FIC: Game Over (Castiel/Dean Winchester) [6/6]
Title: Game Over [Part 6/6 of Bunker!Verse]
Author: todisturbtheuni
Rating: PG-13.
Genre and/or Pairing: Fluff; Castiel/Dean Winchester
Spoilers: Up to 8x13.
Warnings: Cursing. Cuddling. Vague sex.
Word Count: 1924
Summary: The world doesn't end, and Dean's really, really okay with that.
Author's Note: Let’s face it: the plot in this damn thing was peripheral at best, and it’s been mostly for my own amusement. This is gonna be the fluffiest fluff that ever fluffed: no real details about how anything gets resolved, shaky explanations for how they come out the other side. I don’t care. If season 8 were to be the final season of Supernatural--this is how I’d want it to end. This is also the conclusion to Bunker!Verse; other offshoots might occur, but for now I'm calling this piece complete.
Also available on AO3 | Part I: Faith | Part II: We're Okay | Part III: Let 'Em | Part IV: Falling | Part V: Settling
When the gates of Hell and Heaven close, the Winchesters and their angel stand shocked in the aftermath.
It’s a relief, really, that they are all (more or less) in one piece: sure, Kevin has an IV pumping nutrients into him at the local hospital right now; and no, Sam will never be quite the same again, after all that internal trauma; and yes, Dean’s leg is fucking broken, again, for the second time in the last three years; and no, Cas will never be an angel again, even has a mild concussion at that very moment, but--but.
No more demons to creep out of Hell’s secret pathways; no more angels, interrupting their modest lives with holier-than-thou missions. As the dust settles, Dean grins, because yeah, he’s going to have to get his leg set and splinted and it hurts like a motherfucker, and Sam looks tired and worn and Cas looks just plain shell-shocked, but it’s over. The last ten years, all building and crescendoing out of control to this, and it’s done.
He’d thought he might feel purposeless, aimless, if he survived. Hell, he hadn’t even been planning on surviving until Cas plummeted out of Heaven and Sam set him straight.
Back to Wendigos, and Werewolves and Shapeshifters; back to spirits and ghosts, where demons were a rare thing, unusual to come across and rarer to fight; back to just hunting, and none of this save-the-world, epic-scale, horrible-catastrophe-Apocalypse crap. Dean can’t wait for the next time he staggers across a monster of old that he hasn’t seen in far too long. No crusades, no missions, just--Hell, maybe he’ll even get a day job, make a good enough fake identity and become a mechanic or a bartender, stop hustling pool and poker and only hunt on the weekends.
“What’re you smiling about?” Sam comments, bemused, and Dean just lurches forward on his good leg and hugs his brother, hard, before turning to kiss Cas, who still looks a little dazed by it all. The concussion probably doesn’t help.
His leg takes two months to heal: worse this time than the last he’d been laid up, and he can’t believe, in all his time as a hunter, that he’s broken so few bones. He gets restless after only a few days in the cast, but he’s content enough to sit around the bunker, helping Sam field phone calls from the network of hunters that Garth shares with them now. Garth has a lot of ideas about dividing up the United States into zones and situating hunters in each one, so that some of the men and women who had been on the road for decades can settle down.
“I don’t know how you even deal with these guys, Garth,” Dean says over the phone, about two weeks after the last battle went down. “We’re anti-social by nature.”
“War breeds strange bedfellows,” Garth says cheerfully. “You guys can have the bunker and surrounding 500 miles--no further than a day’s drive. S’long as one of you’s always at home base to help with the phones and the research. You’ve got a better library than anybody in the biz.”
They don’t hunt much, in the weeks that follow; if there’s a case in their jurisdiction, Sam and Cas take care of it, Dean left behind thanks to his leg and Garth’s (unfortunately smart) rules. After a scrape with a Leviathan--they’re still out there, kicking around, annoying bastards even without Dick Roman--Sam comes back to the bunker white-faced, and Cas immediately vanishes into Dean’s room.
“How’d it go?” Dean asks as Sam sits down across from him at the war table, still sweaty and pale.
“I can’t do it anymore, Dean,” Sam says, with the tone of a reluctant confession. “I’m sorry, I just--I want to help, but I can’t hunt.”
“No problem,” Dean says, flicking to the next page in a directory on vampire bastardizations. “Once I’ve got my leg back, me and Cas’ll handle the hunting. Garth can cover our jurisdiction until then.”
Sam pauses, eyeing Dean warily across the table. “You--what?”
Dean closes the book and looks up at his brother, who’s staring at him warily. “You don’t want to hunt, then, you’re done. No big. You can handle the phone calls or the research or--you know, be a Man of Letters, Sam. Not a hunter.”
“You’re serious,” Sam says, his voice breaking. “No questions asked? Just like that?”
“Think we’ve done our time,” Dean points out, feeling his mouth quirk up at the corner despite the way Sam’s eyes suddenly gleam wet, the way his features slump in something like relief--and Dean has seen tension there so often, so constantly, that he didn’t know that Sam could exist without it. “Should be able to do whatever the Hell we want, right? Hey, if you wanna--I mean, Amelia, she’s--”
But then Sam’s striding around the table and bending down to wrap Dean in a hug so fierce that it chokes him of breath, cutting off his words. He feels Sam’s sudden hitched breath, the cutoff of a sob, and holds on, smiling.
“I want to stay,” Sam says when he’s pulled back, jaw set in a determined line. “Decision was kinda final, with Amelia, and even if it wasn’t, I’d--I’d wanna stay.”
Dean nods, his voice a little croaky when he says, “Good.”
Kevin, it turned out, can’t handle civilian life after the last two years, and moves into the bunker with them to help Sam with research. He shows up at the door totally spooked, had only tolerated a few weeks back at college after his hospitalization before he turned tail and ran. Sam gives him back the room he’d stayed in during those weeks leading up to the final showdown, and they spend their days sequestered in the library and the war room, cataloging and archiving and generally being nerds together.
Charlie comes by to visit pretty often, and occasionally takes cases with Cas if Garth can’t spare anyone while Dean’s leg heals.
“You’re missing out, old man,” she says teasingly, one late night after a run-in with a vengeful spirit, as he warms up dinner for her and Cas. Dirty and sweaty, exhausted but whole, the two got back to the bunker just after midnight. She looks happy--a little muddy, but pleased with herself.
“Shut up,” he grumbles, ruffling her hair as he drops a plate of lasagna in front of her. “Glad you two had fun.” He presses a kiss to the top of Cas’s head as he pushes a larger plate of lasagna to the fallen angel. “It has vegetables in it,” he promises, and Cas smiles up at him, a little tick up of his lips that is especially subtle and just for Dean.
“You guys are sickening,” Charlie says, sticking her tongue out at Dean as he wobbles and drops into his chair beside Cas, still cursing the plaster over his leg. “I can crash here tonight, right?”
“No,” Cas deadpans. “You should drive another hundred miles to your apartment at one in the morning.”
Charlie snickers. “Thanks, Cas.”
And of course, there’s Cas.
He takes well enough to humanity, even though sometimes he still forgets to eat regularly or that he can’t sit still indefinitely without his muscles hurting anymore. He still loves burgers, and takes to running with Sam in the mornings, even though the youngest Winchester usually has to drag him out of bed to do so, an hour after Dean’s already awake and done with breakfast. Cas hates mornings, and loves coffee with enough cream and sugar to give a healthy man a heart attack. He swears in Enochian whenever he stubs his toe on a piece of sharp furniture, and speaking of toes, his feet are always cold.
Dean knows, because Cas worms those cold feet in between his calves every night for warmth and sighs blissfully before passing out.
Cas snores, too, but Dean can’t find it in himself to mind.
Their lives aren’t perfect, not by any stretch of the imagination. They’ve all got issues, every single one of them, the worst of which is--
“Post-traumatic stress disorder,” Cas repeats dully, when Dean finally explains, in the middle of the night, why Cas is having nightmares about Purgatory--about his siege on Hell--about the civil war in Heaven--about the last decade, more or less.
“I still have nightmares about Hell,” Dean admits, and Cas, sitting across from him, cross-legged, on the bed, lets his forehead thunk down onto Dean’s shoulder where he stays. “It gets better,” Dean soothes. “Occupational hazard.”
“Of what?” Castiel asks, his voice muffled by Dean’s shirt. “Being a hunter?”
“No,” Dean corrects. “Being human.”
Cas and Kevin have the worst of it, because one’s new to being human and the other’s still new to the things that go bump in the night, and between the two of them, there are plenty of panic attacks and hallucinations to go around. For Sam--for Dean--this is old hat, routine. They deal, and sometimes they don’t sleep well, but most of the time, it’s better than how it used to be, and the bunker is warmer than any motel room when they wake up gasping from the memories that still flay them open sometimes.
There’s all that, but since their string of terrible luck is over, there’s also this.
Dean wakes up, and Cas’s eyes are closed on the pillow less than six inches from him. He’s breathing deeply, evenly, and his hair’s vertical from being rubbed on the sheets, a little longer than it used to be, a lot like that night in Pontiac when Dean stabbed him in the heart and he didn’t even blink. His scruff is three days old and dark against his pale skin, and he’s wearing one of Dean’s oldest t-shirts, and Dean thinks that of everything he could have wanted most in the world, he ended up with the thing he needed, too: this scruffy, socially awkward, angel-person sharing his bed, sticking his cold feet everywhere, blinking awake slowly to look back at Dean with blue, blue eyes.
There’s this: a slow, liquid smile as Dean leans in and kisses him, slow and deep, cradling the back of Cas’s head in his palm. There’s Cas’s reassuring weight, settling on top of him and between his legs, being careful not to nudge the cast. There’s little noises of pleasure pulled out of their throats and clothes moved hastily out of the way and the slow, slick slide of bodies together, and all the little things: the heat of Cas’s lips rolling into Dean’s mouth, the slide of a tongue against the seam of lips, the fingers digging into hip bones, the trace of old scars in Enochian against Dean’s tongue and the way Cas grips into his shoulder as tight as he did the day he raised Dean from Perdition. There’s a litany, a groan of names and curses and begging, and there’s the little shocked puff of air as the white-out of pleasure trips them over the edge before they’re even fully awake, and they grumble over the stickiness in the aftermath but they smile at each other anyway.
It’s all over, Dean thinks, and holds his angel tight, and listens to his brother making coffee in the distance, and Dean never thought he would want the opportunity to nest, to really have a home that included all the things that he loves, but here it is--and barring future Apocalypse, none of it’s going anywhere.