sacrificed and given up and bled for, he deserves that. Cas deserves so much better than what Dean was ever able to give him.
Against all probability, the universe answers.
The pounding on the door stops, the silence just as jarring as the noise. Dean opens his eyes. Cas is no longer visible, the only thing remaining a pile of black tendrils devouring him.
Instead, Jack is staring intensely at the spot Cas had been taken from.
“Hello, Dean.” His voice is sad as he turns his head to look at Dean. It cocks to the side, a motion that’s so familiar that Dean feels his heart clench.
“You called?”