SPN FIC - When You Are Done (Let's end the thing THIS way, shall we?)
Over the weekend, I watched a Q&A session from last year's Nerd HQ, where Jared insisted yet again that the only possible way to end the Winchester saga is for Sam and Dean to "go out with a bang." Putting aside the urge to slap him silly, I'll concede that he's right -- from the STORY's point of view. But from the AUDIENCE's point of view? Oh HELLS no.
Either way, the situation put me to pondering. How does one end a series "with a bang," while at the same time providing proper emotional closure for an audience who's been invested in a set of characters for an entire freaking DECADE? How does one provide flailing, and nail-biting, and tears, while avoiding having heavy objects thrown at TV sets around the world?
I've been a writer for a really, really long time. I couldn't even begin to guess how many thousands of hours of TV I've watched over the years, but I've been invested in the lives of fictional characters well enough to understand how to move them around. How to put them in the right places, and hopefully, how to make things feel real. So if you'll allow me, I've put together my version of SPN's series finale. One that steals a bit from the finales of Buffy and Angel, because if nothing else, Supernatural is built around bits and pieces stolen wholesale from other things. I want to give you the final scenes of The Winchester Gospels, but before that... why don't you stoke up "Carry On, My Wayward Son" and join me for...
THE ROAD SO FAR
A contingent of demons led by the new Queen of the Crossroads (Bela Talbot) secures the demon tablet, and with the aid of a prophet who was damned in the 14th century, they translate information that allows them to open all the gates of Hell - spilling every last demon out onto the Earth, to the delight of Abaddon, who's become the new ruler of the Pit (and is now on the fast track to become the ruler of Earth as well). The boys convince a garrison of fallen angels to help them battle the demons, and by mid-season they've managed to win a number of skirmishes, but at the cost of many lives, both angelic and human. One of those casualties is Kevin, whose dying act is to inform the boys that God hid one more tablet… the Salvation Tablet.
Finding the tablet is a challenge unlike anything the boys have ever faced, because they're opposed not only by the demons, but by the angels as well - since invoking the power of the tablet will rid the Earth of every single unnatural thing. Including the angels.
Including Castiel.
The angels won't be returning to Heaven, Cas informs the boys when they finally have the tablet in hand; and the demons won't be returning to Hell. They'll be eliminated, as God's purpose in this was to wipe the slate clean. If the power of the tablet is being invoked, things have obviously gone catastrophically wrong, which calls for a brand-new beginning. "What about the people?" Dean asks, to which Cas replies with a fond, if rueful, smile, "You always were His favorites."
Bela's group hasn't been dormant during all this time: they've managed to open Purgatory as well, unleashing all the monsters, forcing the boys to do battle with some familiar faces, among them Gordon Walker, Madison, the shapeshifters, and Lenore. Catastrophes of Biblical proportions are erupting worldwide, and it's clear to the boys that if they don't defeat their enemies within the next few weeks, there'll be nothing left to save. They locate Kevin's replacement, Aaron Webber (the little boy from "A Little Slice of Kevin"), who quickly sets to work translating the tablet. In order to perform God's Little Power Wash, he tells them, they must gather all the unnatural things in one place, something that can be accomplished with a sacrifice of souls.
The Three, he says. The Pure of Heart.
Not something the boys really want to do, of course, since one of the three is Charlie. "What the hell," she says. "I never figured I'd come out of this in one piece."
The sacrifice is made, the invocation is cast, and the boys are truly alone as the forces of the supernatural - including Lucifer and Michael (sprung from their cage by the invocation) - arrive as one collective army… on a field in Kansas, because, as Chuck so wisely said, "It should end where it began."
NOW
My 600th Supernatural story.
CHARACTERS: Dean, Sam... and guest stars
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 3200 words
WHEN YOU ARE DONE
By Carol Davis
All he could think to say was, "Wow."
The one thing you couldn't help but notice about Kansas, if you'd driven through it a thousand times, as Dean had throughout his life, was how damn FLAT it was. Flat as a gigantic damn pancake. Which could be advantageous under certain circumstances, he supposed.
Now, though?
Not so much, given what it allowed him and Sam to see.
"Yeah," Sam agreed on a breath, from arm's length away. "There's one serious crapload of those sons of bitches, isn't there?"
Assembling like an enormous ring of locusts. Maybe a mile off, Dean guessed, forming a circle with him and Sam at its center. From this distance it was something like that Dust Bowl cloud, filling the horizon in every direction, roiling and angry; its fury was something he could taste, could feel in his bones. Well, he thought, it's our own damn fault. This was our big plan.
We are so, so screwed didn't even begin to cover something like this.
Smiling, he turned to Sam, who was pulling the tablet out of the leather bag that had once transported his laptop. When Sam noticed the smile he returned it. They stood looking at each other for a moment, then Sam stepped forward and seized his brother in a smothering, one-armed embrace that Dean accepted and returned in kind.
"You good with this?" Sam asked as he stepped away. "Because - man, if this is Ground Zero, and all of them are gonna disappear into some gigantic black hole of nowhere, what's to say we -"
"I could use some peace and quiet," Dean said. "After all this? I'm not gonna object to a little oblivion."
"We might survive."
"It gets rid of everything unnatural, Sam. You gonna stand there and call the two of us 'natural'? After Hell, and all the resurrections, and the deals? God, man, after our lives?"
A mile away, and closing fast.
"We'd better do this," Sam said.
How many? Dean wondered - how many of those bastards were there? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? And some of them were older than time itself. How in the hell had it come down to him and Sam, to tackle something this enormous? Who the hell had decided they were worthy of wielding a weapon like this?
As if he knew exactly what Dean was thinking, Sam quipped softly, "Because you're Batman."
Before Dean could reply to that, Sam held the tablet out in front of him, grasping it tightly in both hands, leery of losing his grip, of dropping the thing before they could do what they'd come here to do. Before they could light the fuse on this nuke. As Dean reached toward the ancient stone, the breath he exhaled felt liquid, alive, something he had to force out of his lungs to join the clear, warm atmosphere of a spring afternoon.
Hell, maybe his body knew it was done for. Maybe it was hanging onto what little life it had left.
"Let's do it," he told Sam. "Let's kick this thing in the ass, one last time."
He didn't add, And hope it works.
He took hold of his end of the tablet with both hands, so that he and Sam had a hand wrapped around each of its four chiseled corners. When he touched it, it felt like nothing out of the ordinary, nothing other than a piece of rock; it gave off no heat, no sense of power.
At least, it didn't until he and Sam began to recite the invocation.
For fear of turning something loose prematurely, they hadn't spoken the verse aloud before now; they'd practiced it only in the silence of their own heads, frowning at the unfamiliar words, the cadence, the sense of flying into something completely blind. Dean had no more honest confidence now in what they were doing than he'd had in the car on the way here - but as he'd felt so many times before, there came a point where you just had to let go and do the thing.
He could hear the armies of Heaven and Hell now: could make out the thunder of their pounding feet, hammering the Kansas landscape into dust.
Half a mile away, maybe?
There wasn't going to be anything left of America's heartland but a gigantic hole.
From the other side of the tablet, Sam smiled at him again. His eyes said something Dean didn't need a prophet to translate, something that was the best possible thing he could see, if this was the end of it, if their long road, at last, stopped here.
Thank you. Brother. For everything. For all of it.
Dean nodded, a single dip of his chin. His smile wobbled a little, then strengthened, and he thought of what Charlie had said. What the hell - it's not like I ever expected to come out of this in one piece.
The tablet was growing warm now.
Lucifer and Michael were in that roiling mass somewhere, Dean realized. Surprisingly, they weren't leading the charge; they weren't up front, riding a couple of damn Horses of the Apocalypse, waving swords of vengeance or hurling lightning bolts. In some small way, that was disappointing, given that the two of them had set most of this shitstorm in motion.
Maybe they were lingering toward the back somewhere, allowing the grunts in their army to serve as a shield.
Cas had warned the Winchesters not to stop once they'd started, not to allow the chain of words to be interrupted. So Dean didn't stop, or hesitate; nor did Sam. Dean did, however, smile one last time as he and his brother reached the end of the words the Lord of All Creation had long ago demanded be etched into a block of stone.
His last conscious thought was Yippeekayay, motherfuckers.
The light that burst from the tablet was brighter than anything he could possibly have imagined.
Then the entire world went black.
~~~~~~~~
He woke to the smell of grass and dirt, and it sent a jolt through him; the memory of finding himself inside a wooden casket under six feet of Illinois earth had never faded very far from mind, and it certainly was vivid enough now. Sputtering, and nearly frantic, he shoved at the ground beneath him and rolled over, both surprised by and enormously grateful for the sight of blue sky and a wide canopy of leaves overhead.
Outside, then. And… alive?
His head spun as he pushed himself up into a sit, and rather than risk passing out, he lowered his forehead into his hands and sat breathing slowly for a little while, shivering although the day seemed to be warm.
Maybe not alive. How could he be, after what had happened?
He'd set off a damn NUKE, with himself and Sam at the center of it.
Sam.
His eyes were gritty and dry, as if he'd indeed been underground for some time, but he forced them open and looked around. Sam was nowhere in sight. For that matter, neither was anyone else, the up side to that being that there was no sign of the murderous army that had been headed his way what seemed like moments ago. The day was quiet, calm, its silence broken only by the rhythmic whapwhapwhap of a lawn sprinkler and the distant sound of traffic.
Sam…
Not again, dammit. Not after all this. It was supposed to be both of us.
"SAAAAAM!" he roared.
"Easy, tiger," a voice said.
A voice he knew. One he didn't particularly like, unfortunately. One that came nowhere near making the short list of voices he'd like to hear after he'd either survived God's planetary douching, or… you know. Not. He had to turn quite a ways to his left to find the source of the sound, an action that made his neck creak like an old hinge, and he grimaced when he found the speaker grinning at him.
"Hey, Dean," Chuck Shurley said.
For a moment, all Dean did was blink. Then he said, "My heaven is YOU?"
"Heaven?"
"Sunshine. Birds singing. And Chuck Freaking Shurley in underwear and a bathrobe. This is God's idea of a side-splitter?"
"You're not in Heaven, Dean."
"Well, it's sure not Hell. I've had the two-dollar tour down there."
"Not Hell either."
Groaning, Dean again buried his face in his hands. "Look," he said through his fingers. "Pardon me for being the rudest son of a bitch on earth, but after what I've been through the last - no, you know what? What I've been through my whole damn LIFE. The last thing I want to do right now is banter with you, Chuck. What am I doing here? And where the hell is my BROTHER?"
"Not far," Chuck said.
"Which means what, exactly?"
"It means, not far. Count to ten, Dean. Take a breath. You made it to the other side. You can stop throwing punches."
Dean would have stormed away, if he could have mustered the ambition. As it was, all he could do was sit where he was, on somebody's grassy front lawn, with a jagged pebble or the sharp end of a twig jabbing him in the ass. If things were playing true to what he'd been shown during his and Sam's trip Upstairs a few years back, this was all part of some treasured memory - but what that could be, he had no idea. He certainly had nothing approaching a fond memory that included the Assumed Dead and Largely Unlamented Prophet Chuck.
"Do me a favor," he muttered. "Go haunt somebody else."
Then he waited. Counted to a hundred, staring at the wilted dandelion growing near the toe of his right boot. When he'd finished, he lifted his head, and Chuck was still there.
Smiling.
From somewhere at the back of his mind, he could hear Cas saying, "You always were His favorite."
What he understood then was tough to put into words. Sure, he'd seen any number of movies portraying the Almighty as something other than a majestic old guy in a flowing robe, sporting a long, white beard. He'd seen the one where God was George Burns. But… this? "Dude," he sputtered. "You - the HELL. You're a short, smelly asshole in a cheap bathrobe?"
"Not exactly," Chuck said.
"All along? Were you - when we -"
"Not then, no."
"This is Heaven, then? With the weeds, and the lawn sprinkler?"
He had to stop then, battered by memories of all that had happened over the past few years. Of what they'd suffered. The people they'd lost. GOOD people, all of them. Charlie. Kevin. Jody and Aaron and his devoted golem. Garth. Bobby. Rufus, Pamela, Ellen and Jo, Henry, Demian and Barnes, Missouri, Pastor Jim, Caleb. Ash. Kevin's mom. Henricksen, and that girl Nancy. So many. So, so many.
"Why didn't you come back?" he whispered. "Why'd you let all that crap happen? Where did you go, man?"
Chuck looked past him, at whatever lay behind him, somewhere down the street.
"My house has many rooms, Dean," he said finally. "There were other things to deal with."
"So you left us alone."
Chuck Almighty didn't answer, just kept looking at whatever was back there, a smile blooming across his face. The continued silence rankled Dean to the point that he pushed himself up from the ground, stumbling a little as he reached his feet and turned to see what the unshaven, bearded Deity was so interested in.
Sam.
Sam, with his arms wrapped around a blonde girl in jeans and a baggy blue sweater. A girl whose shape was unmistakable - mostly because of her height - even though Dean had met her only once, three days before she died. Still wobbly, Dean took a step in their direction, then another, then broke into a near-run, bringing himself up short just beyond reach of his brother.
Sam was weeping, both hands knotted in the loose fabric of Jessica's sweater. When the two of them moved apart - just a little - Dean could see that she, too, had been crying.
There was a lot of snot involved.
"Dean?" Sam said. "Dean?"
Heaven, then, Dean thought. "Sammy," he murmured.
He didn't hear Chuck approach so much as sense his presence. When he half-turned toward the guy he'd always regarded as a monumental pain in the ass, of honest value to pretty much no one, the former Prophet said, "Payment for services rendered. The two of you - I couldn't have asked for two more committed warriors. Occasionally balky, yes, but that's the price of giving you free will. You saw what needed to be done and you did it."
Okay, then, Dean thought. It was enough: seeing Sam happy.
Seeing Sam freaking deliriously happy.
Jessica alive.
Chuck tapped Dean on the arm, and pointed.
It was tough, looking away from Sam and the woman who'd never stopped being the love of his life. Dean might not have been able to manage it, if there hadn't been so much snot involved in all that weeping. As it was, he frowned, shaking his head at the distraction, and turned to see two people he'd excised from his life - for their own good, he'd decided. For their own safety, though he'd never been sure that would always be true, that Crowley, or Abaddon, or some other evil son of a bitch, wouldn't someday decide to draft them back into the game.
He'd made sure they wouldn't remember him.
But they clearly remembered him now.
Just like that warehouse in the djinn-world, he thought furiously, when they'd all come crowding around him, begging him to stay, to live out a life there, with them, happy and free of responsibility. A damn dream world, and that's what this was, too: Jessica alive, Sam happy, and Lisa and Ben standing there beaming at him. "Is this what I get?" he demanded, whirling on Chuck, mildly surprised when Chuck didn't back off, didn't cower in alarm the way the real Chuck would have. "This whole fantasy thing? I'm sick of this crap, man! I didn't sign up for this! I thought - I thought -"
"That you'd just fade to black?" Chuck said.
"I want -" As it had back in that field in Kansas, the air seemed liquid. Impossible to force in and out of his lungs. "When is it over?" Dean pleaded. "When is it gonna be over?"
"When you've lived out your life," Chuck told him quietly.
"I did that, you bastard. I set off a nuke. I did what I was supposed to do. Did that not happen?"
"It happened."
"Then -"
He stumbled away. Would have run, if he'd been able to find the strength. The best he could manage was a dozen yards along the sidewalk, then dropping into a slump on the curb.
The gutter, he noticed distantly, was littered with junk: a gum wrapper, bits of dead leaves, the broken corner of an old cassette tape.
"This isn't Heaven," Sam said as he sat down beside his brother.
Dean didn't reply right away. "Then… what? It's a dream?"
Sam reached into the gutter and picked up the piece of plastic, which bore half a label written in black Sharpie. HARLEY'S MIX TA and JUN and HAPPY BIR. "The set decoration's pretty good, if this is a fake," he observed. "Dean. I woke up a few minutes before you did. We did it, man. They're all gone. All of them. The demons, the angels, all the wendigos and the shapeshifters and the vampires - the world's clean. It's normal, Dean. All of it. And this - do you know where we are?"
Sam's expression wouldn't allow Dean to refuse to answer. Reluctantly, he took a look around.
"No idea," he said.
"Dumbass," Sam chided. "Do you know where we are?"
Too tired for this, Dean thought. Too freaking goddamn tired.
But because his brother was so earnest - half-covered with snot, but earnest - he shifted his position on the curb and looked around more diligently. It took him a moment of gathering his bearings, and thinking back to a few autumn days almost a decade ago, the last time he'd been on this street. Yes, he knew where he was. Knew that house with the peculiar tree out front.
And God help him, he knew the two people standing on the front lawn, smiling, each with an arm wrapped securely around the other.
"It's the world, Dean," Sam said. "Not Heaven. Not a fantasy. We finally got paid, for all that crap we went through. We get to start from here. Have a life. With the people we love. And there's nothing out there to fight. Not any more."
Dean shifted his gaze a little. Saw Chuck and Jessica, Lisa and Ben in one direction.
His parents in another.
"What about everybody else?" he whispered. "Charlie? Kevin? All of them?"
Bathrobe flapping around his legs, Chuck strolled along the sidewalk toward the Winchester brothers. When he reached them, he held out a cell phone whose screen displayed a contact list. "Some of them chose to move on," he said. "The others -"
JO, the phone said.
KEVIN.
GARTH.
Hand trembling, Dean took the phone and scrolled down the list. NANCY. DEMIEN/BARNES. SARAH. VICTOR. AARON. LINDA.
When he looked up - careful to make it a rapid crane upward, being not at all interested in staring the Almighty in the crotch - Dean found Chuck still smiling, if a little distracted. "I wouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth, if I were you," God said mildly. "If you balk a little too much, I could go back to writing. I don't think you'd enjoy that."
He was gone then, flapping bathrobe and all, as completely as if he'd never been there.
In his place stood a man in a filthy, wrinkled trenchcoat.
"Hello, Dean," Castiel said. "I seem to have been 'natural' enough to survive the great purge. I suppose I should thank Metatron for that."
He reached down to help Dean to his feet, then pulled him into an all-too-human embrace.
When Cas finally let go, Sam too had climbed to his feet, and the others had walked over to join them. Dream, Dean's mind insisted. Got to be…
Then he looked into his father's eyes.
"Hello, son," John Winchester said. "Been a long time."
It was all there, in his eyes. Pain. Grief. Anger. Frustration. Regret. The marks of a life cut short, of mistakes made, words gone unsaid. His hair was grayer than it had been the last time Dean saw him, his shoulders a bit more bowed, but he was unmistakably alive.
They were all unmistakably alive.
Tears streaming down his face, Dean reached out to embrace his father, burying his face in the familiar angle between John's neck and his shoulder, the refuge he'd often sought when he was a child. John held him securely as he cried, murmuring reassurances into his ear, accompanied by similar comforts from Mary and Sam, then from Lisa and Ben, and Jessica, and Cas.
His family.
At long last, Dean Winchester was home. They were all home.
* * * * *
Either way, the situation put me to pondering. How does one end a series "with a bang," while at the same time providing proper emotional closure for an audience who's been invested in a set of characters for an entire freaking DECADE? How does one provide flailing, and nail-biting, and tears, while avoiding having heavy objects thrown at TV sets around the world?
I've been a writer for a really, really long time. I couldn't even begin to guess how many thousands of hours of TV I've watched over the years, but I've been invested in the lives of fictional characters well enough to understand how to move them around. How to put them in the right places, and hopefully, how to make things feel real. So if you'll allow me, I've put together my version of SPN's series finale. One that steals a bit from the finales of Buffy and Angel, because if nothing else, Supernatural is built around bits and pieces stolen wholesale from other things. I want to give you the final scenes of The Winchester Gospels, but before that... why don't you stoke up "Carry On, My Wayward Son" and join me for...
THE ROAD SO FAR
A contingent of demons led by the new Queen of the Crossroads (Bela Talbot) secures the demon tablet, and with the aid of a prophet who was damned in the 14th century, they translate information that allows them to open all the gates of Hell - spilling every last demon out onto the Earth, to the delight of Abaddon, who's become the new ruler of the Pit (and is now on the fast track to become the ruler of Earth as well). The boys convince a garrison of fallen angels to help them battle the demons, and by mid-season they've managed to win a number of skirmishes, but at the cost of many lives, both angelic and human. One of those casualties is Kevin, whose dying act is to inform the boys that God hid one more tablet… the Salvation Tablet.
Finding the tablet is a challenge unlike anything the boys have ever faced, because they're opposed not only by the demons, but by the angels as well - since invoking the power of the tablet will rid the Earth of every single unnatural thing. Including the angels.
Including Castiel.
The angels won't be returning to Heaven, Cas informs the boys when they finally have the tablet in hand; and the demons won't be returning to Hell. They'll be eliminated, as God's purpose in this was to wipe the slate clean. If the power of the tablet is being invoked, things have obviously gone catastrophically wrong, which calls for a brand-new beginning. "What about the people?" Dean asks, to which Cas replies with a fond, if rueful, smile, "You always were His favorites."
Bela's group hasn't been dormant during all this time: they've managed to open Purgatory as well, unleashing all the monsters, forcing the boys to do battle with some familiar faces, among them Gordon Walker, Madison, the shapeshifters, and Lenore. Catastrophes of Biblical proportions are erupting worldwide, and it's clear to the boys that if they don't defeat their enemies within the next few weeks, there'll be nothing left to save. They locate Kevin's replacement, Aaron Webber (the little boy from "A Little Slice of Kevin"), who quickly sets to work translating the tablet. In order to perform God's Little Power Wash, he tells them, they must gather all the unnatural things in one place, something that can be accomplished with a sacrifice of souls.
The Three, he says. The Pure of Heart.
Not something the boys really want to do, of course, since one of the three is Charlie. "What the hell," she says. "I never figured I'd come out of this in one piece."
The sacrifice is made, the invocation is cast, and the boys are truly alone as the forces of the supernatural - including Lucifer and Michael (sprung from their cage by the invocation) - arrive as one collective army… on a field in Kansas, because, as Chuck so wisely said, "It should end where it began."
NOW
My 600th Supernatural story.
CHARACTERS: Dean, Sam... and guest stars
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 3200 words
WHEN YOU ARE DONE
By Carol Davis
All he could think to say was, "Wow."
The one thing you couldn't help but notice about Kansas, if you'd driven through it a thousand times, as Dean had throughout his life, was how damn FLAT it was. Flat as a gigantic damn pancake. Which could be advantageous under certain circumstances, he supposed.
Now, though?
Not so much, given what it allowed him and Sam to see.
"Yeah," Sam agreed on a breath, from arm's length away. "There's one serious crapload of those sons of bitches, isn't there?"
Assembling like an enormous ring of locusts. Maybe a mile off, Dean guessed, forming a circle with him and Sam at its center. From this distance it was something like that Dust Bowl cloud, filling the horizon in every direction, roiling and angry; its fury was something he could taste, could feel in his bones. Well, he thought, it's our own damn fault. This was our big plan.
We are so, so screwed didn't even begin to cover something like this.
Smiling, he turned to Sam, who was pulling the tablet out of the leather bag that had once transported his laptop. When Sam noticed the smile he returned it. They stood looking at each other for a moment, then Sam stepped forward and seized his brother in a smothering, one-armed embrace that Dean accepted and returned in kind.
"You good with this?" Sam asked as he stepped away. "Because - man, if this is Ground Zero, and all of them are gonna disappear into some gigantic black hole of nowhere, what's to say we -"
"I could use some peace and quiet," Dean said. "After all this? I'm not gonna object to a little oblivion."
"We might survive."
"It gets rid of everything unnatural, Sam. You gonna stand there and call the two of us 'natural'? After Hell, and all the resurrections, and the deals? God, man, after our lives?"
A mile away, and closing fast.
"We'd better do this," Sam said.
How many? Dean wondered - how many of those bastards were there? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? And some of them were older than time itself. How in the hell had it come down to him and Sam, to tackle something this enormous? Who the hell had decided they were worthy of wielding a weapon like this?
As if he knew exactly what Dean was thinking, Sam quipped softly, "Because you're Batman."
Before Dean could reply to that, Sam held the tablet out in front of him, grasping it tightly in both hands, leery of losing his grip, of dropping the thing before they could do what they'd come here to do. Before they could light the fuse on this nuke. As Dean reached toward the ancient stone, the breath he exhaled felt liquid, alive, something he had to force out of his lungs to join the clear, warm atmosphere of a spring afternoon.
Hell, maybe his body knew it was done for. Maybe it was hanging onto what little life it had left.
"Let's do it," he told Sam. "Let's kick this thing in the ass, one last time."
He didn't add, And hope it works.
He took hold of his end of the tablet with both hands, so that he and Sam had a hand wrapped around each of its four chiseled corners. When he touched it, it felt like nothing out of the ordinary, nothing other than a piece of rock; it gave off no heat, no sense of power.
At least, it didn't until he and Sam began to recite the invocation.
For fear of turning something loose prematurely, they hadn't spoken the verse aloud before now; they'd practiced it only in the silence of their own heads, frowning at the unfamiliar words, the cadence, the sense of flying into something completely blind. Dean had no more honest confidence now in what they were doing than he'd had in the car on the way here - but as he'd felt so many times before, there came a point where you just had to let go and do the thing.
He could hear the armies of Heaven and Hell now: could make out the thunder of their pounding feet, hammering the Kansas landscape into dust.
Half a mile away, maybe?
There wasn't going to be anything left of America's heartland but a gigantic hole.
From the other side of the tablet, Sam smiled at him again. His eyes said something Dean didn't need a prophet to translate, something that was the best possible thing he could see, if this was the end of it, if their long road, at last, stopped here.
Thank you. Brother. For everything. For all of it.
Dean nodded, a single dip of his chin. His smile wobbled a little, then strengthened, and he thought of what Charlie had said. What the hell - it's not like I ever expected to come out of this in one piece.
The tablet was growing warm now.
Lucifer and Michael were in that roiling mass somewhere, Dean realized. Surprisingly, they weren't leading the charge; they weren't up front, riding a couple of damn Horses of the Apocalypse, waving swords of vengeance or hurling lightning bolts. In some small way, that was disappointing, given that the two of them had set most of this shitstorm in motion.
Maybe they were lingering toward the back somewhere, allowing the grunts in their army to serve as a shield.
Cas had warned the Winchesters not to stop once they'd started, not to allow the chain of words to be interrupted. So Dean didn't stop, or hesitate; nor did Sam. Dean did, however, smile one last time as he and his brother reached the end of the words the Lord of All Creation had long ago demanded be etched into a block of stone.
His last conscious thought was Yippeekayay, motherfuckers.
The light that burst from the tablet was brighter than anything he could possibly have imagined.
Then the entire world went black.
~~~~~~~~
He woke to the smell of grass and dirt, and it sent a jolt through him; the memory of finding himself inside a wooden casket under six feet of Illinois earth had never faded very far from mind, and it certainly was vivid enough now. Sputtering, and nearly frantic, he shoved at the ground beneath him and rolled over, both surprised by and enormously grateful for the sight of blue sky and a wide canopy of leaves overhead.
Outside, then. And… alive?
His head spun as he pushed himself up into a sit, and rather than risk passing out, he lowered his forehead into his hands and sat breathing slowly for a little while, shivering although the day seemed to be warm.
Maybe not alive. How could he be, after what had happened?
He'd set off a damn NUKE, with himself and Sam at the center of it.
Sam.
His eyes were gritty and dry, as if he'd indeed been underground for some time, but he forced them open and looked around. Sam was nowhere in sight. For that matter, neither was anyone else, the up side to that being that there was no sign of the murderous army that had been headed his way what seemed like moments ago. The day was quiet, calm, its silence broken only by the rhythmic whapwhapwhap of a lawn sprinkler and the distant sound of traffic.
Sam…
Not again, dammit. Not after all this. It was supposed to be both of us.
"SAAAAAM!" he roared.
"Easy, tiger," a voice said.
A voice he knew. One he didn't particularly like, unfortunately. One that came nowhere near making the short list of voices he'd like to hear after he'd either survived God's planetary douching, or… you know. Not. He had to turn quite a ways to his left to find the source of the sound, an action that made his neck creak like an old hinge, and he grimaced when he found the speaker grinning at him.
"Hey, Dean," Chuck Shurley said.
For a moment, all Dean did was blink. Then he said, "My heaven is YOU?"
"Heaven?"
"Sunshine. Birds singing. And Chuck Freaking Shurley in underwear and a bathrobe. This is God's idea of a side-splitter?"
"You're not in Heaven, Dean."
"Well, it's sure not Hell. I've had the two-dollar tour down there."
"Not Hell either."
Groaning, Dean again buried his face in his hands. "Look," he said through his fingers. "Pardon me for being the rudest son of a bitch on earth, but after what I've been through the last - no, you know what? What I've been through my whole damn LIFE. The last thing I want to do right now is banter with you, Chuck. What am I doing here? And where the hell is my BROTHER?"
"Not far," Chuck said.
"Which means what, exactly?"
"It means, not far. Count to ten, Dean. Take a breath. You made it to the other side. You can stop throwing punches."
Dean would have stormed away, if he could have mustered the ambition. As it was, all he could do was sit where he was, on somebody's grassy front lawn, with a jagged pebble or the sharp end of a twig jabbing him in the ass. If things were playing true to what he'd been shown during his and Sam's trip Upstairs a few years back, this was all part of some treasured memory - but what that could be, he had no idea. He certainly had nothing approaching a fond memory that included the Assumed Dead and Largely Unlamented Prophet Chuck.
"Do me a favor," he muttered. "Go haunt somebody else."
Then he waited. Counted to a hundred, staring at the wilted dandelion growing near the toe of his right boot. When he'd finished, he lifted his head, and Chuck was still there.
Smiling.
From somewhere at the back of his mind, he could hear Cas saying, "You always were His favorite."
What he understood then was tough to put into words. Sure, he'd seen any number of movies portraying the Almighty as something other than a majestic old guy in a flowing robe, sporting a long, white beard. He'd seen the one where God was George Burns. But… this? "Dude," he sputtered. "You - the HELL. You're a short, smelly asshole in a cheap bathrobe?"
"Not exactly," Chuck said.
"All along? Were you - when we -"
"Not then, no."
"This is Heaven, then? With the weeds, and the lawn sprinkler?"
He had to stop then, battered by memories of all that had happened over the past few years. Of what they'd suffered. The people they'd lost. GOOD people, all of them. Charlie. Kevin. Jody and Aaron and his devoted golem. Garth. Bobby. Rufus, Pamela, Ellen and Jo, Henry, Demian and Barnes, Missouri, Pastor Jim, Caleb. Ash. Kevin's mom. Henricksen, and that girl Nancy. So many. So, so many.
"Why didn't you come back?" he whispered. "Why'd you let all that crap happen? Where did you go, man?"
Chuck looked past him, at whatever lay behind him, somewhere down the street.
"My house has many rooms, Dean," he said finally. "There were other things to deal with."
"So you left us alone."
Chuck Almighty didn't answer, just kept looking at whatever was back there, a smile blooming across his face. The continued silence rankled Dean to the point that he pushed himself up from the ground, stumbling a little as he reached his feet and turned to see what the unshaven, bearded Deity was so interested in.
Sam.
Sam, with his arms wrapped around a blonde girl in jeans and a baggy blue sweater. A girl whose shape was unmistakable - mostly because of her height - even though Dean had met her only once, three days before she died. Still wobbly, Dean took a step in their direction, then another, then broke into a near-run, bringing himself up short just beyond reach of his brother.
Sam was weeping, both hands knotted in the loose fabric of Jessica's sweater. When the two of them moved apart - just a little - Dean could see that she, too, had been crying.
There was a lot of snot involved.
"Dean?" Sam said. "Dean?"
Heaven, then, Dean thought. "Sammy," he murmured.
He didn't hear Chuck approach so much as sense his presence. When he half-turned toward the guy he'd always regarded as a monumental pain in the ass, of honest value to pretty much no one, the former Prophet said, "Payment for services rendered. The two of you - I couldn't have asked for two more committed warriors. Occasionally balky, yes, but that's the price of giving you free will. You saw what needed to be done and you did it."
Okay, then, Dean thought. It was enough: seeing Sam happy.
Seeing Sam freaking deliriously happy.
Jessica alive.
Chuck tapped Dean on the arm, and pointed.
It was tough, looking away from Sam and the woman who'd never stopped being the love of his life. Dean might not have been able to manage it, if there hadn't been so much snot involved in all that weeping. As it was, he frowned, shaking his head at the distraction, and turned to see two people he'd excised from his life - for their own good, he'd decided. For their own safety, though he'd never been sure that would always be true, that Crowley, or Abaddon, or some other evil son of a bitch, wouldn't someday decide to draft them back into the game.
He'd made sure they wouldn't remember him.
But they clearly remembered him now.
Just like that warehouse in the djinn-world, he thought furiously, when they'd all come crowding around him, begging him to stay, to live out a life there, with them, happy and free of responsibility. A damn dream world, and that's what this was, too: Jessica alive, Sam happy, and Lisa and Ben standing there beaming at him. "Is this what I get?" he demanded, whirling on Chuck, mildly surprised when Chuck didn't back off, didn't cower in alarm the way the real Chuck would have. "This whole fantasy thing? I'm sick of this crap, man! I didn't sign up for this! I thought - I thought -"
"That you'd just fade to black?" Chuck said.
"I want -" As it had back in that field in Kansas, the air seemed liquid. Impossible to force in and out of his lungs. "When is it over?" Dean pleaded. "When is it gonna be over?"
"When you've lived out your life," Chuck told him quietly.
"I did that, you bastard. I set off a nuke. I did what I was supposed to do. Did that not happen?"
"It happened."
"Then -"
He stumbled away. Would have run, if he'd been able to find the strength. The best he could manage was a dozen yards along the sidewalk, then dropping into a slump on the curb.
The gutter, he noticed distantly, was littered with junk: a gum wrapper, bits of dead leaves, the broken corner of an old cassette tape.
"This isn't Heaven," Sam said as he sat down beside his brother.
Dean didn't reply right away. "Then… what? It's a dream?"
Sam reached into the gutter and picked up the piece of plastic, which bore half a label written in black Sharpie. HARLEY'S MIX TA and JUN and HAPPY BIR. "The set decoration's pretty good, if this is a fake," he observed. "Dean. I woke up a few minutes before you did. We did it, man. They're all gone. All of them. The demons, the angels, all the wendigos and the shapeshifters and the vampires - the world's clean. It's normal, Dean. All of it. And this - do you know where we are?"
Sam's expression wouldn't allow Dean to refuse to answer. Reluctantly, he took a look around.
"No idea," he said.
"Dumbass," Sam chided. "Do you know where we are?"
Too tired for this, Dean thought. Too freaking goddamn tired.
But because his brother was so earnest - half-covered with snot, but earnest - he shifted his position on the curb and looked around more diligently. It took him a moment of gathering his bearings, and thinking back to a few autumn days almost a decade ago, the last time he'd been on this street. Yes, he knew where he was. Knew that house with the peculiar tree out front.
And God help him, he knew the two people standing on the front lawn, smiling, each with an arm wrapped securely around the other.
"It's the world, Dean," Sam said. "Not Heaven. Not a fantasy. We finally got paid, for all that crap we went through. We get to start from here. Have a life. With the people we love. And there's nothing out there to fight. Not any more."
Dean shifted his gaze a little. Saw Chuck and Jessica, Lisa and Ben in one direction.
His parents in another.
"What about everybody else?" he whispered. "Charlie? Kevin? All of them?"
Bathrobe flapping around his legs, Chuck strolled along the sidewalk toward the Winchester brothers. When he reached them, he held out a cell phone whose screen displayed a contact list. "Some of them chose to move on," he said. "The others -"
JO, the phone said.
KEVIN.
GARTH.
Hand trembling, Dean took the phone and scrolled down the list. NANCY. DEMIEN/BARNES. SARAH. VICTOR. AARON. LINDA.
When he looked up - careful to make it a rapid crane upward, being not at all interested in staring the Almighty in the crotch - Dean found Chuck still smiling, if a little distracted. "I wouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth, if I were you," God said mildly. "If you balk a little too much, I could go back to writing. I don't think you'd enjoy that."
He was gone then, flapping bathrobe and all, as completely as if he'd never been there.
In his place stood a man in a filthy, wrinkled trenchcoat.
"Hello, Dean," Castiel said. "I seem to have been 'natural' enough to survive the great purge. I suppose I should thank Metatron for that."
He reached down to help Dean to his feet, then pulled him into an all-too-human embrace.
When Cas finally let go, Sam too had climbed to his feet, and the others had walked over to join them. Dream, Dean's mind insisted. Got to be…
Then he looked into his father's eyes.
"Hello, son," John Winchester said. "Been a long time."
It was all there, in his eyes. Pain. Grief. Anger. Frustration. Regret. The marks of a life cut short, of mistakes made, words gone unsaid. His hair was grayer than it had been the last time Dean saw him, his shoulders a bit more bowed, but he was unmistakably alive.
They were all unmistakably alive.
Tears streaming down his face, Dean reached out to embrace his father, burying his face in the familiar angle between John's neck and his shoulder, the refuge he'd often sought when he was a child. John held him securely as he cried, murmuring reassurances into his ear, accompanied by similar comforts from Mary and Sam, then from Lisa and Ben, and Jessica, and Cas.
His family.
At long last, Dean Winchester was home. They were all home.
* * * * *