1.

Has Dean changed?

This question troubled him while he was away, and it troubles him now. Castiel watches him from the other side of the circle of holy fire, on the grease-stained cement floor of an abandoned parking complex. The circle of fire currently contains the archangel Michael in the vessel of Adam Milligan. Thunder drums over Kansas City, distant and sharp. Rain lashes at the parking garage, pouring in through the windowless openings between the heavy floors. Despite his diminished state, Michael is, after all, an archangel. And archangels do not like to be contained.

Dean is staring back into the eyes of his half brother, holding the crumpled slip of paper Michael threw at him: The instructions for the Cage spell to trap Chuck. The fire paints his unshaven jaw a warm orange and leaves his eyes in dull shadow.

Finally, Dean looks down at the spell.

“This says we need a ‘leviathan blossom,'” Dean says. He has to speak loudly to be heard over the rain. “What the hell is that?”

“It grows in Purgatory,” Michael says, his back to Castiel. Thunder rumbles, and a gust of wind flaps Castiel’s coat around his legs.

“And how the hell are we supposed to get that?” Dean asks, dropping his arm.

Michael makes no reply. Dean must not like what he sees on his half brother’s face.

“Listen, you—” He starts towards the holy fire, his free hand twitching.

“Dean.”

Thunder rumbles again, its silence filled immediately by the rush of the rain. And then, in the distance, they hear an unearthly wail. It slowly rises in pitch, then falls.

The tornado sirens are sounding in the city below.

Dean stills. His eyes travel over Michael one more time, then he holds up the paper. “Well thanks anyway. I guess we’ll figure out how to get there by ourselves.”

“So long as God allows it,” Michael says.

Dean’s face darkens.

“I’d like to see him try and stop us,” he says.

“It’s not a matter of stopping you,” Michael says. He shrugs Adam’s shoulders. “If He allows you to go, it’s because He wills it.”

Dean is clearly fighting the urge to do something—his fists are clenching and unclenching, and his eyes dart down to the sides, as if looking for something. Before he can figure out what, Castiel is circling around the flames to stop him, his footsteps drowned in the sound of the rain.

“I mean, you can’t even be sure He didn’t send me in the first place.” Michael puts one of Adam’s hands onto his chest. “It took you 12 years to pull Adam out of our cage. Is that because He finally let you succeed? Or just because you hadn’t ever tried before—?”

Cas reaches Dean just as Dean’s hand closes around the jug of holy oil. Cas shoves him bodily, barking “Dean!” The jug shatters on the concrete. The oil meets the circle, and as the fire flares up, Cas grabs Dean to shield him. Not fast enough—it scorches both of them.

Then it dies down as quickly as it flared up, and Dean is still pushing back on Cas, furious.

“Get the hell off me!”

Cas lets go. Dean shoves away and storms off, back into the dark interior of the garage, without looking at Cas.

Panting, Castiel looks back at the holy fire. The circle is still complete—still holding Michael—now with a new, asymmetrical bulge.

Something smells burnt. Castiel realizes his coat is still smouldering. He puts it out.

Unaccountably embarrassed, he doesn’t look up to see Michael, and instead hurries after Dean. The tornado alarm whines behind them.

The ceiling of the garage is low, stubbled concrete, dripping with water from the roof above them and creating a dark, claustrophobic space. Cas follows the sound of Dean’s footsteps towards the elevators, away from the rain and the meager natural light. He catches up to Dean in the glass-walled elevator bay, as he’s pressing the down button.

“Dean.”

One fluorescent light is still working. It flickers above them. “Yes?” Dean says warningly.

The holy fire burned him on the leg, on the outer side of his calf, and through the burnt hole in the denim Castiel can see a red, angry wound. Castiel’s own anger mixes with the urge to heal it, but obstinacy wins out. “That was incredibly stupid. Michael was baiting you." Cas gestures furiously back out the glass. “You shouldn’t have tried to attack him. He can still kill both of us.”

Dean glares at him. “Chuck wouldn’t let that happen,” he finally says.

Cas drops his arm. “Right. So, what, no other threat matters?”

“Pretty much.” Dean checks for the elevator. It still hasn’t arrived. “We’re bulletproof, baby.”

This is intolerable.

But Dean, apparently, isn’t in an arguing mood. Abruptly, neither is Cas. “Then—what now?" Cas says. "We can’t just leave him—them—there. They helped us, they gave us the spell to trap Chuck.”

Dean follows Cas’s gesture with his eyes, uninterested. “Do what you want,” he says, looking back at the elevators. “Just let me get some distance first.” He prods the elevator button again.

Cas, as ever, trying to understand: “You don’t trust him.”

“I don’t trust me, either,” Dean says, glaring at the elevator button. Still, the light doesn’t turn on. “Damn thing,” Dean mutters. “How are we supposed to get the hell out of here? No—he won’t help us get to Purgatory. Leave me alone with him and I don’t know what I’ll do. Fucking—”

With a sharp clack he stabs the button furiously with two fingers, over and over and over. Then he hits the panel with his fist, making a frustrated noise.

The light doesn’t turn on.

Dean exhales. “I’m taking the stairs.”

He pushes past Cas to open the stairwell door. Cas moves out of his way, but not fast enough—Dean’s shoulder brushes his. It takes him another second to register that Dean is holding the door open for him.

When Dean looks at him, raising his eyebrows impatiently, Cas shakes his head.

“Fine,” Dean says. “Catch your own ride back.”

The door slams shut behind him, echoing down the concrete stairwell. Cas is left alone with the sound of the rain and the flickering fluorescent light. The rain is quieter in here, a distant roar like a waterfall.

He closes his eyes. He doesn’t regret returning from his self-imposed exile. He doesn’t.

Has Dean changed? People never really change, Dean said to him once, sometime in their Apocalypse year. What that really meant, Castiel eventually learned, was that he never changed. Meanwhile, Castiel changed so much that he doesn’t recognize himself as an angel. He doesn’t recognize what he is at all.

Over the years, he has seen Dean in every state from abjection to desperate determination, but his essential nature has never changed. He is a man of principle, even if those principles are sometimes outside of Cas’s understanding. He cares about the greater good, even if realizing it means his own destruction. And he hates change, for worse or for better.

This, this fight against Chuck, it’s different. Dean is acting differently. It isn’t like his moody hopelessness in the face of an existential threat. It never lets up. Ever since the cemetery, something is different.

Is it Chuck’s fault? Has Dean changed because he found out about the strings, or because Chuck stopped pulling them? Castiel doesn’t know. All he knows is he’s never seen Dean like this. Not with the Mark, not with the Darkness, not with the Michael and the Ma’lak Box. Yes, Castiel came back, despite it all, but he still feels lost at sea.

Without light or sound, the elevator door slides open behind him. It waits a moment for a passenger to climb inside, then it closes its doors again.

Back out in the garage, Michael waits in the circle of holy fire, Adam’s arms folded. Wind tosses his hair.

“I’ll douse the flames in a moment,” Castiel says.

“I’ll wait,” Michael replies.

The tornado siren wails.

Michael gestures after Dean, in the direction he disappeared. “He’s different.”

Castiel puts his hands into his pockets. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand the circumstances. It’s Chuck. You don’t know what he’s done.”

Michael makes a bemused face with his human vessel. “Don’t I?” He holds up Adam’s hand. “I don’t even need the details. You know the way that He treated me, Lucifer—His own sons, to slaughter.”

Castiel swallows a stupid urge to defend Dean. He thinks of Jack, two black wings burned onto the cemetery grass.

But he's never not thinking of Jack.

“He likes that plot, doesn’t He,” Castiel says, voice low.

The sound of an engine rumbles from a few floors below them.

“Are you going to let me go, now?” Michael says, re-folding his arms.

In a moment. Castiel considers asking him how freedom feels, after all this time. “Where will you go?” he asks instead.

“Wherever I want,” Michael says. “Doesn’t that sound nice?”

A month or more ago, Castiel’s answer might have been different. “No,” he says.

He can’t hear the Impala anymore, so he lifts a hand and beckons, diverting a sheet of rain inwards to douse a corner of the fire. He’s expecting a goodbye, something resentful or guilt-tripping, but Michael and Adam are gone before the smoke has even dissipated.

*

Years ago, long before Jack, before the deal with the Empty or the return of Chuck, Castiel got a car of his own. He stole it from a display at an antique car show. He was newly without wings, not yet an expert on crossing Earth by human means. The theft was partly a crime of opportunity, and partly based on Dean’s long diatribes about the inferiority of modern cars, made in the hope that Dean would approve his decision. And partly, it was the Continental itself—the car caught his fancy.

Dean didn’t just approve of Cas’s choice, he was delighted by it. The ’78 Lincoln Continental was a nice model, almost extravagant, and he said it was good to see Cas loosening up and living a little. This one had been well maintained—he pitied the guy Cas had stolen it from, and he said if the shoe was on the other foot, he’d probably hunt Cas down and kill him, but given the circumstances, he was excited to putter around with it. He and Sam were living in the bunker by then, with a bay full of antique cars and specialty repair equipment. So when time allowed, Dean would give the Continental a tune-up.

He gave Castiel advice, too, about caring for the car so it wouldn’t need such frequent maintenance, and Cas tried studiously to follow it. When he inevitably damaged the car again, Dean would fix it for him. It was a matter of respect, Dean said, in a tone that implied Cas was not being sufficiently respectful of the machine. Castiel really was fond of the car. It was just that there were a lot of moving parts, and a lot of outside factors on the road, and a lot of angels out for his blood. He didn’t like driving it as much as he just liked having it—having something of his own to care for.

On one memorable night in 2015, Dean insisted on driving the Continental. Normally, Castiel preferred that, but Dean was in the worst throes of the Mark, and they were in a rush to meet someone claiming to have a cure, and though Dean had often told him Don’t drive angry (a quote from a movie about a rodent), he was not taking his own advice. He told Cas to navigate, but Cas was more focused on how Dean was speeding and tailgating his way down the highway. “You need to slow down, Dean, you’re going to hurt someone,” he said as another truck moved out of the left lane so Dean could hurtle past it. “Or damage the car.” Dean ignored him and asked him again what exit they were supposed to be going to?

“Exit 34,” Cas said, exhaling angrily. “In 6.4 miles.”

“Listen,” Dean said testily, turning towards Cas to begin a lecture, but Cas grabbed his arm and barked “Dean!” as the taillights right in front of them lit up red—too close, of course, because Dean was too close—and Dean slammed on the brakes but not fast enough. With a sharp bang, loud like a gunshot but somehow broader, the Continental struck the other car. They both pitched forward sharply, held back only by lap belts. No airbags deployed. Castiel, with his superhuman reaction time, caught himself on the dashboard, instantly spraining the tendons in his wrists and arms. He sat back up. The car was no longer moving. Red blinkers pulsed in front of them. “Dean?”

Dean was dazed, blinking, bent forward over the wheel.

“Did you hit your head?” Cas prompted.

Dean blinked at him. “No airbags in the Continental,” he croaked.

Castiel lifted his hand to Dean’s forehead, pain lancing through his injured arm. He had only recently recovered his grace, but his stint as a human had made him more aware of pain—it was now more than just a status message about his vessel’s state. Dean’s eyes fluttered shut, a pained expression cutting through the haze. When Castiel touched his temple, he almost flinched.

After he’d healed Dean’s concussion, and then his own muscle sprain, and they were standing out in front of the car, Dean snapped at him, “You distracted me.” Cas didn’t want to fight with Dean in this state, but he felt bereft looking at the bent fender and ruined grille. He stayed silent and wiped the other driver’s memory and they drove off with their bent fender and met Sam and the demon who said he had a cure. It was a lie; they killed the demon. Dean didn’t apologize to Cas, and in fact told Sam their fender bender was Cas’s fault. But some weeks later, after Dean was finally cured from the Mark, and after Cas was cured from Rowena’s spell, he found his car in the garage with the front fender repaired.

Not long after that, Lucifer lost the Continental during his travels in Castiel’s vessel, so Jack never saw the car.

*

Back at the bunker in western Kansas, it’s a clear, sunny afternoon. The war room and library are empty; Castiel walks down the inner hallway, passing Jack’s closed door, and at the end finds Dean in 7B. He’s bent over a card table holding a thick leather-bound spellbook, with a bronze bowl set beside it. His phone lies on top of the book, screen black, holding down the slip of paper with the spell on it. Dean glances up when Cas comes in, then goes back to the book, tracing a finger along the line he’s reading.

“Have you heard from Sam?” Cas asks. “Did he find Eileen?”

“No,” Dean says, not looking up. Cas frowns in the direction of Dean’s phone.

“You’re not worried about that?” Cas says. “Did you try calling him?”

Dean elects not to reply.

He continues not to look up as Cas approaches, to read what Dean’s reading. Cross-referencing Michael’s spell, perhaps, though that’s not really like him. Castiel comes around the table behind Dean to read over his shoulder. He puts his hands in his pockets and clenches them into fists to divert some unknown tension. He’s expecting a rebuke or a sharp comment from Dean, but instead he gets only a brief glance. The silence is an unexpected relief. Instead of reading, Castiel’s eyes fall on Dean, the sliver of his profile he can see, his ear, the short hair right behind it. His hand, braced flat on the open book.

“What does it say?” Cas finally asks, breaking the silence.

“Few things we need for the spell,” Dean says, running his finger along the page. “Salt from the Dead Sea, a ‘lock of a parent’s hair entwined with the hair of the child’... Traveler has to give blood, draw the blood of a monster, mix it all together, burn an ancient bone in it, then kill the monster with the bone. There’s a sigil too. The whole nine.”

This spell seems easy for something strong enough to trap the Almighty God. Cas frowns.

“Thought I could use some of Mary’s hair plus mine, but I couldn’t find her hairbrush,” Dean says, voice gruffly blank. He’s in a phase of never mentioning her, and, if she comes up, pretending she was never resurrected. “It’s not here. So we’re SOL for that. Any ideas?”

Cas looks at him for a moment.

“We could use Jack’s,” he says.

Dean’s hand stills on the book, then his finger taps lightly against the page. “Oh,” he says. He goes on not looking up. “Yeah. Didn’t think of that.”

After Jack’s death, Castiel visited his bedroom a few times. It’s hard; the bed still looks recently slept in, and his laptop is charging on the desk, next to an empty novelty Walking Dead mug crusted with hot chocolate. Whenever he went in, Castiel considered cleaning it up, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

“He left a comb on the dresser. I’m sure it’s still there,” Cas says, then clears his throat because it comes out hoarse. “He wasn’t my son by birth, but it should work for the spell.”

“Okay,” Dean says, still not turning.

Castiel hasn’t visited Jack’s room again since his return from exile. He’s realizing that probably, no one has.

Dean makes no move to go fetch the comb.

He didn’t pull the trigger. He came to the brink, and he stopped. It was Chuck who killed Jack. The problem is that for Dean, coming to the brink is as good as jumping off. In his mind, he may consider himself a man who has already crossed the line.

“Cas, when did you come back?” Dean says.

“Three minutes ago,” Cas says. He adds, coldly, “I took a taxi.”

Dean doesn’t take the bait, or turn around. He’s stopped reading. “No, not—” he says after a pause. “I meant, uh...”

Does he actually want to talk about it—after all this time? Castiel finds it hard to believe, and sudden resistance kicks out inside him, as if to brace against whatever Dean is about to say. His defenses rise, and so does his disgust—for Dean’s weakness, for his own, for the shame of his departure, the shame of his return. Don’t say anything, don’t say anything, don’t even say Jack’s name—

Then Dean’s phone lights up, buzzing on the table. Castiel almost flinches. Dean doesn’t move. Castiel watches his profile, fists clenched inside his pockets.

The call is from Eileen’s cell.

After a moment, Dean reaches for it and answers.

It’s not a videocall. “Eileen?” he says anyway. “Sam? Where the hell are you guys?”

He turns away from Cas, listening with the phone pressed into his ear and a frown on his face. Cas can hear it—no one replies, but there’s a shuffling sound of fabric, and then a distant, muffled yelp of pain.

“What is it?” Cas says.

“I think it’s a butt dial,” Dean says. “Or—” Then Dean stops, and his face hardens.

Castiel can hear it too.

It’s Chuck’s voice.

“You’re so helpful, Sam,” Chuck says, muffled. “Now sit still. This won’t hurt a bit.”

A man gasps in pain, then grunts, getting ahold of himself—a couplet instantly recognizable as Sam.

“I don't really know what I'm looking for here, so this might get messy,” Chuck says.

Cas opens his mouth, starting to say something—but Dean motions for him to keep quiet.

“Oh,” says Chuck’s voice, louder now, and interested. “Do we have an audience? That’s fun. Give it up, now, Eileen—”

They hear a scuffle. Then, clearly:

“Dean? Is that you?”

Dean grips the phone, making no reply. He’s too angry to speak.

“Where are you?” Castiel says sharply, loud enough for the mic to pick him up. “Where are you keeping them?”

“Why, you gonna come get me?” Chuck says, in mock fear. His voice sharpens: “You don’t have it in you, Dean—didn’t last time, won’t this time.”

Dean manages to speak at last: “Don’t be too sure.”

Chuck makes a dismissive noise. “Please. I know your every move. I have all the cards, Dean, and I can see yours. And they all suck.”

“Dean!” Sam’s muffled voice cries out suddenly. “Dean, don’t—”

The call cuts off.

Dean flings his phone across the room.

*

“They’re in Las Vegas,” Castiel reports, returning to the saferoom soon after, with a laptop in hand. He managed to ‘Find My Friends’ Sam’s phone, without any help. “A casino.”

Dean looks up from the spellbook, giving the GPS map a cursory glance. “Okay. Good to know.”

“Are we going to finish the spell and go?”

Dean glances up at him. “This isn’t the Cage spell. We don’t have all the ingredients.”

“Oh.” Right. Cas pauses. “But Sam—”

“We still need the Leviathan blossom. This is the spell to get it.”

Castiel finally looks at the book, and the spell bowl. There’s a sawed-off bone in the bowl, and a pile of sea salt. He looks back up at Dean, frowning.

“What? You want to go to Purgatory? Aren’t we going to save Sam and Eileen?”

Dean shuts the leather-bound book. “We have all the ingredients for the Cage spell except for one: The Leviathan blossom from Purgatory. This is a ritual that can get us there—” He taps the cover of the book. “I wasn’t talking about the Cage spell before, I was talking about this. It needs a sacrifice, but it’s nothing too bad—”

“Dean—” Cas sets the laptop down, barely squeezing it onto the crowded table. “Dean, we have to go save Sam and Eileen.” He raises his eyebrows, prompting, as Dean continues to look at the book. “Sam? Your brother?”

“This will save Sam,” Dean finally says. “By locking Chuck up for good.”

Cas opens his hands, uncomprehending and upset. It feels like he’s talking to a brick wall instead of to Dean. “While we sit here, he’s hurting Sam—probably torturing him—”

Dean cuts him off. “Whatever you’re suggesting, Cas—that we go charging into some casino like a couple of idiot heroes—it’s a temporary fix. I’m talking about a permanent fix. A spell. We just kill a monster using this blade—” His voice is calm, but his arm jerks spasmodically and he grabs the bone out of the bowl. He gestures with it as he continues— “and we can summon a reaper and hitch a ride with the monster to Purgatory. Long as we can convince the reaper to say yes.” A beat. “Tell me you’ve got a better plan. ‘Cause I know you don’t.”

Cas opens his mouth to argue, but it just turns into a look of disappointment. He shakes his head slowly. He doesn’t understand any of this.

After another moment, Dean looks away, back at the spellbook. He still needs the hair from Jack’s room, but it’s clear that out of guilt or denial or stubbornness, he isn’t going to go get it himself. Castiel leaves to go get it. Going into Jack’s room is hard for him, but he can do it.

Maybe Dean has changed. Maybe, when this is over, the real Dean will return.

2.

The vampires’ nest was in the gymnasium of an unfinished high school fieldhouse, abandoned halfway through construction due to some unknown budget shortfall. It’s a cool, moonless night. The only light is the orange streetlights coming through the high, wide windows, never filled in with glass. Ivy hangs down one of the window frames, drawing a swaying gray line of shadow across the glowing floor. The last vampire left alive is a thin, smooth-faced young male bundled in a black hoodie. It’s bound on the dull floor of the basketball court, in the middle of the free throw circle. Castiel, covered in the blood and viscera of the vampire’s dead siblings, draws a sigil around the vampire in its own blood. Dean is outside, getting the remaining spell ingredients from the car.

“So you’re... what, his sous chef?” the vampire says to Cas, who is on his knees drawing the bloody pattern.

Castiel doesn’t look up, instead reaching for more blood from the puddle around the vampire’s sneakers. He pulls it to the edge of the circle, drawing the Enochian letter to match the diagram he memorized in Dean’s book.

“You’ll be at peace with your brothers and sisters soon,” Castiel says.

“Don’t make me laugh,” the vampire kid says. “What’s this really about?”

Cas hears the gymnasium door open. Dean’s back.

“It’s not important,” Cas says, bending over his work.

Dean’s footsteps come up behind him. “Shut up,” Dean says to the vampire. “No talking.” Dean sets the spell bowl down inside the circle. The sound echoes on the hardwood.

“Bite me,” the vampire kid says.

“Very original,” Dean says. He raises his voice: “You write that one yourself, Chuck?” It echoes back to him off the high walls.

Cas gazes up at him sadly. He finishes the last symbol and stands, wiping his hands off on his coat. Dean pours in the salt, and then takes out the little envelope Castiel gave him hours earlier, containing a few strands of his hair twisted together with a few strands of Jack’s. He holds the envelope for a moment, balanced by the corners between two fingers and his thumb—hardly touching it. Then he notices Cas watching, and quickly drops the envelope into the bowl. He digs something else out of his pocket, and hands it to Cas.

It’s a napkin. Cas cleans his hands as best he can.

Dean straightens up, raising his eyebrows to Cas. Ready? The vampire watches them, frowning. Cas nods. Ready. Dean pierces his hand with the broken tip of bone, in the meat of his palm above his thumb joint. Then he beckons to Cas, who holds out his hand. Dean takes it, cradling the back of it with his own bleeding hand, and pierces Cas’s hand with the point.

He puts the bone into the bowl, and lights a match over the whole thing. Flames puff up, engulfing the blade. When the puff of smoke clears, the bone is scorched black, and everything else inside the bowl is ash.

“What the hell is—” the vampire kid begins, but before it can finish, Dean stabs it through the neck with the bone. Castiel watches it choke and gag, black blood filling its mouth.

It dies, and the shadow of the ivy stills.

Outside the circle, the world comes to a halt. The light breeze outside falls silent, and the trees stop swaying. The blood dripping from the throats of the dead vampires stops; drifting dust stops in its path. As the vampire falls silent, light begins to stop too, on its journey from objects to their eyes; hue drains from the orange glow on the floor, and then the glow itself drains away, and darkness tunnels in, like they’ve been hit on the head.

“Not you,” says a voice, and Dean and Castiel turn.

Hovering over the vampire’s corpse is a reaper. A floating, hooded cloud of smoke to Castiel—he knows it’s showing itself to Dean differently, so he blinks, trying to tune into the same signal. The reaper resolves itself into a young-looking woman wearing, of all things, an orange high-visibility vest.

“I can’t believe this,” she mutters to herself.

Dean grins, an empty smile. “Hi there. Have we met before?”

“No.” The reaper folds her arms. “I just don’t want anything to do with you people. What do you want? Make it quick.”

Dean glances at Cas, maybe for support. “We wanna hitch a ride with Mr. Robot here to Purgatory. That’s all.” He jerks his chin towards the reaper. “Ask your boss. See if she minds.”

His look to Cas is the only sign of his doubt. He’s not sure this is going to work.

“Oh, is that ‘all’?” the reaper says, biting. She mutters something and turns away, pressing a finger to her ear. Castiel blinks again, tuning out of Dean’s frequency to see what it’s really doing. Its true form hovers and morphs like a malicious cloud, then stills. Light pulses from inside the cloud, like little lightning strikes—signals that Castiel can’t eavesdrop on.

Meanwhile, the vampire wakes up. Or rather, its spirit rises from its corpse, which is still lying with a bone through the neck. The spirit looks just like the boy, but translucent, immaterial. It looks down at itself in disgust, then up at Castiel.

“I can’t believe this,” the vampire’s spirit says. “I thought I was going to die.”

“You did,” Castiel says.

“There’s more to it than that, I’m afraid,” the reaper says, returning in her high-vis-vested form. To Dean: “Death gave me permission to take you on the ferry. You can come with us.”

“Come with ‘us’?” the vampire says, affronted. It looks from the reaper back to them. “Come where?”

The reaper glances at the interlopers, plainly wishing they were anywhere else so she could get on with her work.

“Look. Just ignore them. I’m here for you,” she says to the vampire. “I’m taking you to the place where vampires go when they die.”

“Which is where?” There’s real fear in its voice.

“Purgatory,” she says. “The myths are true.”

The vampire kid covers its eyes with its vanishing hands. It scrubs down its translucent face, then points a finger at Castiel.

“I can’t believe you told me I was going to be at peace,” it says to him, viciously, “You pathetic, lying freak.”

“Hey,” Dean says warningly, putting an arm in front of Cas. “Watch it.”

“Let’s go,” the reaper says.

*

A single murdered vampire doesn’t get the express train that Dick Roman gets. This route to Purgatory isn’t a portal; it’s a long, dark river. When Dean leans in to mutter to Cas, “I wonder what’s with the OSHA getup,” nodding at the reaper, Castiel realizes that Dean is anxious. He’s frightened of the unknown risks, or worried they’re going too far, maybe. The reaper is ushering them through a dark, undefined space, framed on all sides by curtains that move heavily, as if full of water, balloons filled to bursting. Castiel remembers waking up in the Empty, but he doesn’t remember the Veil, if he’s been here before. It doesn’t remind him of the malicious substance of the Empty—this place seems awake, but not conscious. The reaper pushes it out of the way with the ease of a professional. The vampire’s spirit follows right behind her, and Dean trails behind, followed by Castiel. Then they see light ahead of her, a dusty, reddish warmth, and they come out into a wider space while she holds the curtain open for them. When Castiel steps out, she lets it fall behind him.

They’re standing on what looks, to Dean and the vampire’s eyes, like the slick shore of a wide, black river in an underground canyon. Overhead, the cave walls disappear up into darkness. The coal-black rock looks slippery and striated—layers of different textures revealed by millions of years of erosion, but not smoothed. Something like lichen grows on the surface, in shades of red and brown. At the bottom, the black river flows. Castiel looks at the reaper, focusing his vision until he sees its true form, and then he looks around at the space again. It’s nothing—this manifestation is entirely unreal, the product of millions of years of layered expectations. Only the river is real. It’s wide and deep and uniform. The water is clear, completely clear, but there’s nothing underneath, so it’s black. A lump forms in Castiel’s human throat. The reaper floats down to the edge, leading the specter of the vampire behind it. Then it pauses—waiting for them. Dean’s fingers brush the sleeve of his coat and Cas resets his sight to the manifestation. In all the times he’s died, he never retained the memories of his journeys to the afterlife. He doesn’t want to see this for what it really is.

They step carefully down the slick stone to where the vampire has settled in the prow of a little rowboat. The reaper holds the near edge of the boat for them, and they climb in, Dean first. Once Cas is settled beside him on the middle bench, she climbs in last, pushing them off into the middle of the stream. The current carries them gently, and they drift for a moment as she gets a grip on the oars. There is no boat, in reality, but Castiel doesn’t want to know the real mechanic by which they’re being transported. He knows it would disturb him.

Presently the reaper begins to paddle downstream. The vampire sits in the front, looking ahead. Castiel hopes it will forget all of this when it gets to Purgatory.

On the bench beside him in the little boat, Dean hunches into himself. The reason for the neon vest reveals itself before Dean can ask again—other boats come into view in the distance, each paddled over the dark water by a brightly dressed reaper. His slight desire for conversation seems to have extinguished anyway. The stone cavern moves by, and then dissipates, until they’re just floating down a river, featureless except for the other boats, all of them too distant to make out. Dean huddles closer, his leg and shoulder pressing into Cas for warmth. The sensation that he could dissolve into the nothingness is so strong that Castiel leans back against him, trying to ground himself. Everything inside him aches with the wrongness of their presence here. He glances at Dean to see tears streaming down his face. Dean doesn’t seem to know it’s happening; he’s watching the water. Castiel touches his own cheek. It’s wet too. No, Castiel doesn’t remember any of his trips to the afterlife, but he does remember the Empty, and now he thinks of Jack traveling there, alone. He closes his eyes. He wishes he could fall into the river and sink into the darkness and dissolve into nothing, and never see the Earth or speak to anyone or feel a thing ever again.

Eventually, a white pinprick of light appears at the end of the river.

*

In Purgatory, the portal forms the mouth of a river, flowing right out into the forest. They stand thigh-deep in the churning water, beside the portal. It’s frigid. On both banks, gray trees reach for a gray sky, same as the day Castiel left. The rowboat stayed on the other side, and as soon as they waded into Purgatory, the vampire kid vanished. A few meters away, the river drops away into a roaring waterfall. White mist billows up from below.

“Death will leave the portal open for you for eight hours,” the reaper says, standing in front of the portal. The water doesn’t soak into her clothes. “To go back, you’ll have to row yourselves upriver.”

“We can do that?” Dean says. He seems less nervous here.

“You have permission to try,” the reaper replies coldly. “That’s the most you can ask for, in my opinion.”

She vanishes.

Dean blinks, then looks to Cas. “Great customer service,” he comments. “Let’s get out of this river, I’m freezing.”

They slosh out onto the shore, both shivering. Castiel doesn’t even have enough grace to dry himself off, let alone warm both of them up. Dean doesn’t ask him to, anyway; he never does. “We can split up, cover more ground,” Dean says.

Castiel sighs. “Okay.”

“I’ll take this side, you take that side?” Dean offers, pointing to either side of the river. “Don’t go too far from the water, and whistle every five minutes.”

Cas squints at him. “Whistle?”

“Just—you know.” Dean touches his index and pinkie finger into an almost-triangle, sticks them in his mouth, and blows out a deafening wolf-whistle. Castiel grimaces at the sharp noise. “You know how to do that?”

“I’ll figure it out,” Cas says, annoyed, and walks off onto his side, ears still ringing.

On opposite sides of the waterfall, they make their separate ways down the rocky slope, using saplings and tufts of grass as handholds and footholds. The vegetation around the falls is more lush than anything Castiel remembers seeing in Purgatory last time. There’s moss and small, unfamiliar plants—not green, exactly, but more saturated, and all coated with dew. None of them have flowers or blossoms. Castiel looks up after five minutes, maybe more. While he’s been examining the vegetation, he’s lost sight of Dean. He hears a stick snap in the distance, and whistles—the normal way. The sound is drowned out by the waterfall.

“Dammit,” he mutters, descending the slope and walking along the shore, looking for Dean in the trees.

And it’s like no time has passed, like the last six years was only a day—noxious anxiety floods him, just like every time he lost sight or sound of him in Purgatory the first time, turned around and realized he was gone—or worse, that he and the vampire were both gone. “Dean!” he shouts. His voice echoes on the stone.

After a second, a wolf-whistle comes from the trees. Cas sighs with relief.

“We shouldn’t have split up,” he mutters, and resumes his search of the undergrowth.

They continue down the river, sending occasional sound signals across the water. Castiel wonders if this is the same river they forded on their first journey across Purgatory—but he doesn’t think so. The water in his shoes sloshes uncomfortably. It’s just as cold as ever here. He feels it more acutely now than he did last time, when he could separate himself from his vessel more easily. Back then, he had the grace on hand to heal his body and warm it and dull the aches and pains from wear and tear and hunger and cold, and, when all else failed, simply separate himself from the sensations. The cold was the only thing Dean ever complained about in Purgatory. Not the hunger or the fear or the long journey, not even the disconcerting irregularity of night and day. Just the cold. Sometimes he’d insist on making a campfire to warm up—in the daytime, so it would be less noticeable—and Castiel would exchange a look with the vampire and let Dean have his way. Neither of them was good at saying no to him, and a fire wasn’t much to ask, in the grand scheme. Dean would bundle together the kindling and then Castiel would snap his fingers to strike a spark.

Near some shallow rapids, after an hour or so of walking, Castiel comes upon a burnt-out crater. In the middle of it, half-rotted open and half-concealed by tree roots, is a decaying leviathan corpse. He mistakes it for a nurse log, briefly, because of all the vegetation and fungus growing out of it, until he notices the white ribs. Castiel wonders what killed it, and how long ago. Maybe it was him, or Dean. Then he sees it—a husk-like plant growing in the middle of the ribcage. It isn’t a mushroom at all—it’s a blossom.

Three short, sharp whistles bring Dean splashing across to him. He joins him in the little crater, and Cas points.

“Leviathan blossom,” Cas says. “They must grow where the leviathans die.”

“Wow,” Dean says, and there’s a little laugh in his voice. “Sweet. You found it.” He looks up at Cas, smiling at him. It’s the first time in a while.

He crouches down, taking a paper bag out of his pocket to store the flower, while Cas, a little dazed, watches his back. He can see Dean’s shoulder blades move under his jacket. As soon as Dean’s hand brushes the leviathan’s corpse, a dark shape rears up above him, and a hand grabs Castiel from behind.

“Dean!”

Three of them—a surprise attack. The leviathan wastes no time, wrapping an arm around Castiel’s neck and gripping his throat with its other hand, digging its fingers into his windpipe. If Castiel was stronger, more his old self and not a prisoner of this body, the lack of oxygen would not slow him down. He would slow his respiration and make the oxygen already available in his vessel’s blood last longer, and wherever hypoxia took hold, he would heal it later. He could fight until there was no air left in his lungs, and no blood left in his body, just as long as he could still get electrical impulses to his vessel’s limbs. But not anymore. His body is closer to human and he is closer to human and he is weak and lonesome and almost hopeless. The leviathan presses down on his windpipe, and the edges of his vision are going black, the same smoky curtains as the ones the reaper parted for them.

He claws backwards until he finds the leviathan’s hair and yanks it forward with all his strength, bringing its head forward enough to throw it off balance. Then Castiel’s foot slips on a slick root and they both tumble forward—the leviathan throws itself over him, and Castiel grabs its neck from below before it can go for Dean. With a grunt and a snarl they roll over and then Castiel brings them to a stop with the leviathan’s neck on top of a thick root, and jams both hands under its chin, shoving upward and snapping its neck over the root with a sickening crack.

Dean is in midair, being thrown into a tree by one of the two remaining leviathans. Cas grabs the distracted one by the shoulders from behind and throws it forward with all his strength. It bodyslams the nearest tree, skewered through the torso on a broken branch. It’s not deep enough to kill it, but it needs a minute to pull itself free. Dean is recovering himself, and the last leviathan is looking between the two of them, grinning wide.

“Well?” Cas barks, raising two hands in a fighting stance. “What are you waiting for?”

The leviathan tackles him with a mouthful of teeth.

By the time Dean slices its head off, it’s made mincemeat of Castiel’s shoulder and upper chest. The headless body slumps on top of Castiel, lying on his back in the dirt, and he lets out a whimper of pain before he can stop himself. It chewed up the meat of his left shoulder and chewed the flesh over his collarbone and ribcage into ribbons—just skin and muscle, not any organ damage, but it stings white hot and bone deep. Castiel tries to rally, shove the corpse off, but his right arm is weak and his left arm doesn’t respond at all. He lets out another pathetic noise, immediately cursing himself for it. He tips his head back into the dirt, panting. The dark canopy is motionless over him, with just a little gray sky visible beyond. Dean is off moving nearby, apparently oblivious to Cas's state. He might as well be alone.

Hope was never something he put much stock in; a human belief system, based on foolish inductive reasoning and their experience of time. Hope is a belief in the future. For Castiel, the future has been obscure for some time now. He doesn't know how to believe anymore.

He just knows how to keep going.

With a grunt, he shoves the leviathan corpse off himself, and rolls over.

“Wow, they almost got us, there, Cas—whoa.” Dean stops short, seeing Castiel roll over and heave into the dirt. He pukes up the bile and water in his stomach. “Whoa, whoa, Cas, what’s wrong?”

Dean tries to help him sit up, but Castiel shakes him off. He hears Dean inhale as his hand comes away slick with blood. “Shit.”

Eventually, Castiel sits up, leaning on his good hand, facing away from Dean. In front of him, the leviathan blossom still sits placidly in the middle of the empty ribcage. Cas breathes heavily.

“I’m okay,” Cas says at length. Dean makes a skeptical noise.

“Can you heal it?” Dean asks.

“No. Not—right away, not here,” Castiel says. “I have less strength, without my connection to the heavenly host.”

“That wasn’t a problem last time,” Dean says gruffly.

“This isn’t last time,” Castiel snaps. He exhales delicately, then heaves himself a little closer to the corpse. He plucks the thick, rubbery flower with difficulty. His useless arm dangles over his waist. “We’ve got the blossom. Let’s just go.”

A pause. “Good. All right. Let me help you up.”

Castiel grimaces and shuts his eyes as Dean hefts him up by his good side. The dead weight of his left arm stretches his torn skin downward, and he hisses through gritted teeth. Dean straightens him up and lets go. Then he sees Cas’s wounds, and says, “Oh, Jesus Christ.”

“I’m okay,” Castiel says again, screwing up his face angrily. He holds out the flower. “Take it.”

“Cas, your shoulder is ground beef,” Dean says.

“Just take it!”

“Okay, okay!” Dean snaps back, frustrated. He takes the blossom, and after a second, Cas hears the crinkle of the brown paper bag. “I was just trying to help, calm down.”

“You—you want me to calm down?” Castiel says, breathing heavily.

“No, Cas, I want to have a huge, noisy fight in the middle of the freaking monster dimension,” Dean hisses.

“This wouldn’t have happened if we had just—found another way to stop Chuck!”

“There is no other way!”

“And that’s worth—this?” Cas gestures violently at his chewed-up shoulder. “Risking our lives? Gambling with Death? This is more important than rescuing Sam? And Eileen?”

“Yes, dammit!” Dean snaps, forgetting to lower his voice. “And you know it, or else you wouldn’t have come back to help us with it! Hell, I still can’t believe you left in the first place!”

“You know perfectly well why I had to leave,” Castiel says, closing his eyes because he doesn’t want to see Dean’s face when he says it.

Before he can retort, they hear a snapping stick. Dean curses, and then something hits Cas in the back of the head and he knows no more.

3.

The place where Castiel wakes feels familiar somehow. They’re underground, on a dirt floor, with close, dark walls densely covered in thin roots. He hears Dean’s breathing beside him, even and conscious and slightly ragged. Slowly, Castiel hoists himself up on his elbow—his hands are tied, putting a painful strain on his injured shoulder—then he stops, panting. He waits for the pain to dull down. From here, he can see the space better. They’re at the top of a long underground room, so narrow that it’s almost a tunnel. The vaulted ceiling disappears into the dark, with tendrils of root peeking down from the gloom like chandeliers. He thinks they must be underneath a great tree of some kind. He can almost see the tree in his mind’s eye.

Castiel breathes for a moment before hoisting himself up on his knees. Dean is kneeling beside him, hands also tied. Castiel’s eyes are drawn to the walls, where the roots are as thick as a tapestry. It feels like he was here before, a long, long time ago—like these are memories from childhood, as if he’d ever been a child. His eyes move around the space, taking in each new detail not as something new, but as confirmation of these sourceless memories.

At the far end of the room, someone clears their throat. The sound echoes strangely, as if bouncing off stone.

With a final deep breath, Cas pushes himself upright, to kneel shoulder-to-shoulder with Dean.

“Hello, angel,” Eve says. “Glad you’re with us.”

The mother of monsters waits at the base of the aisle, sitting on a tangled mound of roots. Though they’re at least 10 meters apart, her voice is crisp in their ears. At Eve’s feet is a puddle of silver water, smooth as glass. She’s flanked by four leviathans, two on each side. Two more stand behind Dean and Castiel. They seem relaxed, but at attention, like they're ready for any threat, but don’t consider their prisoners to be one.

Eve herself wears the same appearance she did all those years ago on Earth—presumably for Dean’s benefit—of a dark-haired, heavy-browed young woman. She even wears the diner waitress apron. It’s stained with dirt and blood. Castiel tries to unveil his eyes to get a glimpse of her true form, but she eludes his gaze, like a mirage on the highway that turns out to be a real puddle. He suspects what they see is not her true body at all, but a projection, or a shapeshifting limb.

“So, Castiel. Here I am, reigning in my kingdom, when suddenly, three of my children drop dead. Imagine my surprise.” Eve lifts a demonstrative hand, making a face of mock shock. The roots underneath her shift, forming an arm for her to rest her elbow upon. “The thing about my leviathans, recall, is that they are at the top of the food chain, here. Well, anywhere. But especially here. In their home. They have no natural predators.”

The roots on the wall next to Castiel move too. They aren’t roots at all, he realizes—they’re tentacles.

“So I send reinforcements, and what do I discover?” Eve says. She points with a finger that ends in a long, ragged nail. “The wretched pair of stowaways we spent the better part of a year trying to exterminate before they slipped out of our grasp.”

Castiel glares down at her, trying to keep his focus external, and not on the pain. It hurts so much, suddenly, that he thinks his body might throw up again. He swallows. He tries to reach sideways, mentally, to assess Dean’s health, to occupy his mind with something else—but again the necessary senses elude him. His true form, his grace, are curbed, dulled, useless. It’s Eve. He’d forgotten what she could do. He’s trapped in this body.

Dean shifts slightly beside him, but offers nothing in reply.

“So tell me.” Eve grins, wide. “What brings you back to my neck of the woods?”

She holds up the brown paper bag.

“This?”

“What does it matter to you,” Castiel manages.

“Curiosity, that’s all,” she says. “I like to know what goes on in my kingdom.” She waggles the bag, heavy with the weight of the blossom. The one thing standing between them and the end of Chuck. “Tell me, Dean. Why do you want this blossom so badly?”

Dean makes no reply.

Castiel looks at him sideways. He has a black eye. His expression is stone cold.

Eve waits, and, hearing nothing, considers the bag instead. She slouches back, slinging a leg over the arm of her throne, and holds the bag up, as if it’s a bunch of grapes she’s about to take a bite from.

“What I just can’t figure out, for the afterlife of me, is how you got here. You came all this way—planning on, what, leaving? Again?” Her voice drips with contempt. “With—this? Why?”

Castiel ventures a reply: “We weren’t—”

A leviathan behind him kicks him in the center of his back with a boot. He doesn’t hear it coming, or see Eve signal at all—he’s just talking one second, and the next he’s flat on his face, his shoulder pounding with pain.

Breathing heavily, Castiel heaves himself upright again. The strain on his abdominal muscles yanks on his torn skin again and he winces—then grits his teeth and holds in the sound. Dean is watching him, eyes sharp with something, but once he’s fully upright, Dean turns away again.

Eve stands, and the expressionless leviathans flanking her draw away in the same fluid motion. Her throne curls away from her, back into the walls. A hivemind, Castiel realizes. Whatever Eve wants, whatever impulse she sends them, they enact, like they’re her hands. He thinks longingly of the Heaven he once knew.

Eve seems relatively uninterested in Castiel, perhaps because Dean is the more reticent, and therefore more enticing, prisoner. Slowly, she paces in front of her altar, feet bare on the dirt floor.

“Come on, Dean Winchester,” Eve drawls. “I remember you. You’re a go-getter, you’re a schemer.” She leans forward, a grin on her face. “You pulling a fast one on me again? Is this a play? Is this where you wanted to get to?” She gestures at the space around them.

Still, Dean doesn’t answer. Just stares back at her.

“It’s not a p—play,” Castiel says, struggling to form the plosive with his swelling lip. “We only came for the blossom. Give it to us—and we’ll go.” Her eyes swivel, impatiently, to fall on him. “Please. We have no quarrel with you.”

That gets her attention.

She stares at Castiel with an open mouth, for a long moment. Then her mouth forms itself into a laugh of some kind—but it’s not amused or hysterical. It’s affronted. The leviathans on either side of her shudder, shifting their feet and scratching their hair. The two behind them breathe heavily.

“No quarrel with—with me? I—how generous of you.” Her voice drips with sarcasm.

Castiel stares down at her, uncomprehending.

Eve holds up the bag again. She upends it suddenly, and violently shakes it—the flower falls limply onto the dirt.

She points down at it.

“Do you know what this blossom is? It grows up from the place where one of my babies dies. And you, you killed a lot of my babies. These blossoms, they used to be rare, in Purgatory. Now? Now—?” She laughs, unable to hold it in or finish the sentence. A chill runs through Castiel. “Do you know how that feels, angel? It feels like having your heart ripped out. Again, and again, and again—and not just when they die, no, but every day after, every day you wake up without them, every time you remember them, and to see—to come face-to-face with the one who did it? Well.”

Castiel swallows bile.

He feels Dean, looking at him, and then looking away, down at the dirt under their knees. Dean’s shoulders slump. Cas can’t think about that right now. The pain in his shoulder, his chest, suddenly seems so trivial in comparison.

Castiel closes his eyes.

The leviathan behind him suddenly grabs him by the scruff of his coat. Before Castiel has a chance to brace himself, it drags him forward, down the dirt aisle. He thrashes in his bonds, friction hot under his knees, until it throws him down in front of Eve.

“You did that,” Eve spits at him. “You two cretins.”

Castiel can hardly hold her gaze. The ones beside Eve scratch at their own arms, breathing heavily. At last the restless energy in the hivemind can’t contain itself—the leviathan behind Dean lashes out, seizing him by the hair. Cas twists around, shouting “No!” It pushes a thumbnail into Dean’s eyelid, pressing until he cries out. “Stop!” Castiel tries to hobble back on his knees—To do what? Bite its kneecaps?—but he’s too far away.

It withdraws. Dean pants, head tipped back. Blood rolls down his cheek from his eye.

“The blossom?" Eve says. "It’s a scab. Pick it off. See if I care.”

Eve drops the empty paper bag onto the dirt floor, abruptly as uninterested in it, and them, as if they were door-to-door salesmen. She sits back on her throne, which curls open for her again.

“I’m much more curious as to why you came all this way,” she says. “It’s a long, hard journey, isn’t it?”

“Don’t you remember it?” Dean says hoarsely.

“Ah,” Eve says, looking up at him. “He speaks. Pain works—I’ll remember that.” She winks.

“Bite me,” Dean says.

“Oh, your heart’s not even it,” she says pityingly. “Just repeats from you, then?”

Dean gazes down the aisle at her with his one good eye and one half-open, bleeding eye. Please, Cas thinks, don’t bait her, don’t—

But she flicks a finger, unprompted, and leviathan grabs him from behind again. Two others move up the aisle to help. One stays to hold Cas back as he struggles. They just kick him this time, into the dirt, kick him in the ribs and the torso until Eve gets bored. Dean grunts, but doesn’t cry out. Eventually they withdraw.

Dean lies there on his side, breathing hard.

Cas leans forward, trying to see him. His eyes look dead.

“You know... take the blossom,” Eve says. “What do I care? You, Dean, you have something I want. We can make a trade.”

Dean frowns just slightly at her.

She kicks the blossom towards him on the floor. Then she puts a hand out, and rests it on top of Castiel’s head.

“The angel,” she says, simply. “Let me keep the angel, and I’ll let you go, with your blossom.”

Cas turns to look back up the aisle at Dean, his mobility restricted by the ties and the wounds. Dean doesn’t make eye contact with him. He lies there, looking at Eve. But Castiel doesn’t believe he’ll say it until the word comes out of his mouth.

“Deal,” he says.

4.

Dean won’t look at him as they take him away. Two leviathans lift him by both arms and drag him, half-limping, down to the altar. Another picks up the blossom, placing it back into the bag and handing it to him. Eve, sitting forward on her throne with hands clasped, observes the scene with fascination. Without a word, Dean accepts the bag, clutching it in his fist. Cas looks up at him, still kneeling next to Eve’s pool, a leviathan holding him down. He waits for a look, a signal, something. They turn Dean around, and march him back up the aisle to the entryway, blocking Cas’s view of his face.

Dean lowered the gun. In the cemetery, he lowered the gun.

So Cas waits for him to turn and look back, one last time.

They reach the entryway. Dean disappears into the dark. He doesn’t turn.

Behind him, Eve exhales.

Panic, instinctive and adrenalized, washes through Castiel. It dissipates almost immediately. In its wake, only dark embers of sadness remain. It’s over. Not for himself—not because Dean walked out without him—but because he walked out alone.

It isn’t that Dean doesn’t care about him. It’s that Chuck has blotted out everything else. He’s going to keep on walking towards Chuck, Castiel realizes now, shedding the people he loves one by one, until he’s alone.

“Some friend he is,” Eve comments. Her remaining leviathans shuffle restlessly, settling down again. “Did you think he’d give you up that easily?”

Castiel is still looking at the place Dean was kneeling. “I didn’t realize. I didn’t realize how wrapped up in this quest he was,” Castiel murmurs. “He’s going to give up everything for this, and then he’ll lose, and die.” He swallows. “And there’s nothing I can do to help him.”

Eve looks down on him, disgust and pity on her face.

*

*

*

They’re looking for the river. It’s not the same river, Dean’s sure, the one from last time. Last time they—he was here. His memories of this place are fuzzy now, anyway, with the long years elapsed. It’s the same as the déjà vu he gets once a day driving down state highways. He can’t be certain he hasn’t driven here before, and hell, probably, he has, but there are too many overlapping memories to know for sure.

He’s fidgety, still on the comedown from the fight against Eve’s oily tin soldiers, and nauseous from some unknown cause—he hasn’t eaten or slept, that’s probably why. Plus his eye hurts like a bitch. Exhaustion is on the horizon, after a long day and night and day of going, going, going. All he can do now is look at the finish line.

The last thing he wants is to be alone with his thoughts. “You meet many vamps in this great land?” he asks his leviathan escort.

It has the appearance of a scruffy guy with hair past his ears, and a mean look about it. “Sure,” says the guy, walking a few steps behind him. “Why? Did you want a snack before you left?”

“I’m looking for a friend—Benny Lafitte,” Dean says. “You’ve probably heard of him.”

“Sure,” the guy says again. “I’ve heard of him. He was the one who hitched a ride out the human portal with you, wasn’t he? Rumor has it he rubbed off on you.”

Dean keeps walking.

“I heard you sent him back again.”

Dean begins, “It—” then cuts himself off. “You know? Never mind. Why would I defend myself to you, again? You’re a friggin’ leviathan. You eat people.”

“Anyway, your friend’s dead,” the leviathan says, ignoring his comment.

Dean stops in the middle of the trail.

“What?”

“Benny Lafitte? Yeah,” the leviathan says, walking on past him. “One of his own kind, I heard.”

Dean stays standing in the trees, staring at the pine needles, then closes his eyes for a second. He feels small, insignificant and alone.

Poor Benny.

At the next bend, a few moments later, Dean catches up with his leviathan escort. He can hear the river. Sure enough, the white ribbon of water appears between the trees a moment later. They come out onto the dry edge of the riverbed. Rocks shift and rattle away below Dean’s boots.

“This is the way you came?” the leviathan asks.

“Yeah. Same river,” says Dean, looking upstream. “Well, I mean. You know what they say about stepping in the same river twice.”

“What do they say?” the leviathan asks.

Dean looks at it. “That you can’t,” he says bluntly.

The leviathan makes a weird little noise like a laugh. “Oh,” it says. It looks down, considering the shallow water near its foot. “I’ve never heard that before.”

This conversation is pointless. “Okay,” says Dean.

It splashes a boot in the water, once, then twice.

“Oh,” it says, turning to him again. When it smiles, Dean can see that its gums are black. “Because of time.”

Dean stares at it.

“...Yeah,” he says after a pause.

“I get it,” the leviathan says, nodding, still wearing that bemused grin, like he’s just heard a surprisingly good joke from a parrot. “See, things don’t change much down here.”

“I’m getting that,” Dean says flatly. “I don’t need help to find my way back from here.”

Dean abruptly wants to be as far away from this thing as possible. He pushes past it, walking upriver. There are rapids around the next bend, getting louder as he approaches. But the leviathan follows after him, knocking stones aside with careless steps. “Oh, I think I’ll take you the rest of the way. Can’t have you circling back to mount a rescue,” it says.

Dean rolls his eyes where it can’t see. “I’m not that stupid,” he says gruffly.

“‘Stupid’ would be one word for it,” the leviathan says behind him, following him up the shore. “‘Loyal’ would be another one.”

Dean says nothing. He walks on.

He climbs up a dirt embankment, and the rapids come into view, too much white water skating over a shallow bed of sharp rocks. The leviathan raises its voice to be heard over the noise:

“But we underestimated you, Winchester. I guess we forgot—you don’t mind stepping on the necks of your friends to get where you want to go.”

“Listen.” Dean stops at the edge of the embankment, not turning around. He lifts a hand. “I’m only gonna say it once, freak. You shut your damn mouth.”

The leviathan makes that sound like a laugh again. “You’re probably hoping Mother’s gonna make it quick, aren’t you? She won’t. There’s no such thing as time down here, remember? No days, no seasons... An eternity. Any torment we can do to that angel, we will do, over, and over, and over...”

Dean doesn’t even think. His feet move and he’s suddenly grabbing the leviathan by the lapels of its jacket, throwing it against the nearest tree. It’s a young hemlock, growing just on the edge of the dirt bank over the riverbed, and the thin trunk bends dangerously under their combined weight.

Dean shoves his face into the leviathan’s, matching its grin with gritted teeth. “I said shut—your damn mouth.”

“Hey,” the leviathan pants into his face, still grinning. “Don’t sweat it, guy. Heaven has a system for penance. When you go back upstairs, you can go to one of God’s churches and pray for forgiveness.”

With a guttural noise, Dean shoves the leviathan back, jamming a hand into its throat. The sapling bows even further under them—too far, Dean overbalances, and the leviathan grabs him by the shoulder and yanks him forward. They go tumbling into the dirt, just short of falling into the rapids. Dean scrabbles to stay on top, his hands still digging into the leviathan’s windpipe. The fuckers don’t even need to breathe—he needs something more, but he’s unarmed—as the leviathan grabs at him, choke-laughing, Dean paws around in the dirt for a rock. Nothing.

The leviathan snarls, finally sick of the foreplay, and its facial features collapse into a vortex of teeth. Fury overtakes desperation—Dean plants his feet in the dirt and shoves off, and they plunge over the edge, into the river.

It’s a short fall into shallow water and the leviathan breaks it. Dean comes up gasping, soaked in icy water, on his knees but still gripping the thing by the front of its jacket. It comes up dazed, a big bloody black hole in the top of its human-looking head. It’s not wearing the same face as it was before—Dean recognizes it, though, and shoves the baleful blue eyes away again—back into the same rock it hit on the way down. He bends over, splashing unsteadily to keep his balance over the prone body, and bashes it, again, into the rock. The rock is slick with black blood and something white and viscous. The face relaxes back into a leviathan—alien, eyeless, needle-toothed. Dead.

Dean pants, still leaning over it. Then he lets it go with disgust. The water is too shallow here for it to float away. An inky stain spreads in the water around its head.

“Ugh,” Dean whispers. He wipes his hands on his pants, then shudders and dips them in the water instead, upstream of the body. He flaps them around, desperate to get the gunk off. “God—Jesus. Some piece of work you are,” he hisses, standing up again and flicking the icy water off his hands. In all his months in Purgatory with Benny, he never had to do that with his bare hands.

Panting, he clambers back up onto the dirt bank. He’s dizzy. He steadies himself against the sapling, pulling the brown paper bag out of his pocket. It’s wet, but he feels the contents—the blossom is still inside. He closes his eyes as another wave of vertigo passes over him, and swallows what feels like puke. Don’t throw up, don’t throw up, don’t throw up—he breathes in through his nose, out through his mouth, big shuddering breaths. “God,” he whispers to the unseen listener, to himself. He wipes his mouth, staring down at the dirt below his boots. “Don’t throw up—don’t.” His next breath comes out as a whimper. He squeezes his eyes shut, praying it will make the vertigo stop. Even with his eyes closed, he’s still wiping his hand off on his jacket.

Beyond the roaring rapids, there’s another rush. The waterfall is close. He’ll climb it, then go through the portal, and row himself home. It’s going to be a long, long journey by himself.

Dean finally opens his eyes and looks back, up the river towards the falls, and then glances down at the mangled body in the shallow water. Mistake.

His stomach heaves. Nothing comes up, but his throat chokes and tears spring to his eyes.

It was just a leviathan. It would’ve eaten him given half the chance—there was no good reason for it to let him live in the first place. Killing it was the rational thing to do. His mind knows that, so why doesn’t his gut know it too? 

Dean wipes his eyes, panting over the dirt. He pushes off the sapling, still clutching his stomach, and walks unsteadily away from the river and into the woods.

There’s something else he has to do before he leaves this place.

*

Deeper in the woods, the trees grow taller, with canopies so distant and thick they blot out most of the sky. It’s getting dimmer, and it could be because of the denser trees, or it could be dusk, it’s impossible to tell. He doesn’t know exactly what he’s searching for in here—someplace quiet, someplace that will magically grant him a little courage, someplace that will distract him. Dean circles around a copse of young firs, growing thickly together, and comes out at the bottom of the slope. There’s a big, jagged tree stump, long dead. Moss and smaller plants are growing all over it, even a cute little Charlie Brown Christmas tree.

The sound of the river is a distant whisper here. Dean comes to a stop, looking up at the tiny tree growing on top of the stump.

“Dammit,” he whispers. He exhales, bowing his head, and puts his other hand in his pocket, for symmetry. Then he takes both hands out. They hang anxiously by his side.

He looks up at the treetops.

“Cas. I hope you can hear me. I didn’t have a chance to say it—or say anything, before I—before I left,” Dean says. He takes a deep breath. “I’m sorry. You know I had no choice, but I’m—I’m so, so sorry.” Dean shakes his head. “You’ve given me a lot of forgiveness over the years, Cas. Forgiveness that maybe I didn’t always deserve. But you know—you know what I had to do. You get it.”

Dean swallows. He looks up through the trees, appealing to the gray sky.

“It’s Chuck,” he says weakly. “I mean—there’s nothing else to do, there’s no other way. He—he’s making me—us—”

Dean breaks off, closing his eyes. He gets ahold of himself. “I don’t have to tell you that. You know what it’s like, to have him—his shadow—always hanging over you. But always out of reach. That was one of the first things you did when you started thinking for yourself, remember?” Dean says. “You went looking for him. Thought it was stupid, at the time,” Dean admits, with a weak smile. “I had no idea, back then, did I.”

He squeezes his eyes shut.

None at all.

There’s a sharp pain in his throat. This isn’t the right way to do it—he ought to do it properly. He feels forward, pressing his knuckles into the tree stump, and lowers himself to his knees.

“There’s just this, this voice in my head, screaming for blood. For revenge,” Dean says, trying to keep the tears out of his voice. “And now—now I know it comes from him, from his stupid—his—that all along, it’s been him, and it just feels like if—if I can cut him out, then maybe it’ll go away, maybe it’ll finally stop.” His voice is shaking now, too hard for him to stop it. “I just, I have to stop it. I can’t live with this, Cas, I can’t. I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, since the cemetery, nothing.”

A sob wrings itself out of Dean’s throat, a dry, choking sound that produces no tears. It’s just painful. God, he hopes no one can hear this, and God, he hopes Cas can.

Forcing the words out isn’t hard—it’s impossible. This is intolerable. He thought the numbness of the last few months was bad, living in one locked room in his head—but this is so much worse. It feels like the floorboards inside him are cracking under his feet, and the darkness below is deeper than any he’s ever seen.

“I know I let you down,” he says, voice cracking. “It’s not the first time. I know you won’t ever forgive me—and you shouldn’t. I ain’t never gonna forgive myself either,” he says.

Finally, the tears start.

“I’ve never felt like this before. God,” he says raggedly, squeezing his eyes shut and gripping his knees. “I’m so lost, Cas. I used to have—have an instinct for this stuff, a, a, compass. Now I got, what, I got nothing. I got no idea what’s wrong, what’s right, what’s me, what’s him. It’s all just a dark tunnel, and it feels like the only way out is—is forward. But I don’t know , I just don’t know anymore.” 

He trails off like that, tears falling onto the backs of his hands. The salt stings his injured eyelid. Around him, the forest is silent except for the sound of his breathing.

After a moment, he opens his eyes and stares down at his hands, gripping his knees. He almost doesn’t recognize them as his own. Pale as ghosts in the half-light, clean except for the black gunk still stuck in the edges of his nail beds.

“No,” Dean mutters. “I can’t do this.”

He pulls the brown paper bag out of his pocket and looks at it, then shoves it back in. He holds himself still, shutting his eyes one more time—

“Cas. I’m coming back.”

Dean pulls himself to his feet.

5.

The blood is under attack. Foreign contaminant, white hot burning; foreign contaminant destroyed and damaged vital tissue. The heart is under attack. Intruder attacking the heart. Barricaded. Intruder is persistent. Outworlder. Food. Fuel. Fool. Cannot be hunted without the hand. Hand is cut off. Hand is regrowing. Foreign agent inside the blood. The heart is under attack. Hand must regrow in time before the intruder enters the heart. Then we will swipe it aside and devour it. Then we will swallow it whole, tear it out and swallow it whole. The heart. The heart. It attacks the heart. We will strip the meat from its bones with our hand, we will break its bones one by one and drink the marrow and the blood. We will tear it out and swallow it whole and tear it out and swallow it whole and tear it out and swallow it whole. Hand is regrowing. Hand is regrowing. Hand—

“Cas! Cas! CAS!”

Dean pounds desperately against the bark of the great tree. Eve is down there, where they took them as prisoners, and that’s where she has Cas. When they brought him out, they exited through a hole in the tree, but it’s gone now, patched over with new growth. The tree is huge, roughly the girth of a blue whale, with deeply creased bark and branches reaching up so high and snarled that Dean can’t see the sky. Night has fallen, and it’s strangely deserted outside, as it has been for the whole 20-odd minutes that Dean’s been pounding at the nonexistent door—as if the army has inhaled all its soldiers and closed up shop.

Then a loud groaning sound comes from deep inside the wood, like the sound of two trees rubbing together in the wind. Dean looks up, at attention, waiting for the door to reappear.

Nothing.

“CAS!” he shouts again.

His hands are bruised from pounding the rough bark. Dean shoves off with a frustrated noise, panting. New strategy. New strategy.

It takes several minutes of collecting in the undergrowth, but he gets a good armful of brush together. He dumps the loot at the base of the tree. Getting the fire started in this place was always the hard part. Kindling, kindling, he needs something that will catch—aha. Dean digs the brown paper bag out of his pocket, dumps the blossom out, puts it back in his pocket, and starts tearing the paper bag into strips. He twists the strips up and folds them in half, the way his dad taught him to start a campfire. Then he snaps the twigs into pieces and props them on top of the paper in a little pyramid, and with his lighter, lights the paper’s edges. It takes immediately. As the flame grows from the kindling to the pyramid, he snaps the larger sticks down to size, and starts adding them on. 

It takes a few more minutes for the blaze to get going—and he keeps looking around, expecting something to attack him and stop him, but nothing does. Maybe there is something going wrong in there.

Soon, the fire is hot enough to take hold on the thick bark of Eve’s tree. Dean steps back, watching it grow in the dark.

“Even if this works, how am I supposed to get through it?” he mutters to the unseen listener. “Did not think this through.” He exhales, watching the fire climb higher. “Whatever.”

A high-pitched noise starts coming from the tree. Dean wonders if it’s sap boiling off under the bark. But no—it gets louder, and it’s clearly a sound of pain, like a keening animal.

He steps back a few more paces.

It crescendos into a shriek, and then with a deafening noise, a crack splits the side of the tree. Dean throws his arm up to shield his face from the rain of sparks. “Whoa!”

The shriek dies down, but doesn’t go away completely—too bad, Dean thinks, no time. He plunges through the fire, into the dark interior of the tree. A wave off heat washes over him and he gasps in the cooler air on the other side. Hot little embers flit down like fireflies, burning blisters onto his skin and holes in his sleeves.

Getting back out this way isn’t going to be pretty. Doesn’t matter. He ducks down the dirt tunnel as another crack sounds behind him. All is quiet inside.

“Cas?” he calls out cautiously.

The snake-worm-root-tentacle-things that form the walls are agitated, slithering blindly over the dirt like an advancing lava flow. Dean tucks his arms in to avoid touching any of them, and edges through the passage. No leviathans, no guards or lackeys, appear to stop him.

The tunnel gets narrower, and he squeezes his arms in tighter, until an opening appears. He stumbles through, swatting away the curtain of little tentacles that reach for him, and out into Eve’s throne room.

It’s a disaster. Half the torches are extinguished, he can hardly see. “Cas—!” Dean barks, the name dying on his lips as he takes in the damage. The walls where he can see them are smudged with soot, and so are the snake-roots. Five leviathan corpses lie scattered in the aisle, burnt black to their fingertips like the bodies from Pompeii.

Dean’s heart pounds as he looks around. They’re dead—that means Cas smoked them. He got the juice, somehow. He’s alive. Still kicking.

They must have closed the exit so he couldn’t escape.

The cavern isn’t lit for human eyes, and Dean can’t make out what’s going on at the foot of the room. He hears movement, and a snarling, groaning sound, as loud and deep as the noise he heard from outside the tree. He glances around for anything he can use as a weapon, but of course, there’s nothing for it—he hurries forward, down the aisle into the gloom.

Another deep growl, and then he hears a cry of pain—something hits the ground heavily.

“Cas!” Dean yells, breaking into a run.

Then comes a wordless cry, not of pain but of determination, and blue-white light flares out of the darkness.

In the vaulted space above Eve’s altar, where the roots of the tree should be growing, there’s a massive snarl of thick tentacles, swarming and grasping downward. Some are thick as tree trunks, and others as thin as snakes. The light illuminates the altar, the little silver pool, and the dead body of “Eve”—the yellow-aproned diner waitress, eyes burnt out beside the pool—but of course, she’s not really dead.

It’s all her. The trunk, the roots, the tentacles, all of it—and they’re attacking her from inside and out.

The light swivels like a lighthouse, giving Dean only a second to take it all in. Then the beam turns skyward, and pulses into Eve’s tangle of limbs like a shockwave. As it radiates upward, Dean gets a glimpse of Cas, bathed in light.

His face is bruised and streaked with blood, and his body is covered in gashes. His coat is in ribbons. But his face is focused, and his eyes are burning blue.

Then the blast hits Eve’s tentacles, and she makes another horrible noise. Temporarily blinded, Dean stumbles forward with his hands out, trying to find Cas—“Cas!”

His hands make contact with an arm. Cas hisses in pain.

“Dean?” His voice is ragged.

Air is displaced, and then there’s a thump and Cas disappears from under his hand. Eve threw him back. “Shit—” Dean scrambles forward, trying to find Cas in the dark, he didn’t go far—

His eyes adjust and he’s got him. “Cas!”

Dazed on the ground, Cas lifts his head. “Dean?” he says again. He looks like he doesn’t quite believe it.

“Yeah, yeah, hey. Hey. It’s me.”

Dean kneels next to him, trying to lift him up. Cas’s face, shoulder, and chest are a bloody mess, but there’s a light in his eyes that wasn’t there before—the last vestiges of some miraculous grace. Dean’s own heart surges with relief.

“She’s too powerful,” Cas says, voice almost drowned in the noise. He grasps at Dean’s jacket, but his grip is weak. “I—I used up my energy fighting them, I can’t—can’t take her!”

“You don’t have to—shit!” Dean shields Cas as she lashes out again. “We don’t have to take her, Cas, we just have to get out.”

Eve’s noise above them gets quieter, and Dean hunches forward again, to shield Cas from the next blow—but it doesn’t come.

There’s a creaking, cracking sound, high up.

“Shit,” Dean mutters again.

“How did you get back in?” Cas says, following the same line of thought.

“I—I improvised,” Dean says. “Let’s just say Smokey Bear would not approve. Come on. I think she’s distracted. Let’s move.”

Cas is panting. He tries to sit up, and Dean helps him with a hand on his back. It’s sticky with blood. “I—I don’t know if I can get very far.”

“Bullshit,” Dean says, looking around the altar for something to help. His eyes fall on the pool, and he notices what he didn’t notice before—it’s a scrying pond. There’s an image in it. He sees the river, the rapids where he killed that leviathan.

It clicks. “Oh,” Dean breathes out. “You weren’t escorting me. You were spying on me. You wanna know where that portal is.”

He looks up at Eve, thick limbs stilled above them. Maybe winding up to take another shot—maybe distracted by something else. They don’t have much time before they find out.

“What happened?” Dean asks, still holding Cas up, still trying to form a plan.

“I—smited her leviathans,” Cas pants. “And her vessel. And broke out. That’s why they blocked the exit.”

“I thought you didn’t have the juice.”

Cas breathes heavily.

“Dean. I heard your prayer—” he starts.

Dean shakes his head.

“Not—not now,” Dean says. “We’re not talking about that right now. Eyes on the prize. Here.”

He pulls the flower out of his pocket and presses it into Cas’s hands.

“Hold this.”

“Dean—?”

“Sit up.” Dean pulls off his jacket. He balls it on the floor of the altar, then says—“Sorry. This might sting.”

Another rumble, and dirt filters down from above. Dean smells smoke. Trying to be gentle but also trying to work quickly, Dean peels Cas’s coat off of him. Once Cas catches on to what he’s doing, he helps, gritting his teeth as it goes over his bad shoulder. Dean lifts it off. Cas is hunched forward, breathing hard. “Sorry,” Dean mutters again, then swallows before he says it again. Leaving his hand on Cas’s good shoulder for support, he leans in, and gently rests the side of his head against Cas’s temple.

They stay like that for a moment. Cas’s breathing eases. There’s another crash from up above, and the walls around them shake.

“Okay,” Dean mutters. “Here we go.” He trades his jacket for the trench coat and wraps it around Cas. Cas makes a little sound of protest as Dean bends his arm to get it in the sleeve, but Dean mutters, “It’s all right, almost there,” and Cas shuts his eyes and lets him thread it through. Dean’s jacket is tight on him, but that’s what he needs. He needs the pressure on the wounds. Dean gets it settled on him and starts snapping the buttons shut. Through it all, Cas studiously hangs onto the leviathan blossom, in one hand and then the other.

There’s another crash, and Eve lets out a wail. A clump of dirt crashes down near them, and Dean shields Cas with his arm. Light streams in from above—dim, orange, but light nonetheless.

“Dean,” Cas mutters. “To get back in here. Did you set Eve’s tree on fire?”

Dean snaps another button.

“Say I did. Would that be bad?”

Cas lets out a laugh that’s maybe just a sigh.

“Yes,” Cas says.

“Well, I did,” Dean says.

He snaps the last button.

“Come on.” He pats Cas on the cheek, then puts his hands under Cas’s armpits and lifts him up to his feet.

“How are we going to get back out?”

Another piece of the ceiling falls, bringing down more red light and a healthy cloud of ash. Eve groans.

“Same way we came,” Dean says, picking up the trench coat and wrapping Cas’s good right arm over his left shoulder like he’s sprained an ankle. God, he’s a brick. A whole sack of bricks. “Can you walk like this?”

“Yeah,” Cas croaks.

The tentacles overhead creak, and Eve lets out a wail. Dean yanks them forward, ducking just in time to avoid her lashing limb. They stumble up the aisle in a messy three-legged race, Cas’s ruined coat flapping in Dean’s right hand, the blossom clutched in Cas’s injured left hand. Ash and dirt rain down around them.

Outside, the tunnel is writhing, and almost too tight for both of them to squeeze through. The root-tentacles grasp at them desperately but weakly, too hysterical and disorganized. Dean grimaces in disgust, unable to shrink away.

“Come on, almost there,” he mutters to Cas, who’s panting into his ear. “Just a little further, I got you.”

Away from the noise and confusion at Eve’s core, Cas seems to come back to himself a little. “They didn’t want me, they wanted the location of the portal,” Cas pants. “Well, they wanted me, but—”

“Yeah,” Dean says, as they enter the last bend in the tunnel. He hears the rushing air up ahead. This escape plan was a bad idea. It’s going to work, but it was a bad idea. “Do they want to get back through to Earth?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” Dean nods. Then: “Did they hurt you?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” Dean says again. He swallows an apology. Not the time. Up ahead, he hears the flames crackling. A wall of smoke approaches, tinged orange by the flames. “Okay. Well, they didn’t see the portal, so we’ll just have to get back to it before they do. Look sharp. This, uh—this might get hairy.”

The smoke rises before them, and the flames above roar loud like a jet engine. Dean reaches over, letting go of Cas for a moment, and opens the trench coat. He lifts it over Cas’s head and injured shoulder like a wing, making Cas duck down against his chest, and grips Cas over his shoulderblades. With his other hand, he pulls the other side of the coat over his own head, and plucks his shirt collar to cover his mouth. “Just stay down!” he yells, muffled. Against his chest, Cas nods.

They dive through the fire, blinding light and white heat and gusting, sucking air.

*

Next thing Dean knows, he’s lying on his stomach in the cool dark. He pants into the leaves. “Oh, oh, God,” he croaks. “Shit.” He exhales, and every inch of exposed skin aches—hot-cold, like it’s still burning. “Yeah, that’s gonna leave a mark.” He pants, and lets the pain wash over him. You get ‘til the count of five, he thinks to himself. His hands, his face and neck, his lower back where his shirt rode up, his ankles, all burned. First-degree at least. Maybe worse. Shit.

...Three... two... one.

Okay. Done.

Wincing, he lifts his head, and feels Cas motionless under his arm. He feels him breathing. In the dancing firelight, he can see the side of Cas’s face—no burns.

Dean looks back at the blaze behind them. It’s engulfed half of the Eve tree’s trunk now, flames climbing high. The sky is blankly black, just like every night in this place—no stars, no moon, no satellites. Just a lightless, depthless ceiling over a coal-mine world. The burning tree casts wild orange light dancing on the forest floor. It'll attract the dead like a beacon.

“Cas.” Dean nudges him, and he makes a small noise—alive, but not doing well. For another moment, Dean stares at the blaze, mesmerized. Then, a long whine of pain comes from deep underground, muffled by the earth.

“Cas,” Dean says again. He nudges him harder, eyes on the tree. He could swear—but no. It’s impossible.

Something that big can’t move.

“Come on,” Dean says, scrambling up with another sharp inhale. Oh, it hurts. He lifts Cas, urgently and ungently, by his armpits. The coat is wrecked, mostly-burned on the ground near them. Dean leaves it there. “We gotta move.”

Eyes closed, Cas goes without protest.

*

It takes Dean a long time to find the river in the dark. He loses track of how long. He’s freezing without a jacket, and his back and legs ache from supporting Cas, and the wound on his eye is starting to scab, making it hang half-closed no matter how many times he rubs spit on it. His burns ache frostbite-cold and fever-hot by turns, and everywhere his clothes or Cas’s rub against them hurts unbearably—but he doesn’t let himself make even a noise of complaint. 

It’s Cas who’s in bad shape. Dean hasn’t seen him this messed up in a long time, and it’s scary. In his mind, Cas is immovable, the seawall that the storm breaks against. But the Cas he’s currently half-dragging across the monster zone with is a beat-up, bloody pulp barely stuffed into Dean’s jacket. The further they walk, the less he talks. “Just a little bit further, Cas,” Dean keeps muttering, even though Cas has mostly stopped answering. By the time they get to the river, he hardly seems conscious. 

At last, they reach the waterfall. Dean brings them to a stop at the bottom of it, catching his breath. White fog from the churning water drifts over them in a cloud, painting cool moisture over his aching skin. He looks up into the dark, through the mist. He can’t even see the top. The slightest, dimmest light comes from above—the portal, just beyond. 

“Okay,” he whispers, mostly to himself. “Still open. We can do this. Just a little bit further.” 

He positions Cas at the base of the cliff and directs him to two handholds, a root on the left and a little sapling on the right. Too late, he remembers one of Cas’s arms is out of commission—he’ll have to drag him up. Dean exhales, looking up at the slick rock and the tiny mosses growing on every crevice. 

“Okay, we’ll just take it slow,” Dean says. “Bit by bit. We got time.” More than I deserve, he thinks. This is nothing, he tells himself as he secures Cas’s arm over his shoulder again. You should be dragging Cas up Mount Doom, and letting him push you in at the top of it, ring and all. 

It’s only twenty yards. The work of ten minutes on a good day. 

It takes them almost an hour. 

“That’s it,” he says, breathing hard. “Come on. Just a little further.” 

They’re at the home stretch, a slick vertical expanse of pitted rock, no more than six feet high. Dean doesn’t see any promising routes, so they're climbing up using a dead tree trunk lying against the cliff. “Here,” Dean mutters. “You go first.” 

He guides Cas’s right hand to a severed stump of branch, and when Cas doesn’t take hold of it, Dean cradles his hand and curls it around the branch. “Hold on. Come on.”

He pushes Cas by his broad back, and finally, finally, he gets the idea, and pulls himself up. He hears Cas inhale sharply through his nose—either waking up, or hurting, or both. “Cas? You okay?”  

Cas doesn’t answer, but the weight over Dean disappears as he pulls himself up. One-armed, Cas pulls himself up the last few feet of the cliff. 

Dean scrambles up after him, wincing when the cold stone meets his burns. When he gets to the top, Cas is swaying on his feet. Dean dusts off his hands, taking Cas’s arm again. His blood is soaking through Dean’s jacket. 

The roar of water is quieter, finally, and there’s light—the portal. Hovering over the dark surface of the river, no more than 20 yards away. It’s flickering, but still open. Dean pants with relief. 

“Just a little further,” Dean says, glad to be done lying for morale. “I gotcha.”

He secures Cas’s arm over his shoulders again, and drags him over the riverbed. They go over a bump in the territory and Cas hisses, suppressing a gasp of pain because he’s strong like that, and Dean apologizes again—“Sorry, I got you, sorry.” He wants to keep saying it, he wants to stop himself from saying it—he doesn’t even have the right to Cas’s forgiveness and it’s not his place for him to ask for it. Cas politely refrains from giving it. Dean is grateful for that. So maybe he’s battered and bruised like he’s been through it; he is still the immovable seawall, and Dean’s finally crashed into him. He followed the lighthouse and he hit the shore. The boat stops here. 

They step into the river. “Just a little further,” Dean repeats. 

Cas says something that sounds like “Okay,” and then his toe slips on the slick stones and he goes down, nearly bringing Dean with him. He drops to his knees with a splash and he’s so dazed he doesn’t even catch himself, he just tips towards the water.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, okay—” Dean levers him back by the shoulders, but his momentum goes the other way, backwards, and Dean has to catch his back. “Cas! Hey. Buddy?”

He leans him back to get a look at his face. Cas is blinking slowly. His eyes focus on Dean for a second. “Mm.” 

Dean steadies the arm around him. “Cas. You with me?”

Cas nods.

“Think you can walk another—” Dean cranes his neck over the boulder— “10 yards?” 

Cas closes his eyes and nods with confidence.  

Dean heaves a sigh. “Okay. Come here.”

Cas really isn’t as heavy as he looks. Okay—no, he is. Much heavier. Dean digs one arm under Cas’s knees while the other cradles his shoulders, hissing exaggeratedly with the effort of standing up. Unbidden, the memory of carrying his body to the pyre in Oregon rises in his mind. Dean swallows something dark in his throat. Cas feels less heavy in his arms. “How’s that? Just a—just a little further. Then we’ll—take the rowboat home and we’ll—get you some rest.”

“Mm,” Cas says again. His outer arm hangs loose, flopping in a way that looks unhealthy for the joint. His blood is soaking through Dean’s jacket, into Dean’s chest.  

“Hey. Hang on, there, would you?” 

Cas grunts quietly.

The portal flickers over the water. “Shit,” Dean mutters. “It’s closing. Cas, buddy, come on.” He shakes him lightly. “Stay with me.” 

The water rushes into the tops of his boots. It’s frigid, and heavy. Pins and needles dance painfully over the burns on his ankles. On the next step Dean stumbles, but manages not to fall. 

Jostled awake, Cas’s eyes blink open.

“Hey. You with me?” 

“Dean. Where are we?” His voice is faint and hoarse. 

“Almost there.” Dean winces. Cold water on his calves, on his burns. Cold air on his bare arms, shaking with the effort of holding Cas. Doesn’t matter. Just a little further. “Portal’s closing.” He jostles under Cas’s head again. “Hold on to me. You’re throwing off my balance, you’re like a sack of potatoes.” 

The water passes Dean’s knees. Cas gets a grip on the front of Dean’s shirt, but Dean shrugs his shoulder, encouraging Cas to move up. He hangs onto Dean’s shoulder instead. The portal flickers.

“It’s closing,” Cas says, eyes shut. 

Dean cradles his head with his elbow. “Not closed yet.” Just a few more yards. “Hold on, come on, you’re slipping.” 

Cas wraps his other arm around Dean’s back, clasping his hands together over Dean’s shoulder and leaning his head near Dean’s collarbone. Dean’s chin bumps the top of his head. “There you go,” Dean says, hefting his grip tighter under Cas’s shoulderblades. He can make it a few more yards. 

“Dean. Do we still have the blossom?” 

Dean hesitates. “No.”

He noticed that it was gone sometime between the fire and the river. But it doesn’t matter. 

“I’m sorry,” Cas murmurs. 

“No. It’s all right,” Dean says. A few more steps. The rocks shift under his feet, but he maintains his balance. They’re going to make it. They’re going to make it home. “It’s okay. We’ll figure something else out. That’s not what matters, right?”

Cas’s voice is faint. “Stopping Chuck is what matters.” 

“No. Hey.” Jostles him again. “Stay with me. Just a little longer.” 

Nothing.

“Cas.”

Cas frowns, eyes closed. “We stopped moving.”

“Cas.” Dean’s voice is quiet and hoarse. Water flows by around his legs. “I’m sorry. For what I did.” He stares at the portal, flickering before them. If he can’t say it, the portal will close, and they’ll be trapped here forever. And that’ll be his penance. “I went too far. I’m so sorry.” 

“It’s okay, Dean,” Cas says, voice reassuring, eyes still closed. “I understand.”

Dean tightens his grip under Cas’s legs, his head. “No. It’s not okay. It was fucked up.” The portal contracts and expands again, sending light across Cas’s bruised and bloody face. “It was fucked up and I’m sorry.”

Cas turns his head a little, into Dean’s shirt, but still doesn’t open his eyes. 

“You haven’t changed,” Cas says quietly. “I thought you had. I just didn’t understand.”

Dean’s not about to ask what he means by that. 

Wondering will be penance enough.

He looks up at the portal, bright in the night but growing dimmer. Cas’s grip goes slack, as his fingers unlink at Dean’s shoulder and he drifts back into unconsciousness—dead weight in Dean’s arms again. Dean hefts him up again, securing his grip. Then he steps through the portal to begin the long journey home through the dark.