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They’re all gone.
The whole field is dotted with the bodies of everyone Dean loves. Everyone except for Cas, who is still in The Empty (if it still exists), and Dean doubts that Chuck left out a single detail in his plan of destruction, from cosmic entities down to the smallest living species.
Down to this one space, the last place left on Earth. Every bit of life in the universe—every universe—blotted out, except for Dean. Chuck has left Dean, his final player, on a board littered with the corpses of everyone dear to him: Sam. Jack. Mary. John. Jody. Bobby. Donna. Charlie. Garth. Everyone.
Except for Dean, and except for Chuck, with his one bright eye and one black focused on Dean, smirking as he crosses the field toward where Dean stands, stricken, and not an ounce left of fight in him. It doesn’t matter now, if he takes out Chuck. He can’t, anyway, but even if he could, it wouldn’t matter. There’s nothing left to fight for, nothing left to save.
So Dean, for the first time in his life, doesn’t challenge destiny. He tosses the spear aside, hears wood thunk against packed, bare dirt, and he sits down. Right there, with Chuck still striding toward him, no doubt intending first to gloat and then to tie up the single remaining loose end in the plot of his creation story.
And Dean? He can’t do it—can’t look at Chuck, not here, at the end of it. Not anymore. So he turns his face heavenward, waits for the inevitable, and it’s just instinct, then, for him to think a prayer to Cas. All the times when Dean called for Cas in his mind and out loud while looking up at an empty sky, he wondered where the angel could be, wishing he could will Cas there to him somehow. Wishing he knew how to reach Cas with a plea that was stronger, louder, than a prayer.
It begins far off in the distance and is, at first, just a high-pitched hum, a vibration in the air. And Dean gets goosebumps, even though he doesn’t understand yet what that sound means. Doesn’t know yet that it is the sound of salvation. Doesn’t remember that the same sound called to him from the depths of hell across the incessant screams and wails to reach him.
The sound becomes louder—too loud, too high, too intense—and Dean covers his ears just as piercing, blue-white light streaks down between him and Chuck, a blinding light that has Dean closing his eyes against it.
He expects something cataclysmic, then. An explosion, an implosion, something. But when he lowers his hands away from his ears, there is only sudden stillness. And complete silence. Until a single sound, the smallest of sounds, the flapping of wings, and Dean knows that sound down to the marrow of his bones. But he is still afraid to open his eyes, afraid he’s already dead or stuck inside a dreamscape.
But Dean Winchester is nothing if not brave, so it isn’t long before he blinks open his eyes and looks up into the sunlight that appears as a crown behind the head of the man looking down at him. The man who smiles at him and reaches out a hand, and Dean knows this hand because it pulled him out of hell once, and it has somehow, somehow, done so again.
He is helped to his feet and finds himself face-to-face with an angel and looking into a soft blue gaze.
“Hello, Dean.”
Their embrace isn’t just friendly; it’s fierce, and overwhelming, and Dean never wants to let go. But over Cas’s shoulder, he sees figures all across the field rising to their feet. He sees Sam and Jack, scans behind them and there’s Charlie, and Bobby, and Mary. Everyone. And in the space beyond the borders of the field, the ground is rolling out and out to cover the emptiness that was just there, the nothingness, and the land and light races outward and stretches toward the horizon, on all sides.
And even though Dean doesn’t want to let go, doesn’t want to step back from Cas, not now, he knows this isn’t the moment for what he needs to say, needs to do. So he pulls back, squeezes Cas’s shoulder, and they both turn and walk together toward Sam and Jack.
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Two days later, most everyone has left for Chicago, but the Winchesters are still in Joliet and don’t plan to leave for home for another few days. There will be time later to begin cleaning up the rubble of the bunker.
Time. For anything they want to do, for the first time in their entire lives. And the first thing Dean wants to do is hit the road with a certain angel riding shotgun.
When he asks Cas to go for a drive with him, Cas follows him across the hotel parking lot to Baby without question, the way that he has followed Dean for all his time on Earth. And it is only after they have been driving for 30 minutes or so in companionable silence that Cas asks where they’re headed, and Dean offers him a little grin and says, “You’ll see.”
When they pass the first road sign for Pontiac, Cas turns to look at Dean, a bit in disbelief, and Dean keeps his gaze straight ahead, but he’s smiling.
He takes a left off the exit, coming into Pontiac on 116—past the Burger King, the Arby’s, the Taco Bell—and takes another left onto Westview Drive. They pass 425 Westview, and Dean can see Cas tense a little as they drive past the former house of the former Jimmy Novak, who, all those many years ago, stood outside the white-columned craftsman on a night with a bright moon. This devout man, whose breath was visible on the cool air as he called out to the Divine, looked up and listened to the whispers of an angel, the thousand bell-like voices that blended into one. The voice of an angel who was desperate for a "yes" so he could communicate with a man who was special, who was different, who was chosen. Who was saved.
When Westview Drive dead-ends, Dean parks Baby and he and Cas get out and begin walking toward a clearing in the wooded area not far from the river. The angel-felled trees have long since been carted away, but there is, inexplicably, still a makeshift wooden cross in the ground, sun-bleached and crumbling, but still clearly marking the spot.
They stand there together, side-by-side, looking down at the place where Dean clawed up through the earth and back into life. And Dean, who is not always a man of many words, knows these words by heart because he’s been practicing them in his head all the way from Joliet. And he isn’t nervous or unsure about them:
“This is where we started, me and you. On Earth, anyway. And we’ve come a long way together since then, Cas, and I think we can go a lot further, too.”
Cas looks at Dean, and this time Dean meets his gaze, and says, “I’ve wondered, over the years, how things might be different between us if you hadn’t chosen a dude vessel. And I’ve also wondered, over the years, what it could be like between us, even though you did.”
Dean turns to Cas, takes a step closer, and says, “I think what it comes down to, Cas, is that loving someone isn’t about the vessel they’re occupying, it’s about the soul that’s inside it.”
Cas, who is smiling and standing so still, says a bit ruefully, “Angels don’t have souls, Dean.”
And Dean takes the last step that closes the distance between them and says with as much sincerity as he has ever said anything in his life,
“Cas, you’ve got more soul than anyone I’ve ever known.”
The angel is blinking back tears, when Dean takes a deep breath and says,
“This is new territory for me, so we’re probably gonna have to take it slow. But I want this with you. I do.”
This time, the embrace is still fierce, but is also passionate, and Cas’s eyes are closed—Dean’s, too—as Dean speaks, so quietly: “Hey, Cas, you got your ears on?”
Cas manages a shaky and breathless, “Yes, Dean.”
Dean tightens his grip and says, “Good. Then listen up, Angel.” And turns his head to whisper into the shell of Cas’s ear: “I love you, too.”
When he pulls back to look at Cas, searching his face, his reaction, his beautiful, open, soft blue eyes, looking at Dean in wonder and tenderness, Dean feels a bone-deep gratitude for every single goddamn thing that he went through to get to this moment. Cas’s gaze flicks back and forth between Dean’s emerald eyes and his mouth, and Dean knows Cas won’t be the one to lean in first. That Cas will let Dean take this at his own pace. That Cas has always been waiting for Dean.
Waiting on the side of the road with a cell phone.
Waiting while Dean finishes drinking his coffee in a western-themed motel room.
Waiting for Dean’s cue in any one of a thousand battles against unbeatable odds.
And he will wait for Dean in this, now, too.
At the end of their second trip to purgatory, Cas—Leviathan blossom in hand—stopped Dean from saying that he was sorry; Cas didn’t need to hear it. All of Dean’s “I’m sorrys” to Cas had also always been “I love yous,” and Cas didn’t need to hear another one then, because Cas already knew, had always known, that Dean loved him.
But he didn’t know that Dean loved him, not yet, not then.
And Dean hadn’t been quite aware of it yet, either. But it was there: that kind of love for Cas. The kind people write ballads about and go to war over. And they had certainly fought their fair share of wars. This, then, was their poem.
Dean’s love for Cas, that kind, was there when Dean folded up a drenched and dirty trench coat, and placed it in Baby’s trunk.
It was there when Dean fell to his knees beside Cas’s lifeless body, the sooty silhouette of massive wings spread across the bare earth.
It was there when Dean walked up to a wooden table, pulled back the sheet from Cas’s cold and still face, tore the curtains from the windows, and wrapped the angel’s body in a shroud. It was there as he watched the body burn on a pyre, it was there in the shadows of his hollowed-out expression, in the shimmer of tears.
It was there when Dean stood outside a Gas-N-Sip with his arms braced on Baby’s roof, and watched through the gas station window as his blue-vested, newly-human friend handed people their change.
It was there the night Dean parked near a pay phone, stood in an alley with a neon sign of a white cross behind him in the background, above his shoulder, and watched his angel turn around to face him. And Dean knew he didn’t need to do any kind of test—no silver blade across the palm, no holy water splashed on skin. Dean could see it was really Cas, knew it was really Cas, because of how Cas looked at him in that moment. Dean knew the feeling of Cas’s gaze on him. When Dean was looking, when he wasn’t looking, when he was sleeping, when he was eating, when he was fighting…. Cas’s eyes, that steady blue regard, always on Dean. There could be no mistaking the depth of feeling behind it, the connection that went well beyond words.
And Dean might have gone for it then, there at the pay phone, that night, if Sam hadn’t been there, maybe. If Dean hadn’t been so completely shaken. He might have leaned in, after his embrace with Cas. Might have pressed his lips against Cas’s soft mouth.
He might have gone for it that day in April’s apartment, after Ezekiel brought Cas back to life, and Dean leaned over Cas’s chair and put a hand on his knee, and felt so grateful and relieved he wanted to weep.
He might have gone for it after Rowena lifted the attack dog spell on Cas, when Dean cradled the angel’s face in his hands there on that concrete warehouse floor.
He might have gone for it when Cas was on the sagging plaid couch in Ramiel’s barn, dying from the wound of Michael’s lance, after Cas said it—out loud for the first time—that he loved Dean but couldn’t look him in the eye as he spoke the words.
He might have gone for it while he sat next to his best friend at a bar, nursing a beer while they waited on a cupid and her bow to show.
He might have gone for it that first trip to purgatory, when Dean finally found the angel, crouched by a river, bearded and weary.
He might have gone for it at the cemetery where Mary was buried, in those precious few moments of peace before Dean would leave to bring the soul bomb to Amara, for the sake of saving the world.
He might have gone for it in the bunker library after Mary lowered the gun she had pointed at Cas, and Cas threw his arms around Dean, stunned that his friend was still alive.
He might have gone for it any of those times, or any number of similar times, but they were never alone; there was always an audience.
There isn’t one now. The only witnesses are the wind, the hush, and the sunlight.
And Cas is watching Dean. And waiting for Dean. As Dean bends his head toward Cas’s, Cas leans in, head tilted at the familiar confused-angel angle, and meets Dean in the middle, the way he always has, the way he always will.
There are sparks at this beginning, too. Cascades of them.
And Dean has felt Cas’s grace before—all the countless times Cas has laid his strong, capable, steady hands over Dean’s wounds and healed him; Dean knows the feeling of that warmth running through his body, knitting him back together, repairing all the places that hurt, restoring him.
But Dean has never tasted grace, not until this moment. And Dean is a man who has his favorite flavors, but this one is better than bourbon, better than burgers, better than pie. This flavor tastes like absolution, resolution, confirmation. And it feels like a promise:
Good things do happen, Dean.
And this angel, the one who went to hell and fought back the foes long enough to rescue Dean Winchester, is still gripping him tight.
He hasn’t ever let go, not since that moment in hell when the angel reached out to retrieve a soul, and soul met grace and held on right back.
In a rickety white barn with walls covered in warding, Dean’s first words to Cas: “Who are you?”
Dean knows the answer now as surely as he has ever known any truth. Castiel is the love of his life.
And what could be more profound a bond than that?
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