SPN: "Shadow of the Day"
Category: Supernatural
Title: Shadow of the Day
Word Count: 4200
Rating: PG-13 (language)
Summary: AU, post season 8. Infinity divided by two is still infinity.
Why, yes, this actually has been sitting on my hard drive(s) since the end of season 8, why do you ask? I told you I was finishing stuff.
God, it turns out, likes symmetry-yeah, like that whole brother-angels in brother-vessels wasn't a big fucking clue on that.
Three trials to lock the demons in Hell, and three trials to lock the angels in Heaven. Metatron's lie to Cas worked so well because it was so damn logical, because Cas expected that kind of symmetry.
And just like the Hell-trials, the Heaven trials have a cost.
The price of Hell is life.
The price of Heaven is death.
***
Sam's in no shape to undertake the Heaven-trials, assuming that he even could-that seems like the kind of thing God won't allow. Cas is such a wreck that there was no way he can, either. So it becomes Dean's job.
And Dean's doing it on his own. Garth's gone. So's Kevin, leaving behind a stack of half-illegible notes. Cas isn't any help, even after the shock wears off. Discovering that he had been nothing but Metatron's puppet scrambled his brains again, making him so convinced of his own worthlessness that keeping him from killing himself might as well be trial number seven. Just keeping him sober is an adventure. He may not have the angelic tolerance to drink an entire liquor store any more, but that sure as hell doesn't stop him trying.
There's days when Sam can't get out of bed because he's coughing up so much blood and Cas can't get out of bed because he's discovering the wonders of a fully-human hangover, and on those mornings, Dean seriously considers shooting them and then himself. And then he eats breakfast and shoves the appropriate medication into the appropriate idiot.
If it's a real fun day, he gets to stitch up Cas' latest suicide attempt before lunch. At one point, he finds himself wondering if he should resort to truly desperate measures and find a shrink who'll work on fallen angels.
Really, once Dean finds the page in Kevin's notes that lists the Heaven trials, he just plain doesn't have a choice. It's either take the chance, or stay in the bunker and go batshit crazy taking care of these two.
Besides, he's not sure there's any other way to pry Metatron's ass off Heaven's throne and keep all the confused angels wandering the earth from doing any more damage than they already have.
***
Dean's fully prepared to start falling apart, like Sam. That's how he decides to take care of Cas' suicidal tendencies-train him in first aid and browbeat him into promising to take care of both of them, no matter what. And then he attempts to teach Cas about money and sends him out to buy enough medical supplies to stock a hospital.
Of course, he comes back with a lot of alcohol too. In his defense, Dean didn't tell him not to stop at the liquor store.
But his trials go differently. Even as Sam continues to deteriorate, hacking up both lungs, going blind, losing muscle control, Dean's just...better.
He doesn't realize how much better until after the second trial, when he stands watching a building burn-the so-called church of one of those insane hate-groups that thought they spoke for God, purify the lair of a false prophet-and realizes that the gunshot wound he remembers taking in his leg doesn't hurt. That it's not bleeding.
That it's not even there. The only evidence that he didn't imagine it is a hole in his jeans edged with a spatter of blood.
Sam ignored orders and got himself a lungful of smoke, and it hits him so hard they have to take him to a real doctor for oxygen and medicine, but Dean....
Dean hasn't been this healthy since before Mom died. Maybe not then.
The scars he's accumulated since his last angelic full-body healing vanish. Ditto his hard-earned tolerance to alcohol and painkillers; one whiskey knocks him flat on his ass. He even has to take to carrying an anti-possession charm again, after the third attempt at re-inking his tat heals.
Which sounds great and all, but he's still watching Sammy fall apart and Cas is only moderately sober, so...yeah, things could be better.
***
Luckily, they didn't have to start all the way over again. Sam would never survive it. Cas points out that Sam technically completed the Hell-trials, lacking only the final invocation-and there's absolutely nothing in the tablets-Kevin had checked-about having to say it immediately, simply after.
Dean is starting to believe that the universe runs on loopholes.
So they say those final invocations together, over a confused and recently-resurrected saint.
This time, Dean sees the golden light that begins to eat at his brother's body-the price for Hell is life-just as he sees the silver light that makes the blood sing in his veins, and he simply reacts, the only way thirty-odd (seventy-plus) years of take care of Sammy lets him. Simply reaches for Sam and pulls him into the silver light, too.
The price for Heaven is death.
Hell destroys. Heaven preserves.
Infinity divided by two is still infinity.
All the damage the trials did to Sam heals in that moment-that and more. If Dean hadn't felt it then, he would have known when he turns and sees Cas-Castiel again, because part of that silver explosion was angelic grace surging out to the vessels scattered across the globe-staring at them in stunned disbelief.
***
"You'd think he'd be grateful," Dean grumbles to Cas.
"Dean, the last time you pulled a stunt like this, we wound up neck-deep in the Apocalypse!" Sam shouts.
He hasn't been able to shout in months. Dean kinda missed it. "Well, they won't kill us this time!"
"I am not entirely sure this is an improvement," Cas says.
Dean sighs. "Thanks a lot, buddy."
***
The angels have a name for the time before: the Age of Archangels, even though the archangels were all gone for a couple of years before Metatron's hissy fit.
Nobody ever tells them what happens to him when the angels go back home, but hey, as long as he doesn't come sniffing around the bunker expecting compassion or a handout, Dean doesn't really care.
The Heaven spell is different from the Hell version. It banishes the demons screaming into Hell, no arguments, but for the angels, it just seems to give them the ability to make their own decisions for once.
Most of the angels accept the return of their grace with an almost-sheepish dignity and skedaddle back home as quick as their new wings will take them, hopefully less dickish for their time spent as mortals. A few choose to reject their renewed grace so they can remain in the mortal lives they've built for themselves.
Even fewer-a scant handful-accept grace but do not return, preferring to stay on Earth, forever exiled.
Like Cas.
Dean's suspicious of them at first-if ever the phrase once bitten twice shy applies to a situation, it's this one-but after seeing how Cas reels from the restoration, he's glad for them. Much as he hates to admit it, Cas needs more support than him and Sam, and his social skills with humans were never all that great.
Still doesn't mean he wants them glaring at him over the dinner table, though.
***
It's not so different at first. The healing's very useful, since there's still places to go, things to hunt, people to save. The demons are gone, sure, but the various massacres and disasters of the past few years have left hordes of new ghosts in the night, and putting them to rest isn't always as easy as torching bones. Leviathans don't leave bones.
But the old monsters remain-vampires and wendigo, werewolves and shifters. Turns out that they're not so much super as they are natural. Humans might very well still be the top of the food chain, but that doesn't mean the lower predators can't get a snack in here and there. Without angels and demons and Leviathans meddling with them, their populations stabilize, at least.
Hunters are still necessary, may always be necessary, and as word spreads, new ones show up to ask them questions and get training. When they finally give up on Garth ever reappearing, Sam and Dean and Cas start taking over the things that Bobby used to do. And Sam gets it into his head that now's the time to really resurrect the Men of Letters, without the anti-hunter snobbery. All that snobbery just got the old ones killed, after all, and kept valuable resources out of the hands of those who needed them. There's acres of storage rooms to sort and catalog, phones and e-mails and texts to answer, lore to learn, things to kill.
For awhile, life is good.
It's just not enough for Sam.
Dean's not sure why. Maybe Sam had just really resigned himself to dying for the trials. Maybe Sam just naturally needs...more. More than the bunker and Dean and Cas and a good hunt every now and then.
Whatever the reason, Dean's not really surprised the day Sam leaves. "Just for a while," he says, in that pleading voice he damn well knows Dean can never argue with, the voice he used to wrangle extra Lucky Charms when they were little, the voice he used to convince Dean that saying yes to Lucifer was a good idea. "Just-let me go."
And Dean does. Even offers Sam the Impala, but it's nearly impossible to get parts for her these days, and Sam has his own car now-grace-powered angels, it turns out, actually are able to transform lead into gold, and where the hell was that talent back when they were trying to stop the Apocalypse on stolen credit cards? Cas can keep an eye on him, and Sam knows better than to not call. Mostly he writes, though, old-fashioned letters and postcards sent through his growing Men of Letters network or the post office box they keep in town. He shies away from the Internet as if he fears Dean can actually watch him through it.
It's been fifty years since they shut the gates, and for most of the four decades before that, they lived inseparable lives. It's time to let Sam have some time apart. And now, finally, it's safe to let him. If there's anything out there that can kill them, they haven't found it yet, and it's not for lack of trying.
So Dean plays library security guard, reviewing the credentials of anybody who shows up wanting access, hunts when he wants to, and occasionally he lets Cas zap them somewhere fun. (Roller coasters and angels: Bad idea.) Cas drops in on Sam to make sure he's okay when old habits make Dean worry, and the years aren't the best but they pass okay.
Then one cold night, there's a pounding on the door, and when Dean opens it, ready to tell the would-be Man of Letters that the library's closed till morning, he finds his brother standing on the doorstep with tears in his eyes and a baby in his arms.
***
Johnny's the first child they raise there in the bunker. He's got a grieving father and a thrilled uncle and a bemused angel for a playmate, and between the three of them, they raise him into a decent man and Man of Letters. But like all children, eventually, he has to leave the nest, though when he flies, it's to Purdue, not Daddy's Stanford, and it's a joyous occasion, not the bitter aftermath of years of father-son feuding. He becomes an electrical engineer, because if there's one thing Johnny has in common with his uncle, it's his ability to take apart just about anything and put it together new and improved. Sam's a grandfather and then a great-grandfather before he becomes a still-thirtyish-looking father whose only son just died of old age, and that night he tries his best to prove that enough alcohol will pickle the liver even of an immortal.
That's the night Dean leaves. Really leaves. Cas will take care of Sam. Dean just needs to get out.
Dean learned this with Jess and Amelia, Dad and Bobby. Sam grieves just like Dad: hard and selfish. He doesn't mean to be such a hateful dick, it's just that when he hurts, he has no room for anyone else's pain.
Maybe it's just as well that Sammy never had anything more to mourn of Mom than the concept of "mother." Dean's not sure he would have survived two helpings of that kind of hateful, destructive grief. Not at once. Not without winding up even more fucked in the head than he already was.
He never planned to stay gone more than a few weeks. But then he runs into Monica in a bar in Winnipeg-what? Immortal centenarians can't go to Canada every now and then?-and the next he knows, it's been four years and they have an apartment and a sedan, he has a day job, and the cheap wedding band on his finger is starting to tarnish.
Kids never come into the equation for him. Neither does death. But Monica ages, and he doesn't, and when he realizes that he can no longer pretend he just won the genetics lottery, even with all the advances in medicine, he wraps their car around a tree, making sure it's something nobody could survive, and leaves.
When he walks into the bunker, Sam's sitting at the library table with a pair of shiny new Men of Letters wannabes, Cas is puttering in the kitchen, and it's like he never left.
***
And that's how it goes. It becomes a cycle, eventually. Sam leaves and settles down, every time hoping that this time it'll be different, and it never is. Within five years, he's back, with a wife dead of cancer and a little boy or two-because apparently Sam only shoots Y, never X, which is just as well, because Dean's not sure they could raise a young woman, or at least, not so that she can actually function out in civilization-and the bunker echoes with children's laughter for a few years. Eventually, of course, they leave, and eventually, of course, they die, and Sam never learns how to handle that grief, so that's when Dean leaves, because in a way, they're his kids too, and this is the one pain he can't help Sammy with, any more than he was able to leave Sam dead back in Cold Oak.
Sometimes he marries, most times not, but most of the women Dean loves don't die young. He stays as long as he can, fakes a death if he has to, simply leaves if she believed him when he told her, and then comes home. Children are never an issue for him, and they don't know why, any more than they know why Sam can only father sons or why his wives all die of the same cancer. But Dean finds his nephews, and the occasional stepchild he raises outside, are enough to satisfy any itch for fatherhood.
Sometimes, late at night, he wonders what happened to Ben, wonders if maybe Lisa was lying, but he never looks it up. If Ben was his.... Well, his great-great-great-grandchildren are dead of old age at this point.
It doesn't matter when he comes home, though he does try to call and give them some warning. Sometimes, if there was an accident, if there were stepkids, if she knew and was just too damn understanding about it, he's torn up enough that he forgets. Sometimes they've just gotten too far behind the tech for him to contact them easily, though they do their best to keep the bunker updated.
But usually he walks through the door-the one to the garage, which he built back when he finally admitted he couldn't keep the Impala street-legal anymore and she had to retire (dammit, she deserved better than the scrap heap, she'd saved the world, so she got the best car palace he could design)-and Sam is sitting in the library, possibly consulting with a hunter or teaching the latest MoL apprentices, and Cas is puttering around pretending to be the patron saint of housekeeping. Dean's room will be the same as he left it, although cleaner, and maybe with new linens, depending on what state they were in when he left. He drops the bag that holds whatever remnants of this life he plans to keep, and then he adds a new photo to the neat little gallery on the wall that faces his bed.
Every girlfriend. Every wife. All the way back to Cassie and Lisa.
Sam never wants to remember his wives. He won't even say their names. It's Cas who ferrets those out and steals photos from the lives Sam abandons, Dean who frames them and puts them beside the kids' beds, teaches the boys what "mother" means and who the women in those photos are. It's easier when the kids can't remember.
But advances in medicine mean that sometimes Sam's wife survives long enough that their firstborn is four or five when the inevitable cancer kills her. Nick is six before Leticia dies, old enough to know that there's something not-quite-right about life in the bunker, at least compared to the outside world, old enough to have gone to school and have friends of his own.
Dean loves him, but raising that boy's a nightmare. Sam hasn't fought with anybody that way since Dad. (Cas seriously asks, at one point, if it's possible that Leticia was descended from one of Sam's other children, but Dean shushes that before Cas goes on a genealogy quest, because he's pretty sure Sam's not ready to face the possibility that he married his own great-great-etc.-granddaughter.) Maybe it's not surprising that Nick's one of the few who turns his back on education and the Men of Letters entirely, stalking out of the bunker at seventeen to become an old-school lone hunter, one of the few who refuses to take any aid from the MoL.
Word of mouth brings word of his death at the hands of a banshee seven years later. It hurts Dean more than it does Sam this time, but Dean leaves anyway-out of sheer rage at Sam's easy acceptance. Sam's grief is there, but it's-it's abstract, is what it is, like the way he used to mourn Mom, like Nick wasn't there and real for twenty-four years. Madison got more tears and he knew her for three fucking days.
Dean doesn't come back for centuries. Cas finds him now and then, checking up on him, but if there's a message in that from Sam, Cas knows better than to give it.
***
The first time Cas comes looking, Dean's in the ass-end of South America, but when he asks, Cas poofs him to Europe, no airplanes need apply. Might as well see the place sometime. More than just one graveyard in Scotland, anyway. He wonders what happened to Crowley. But that was-shit, seven hundred years ago? More? Time has no meaning in the bunker, in their life. The news stories on the net just blur together, same old shit, different day, an endless repeating cycle of human stupidity.
Some days, Dean can understand why the angels had such a bad opinion of humanity. They really never do learn.
Dean wanders Europe and Asia and what's left of the Middle East, which is way more peaceful since the African Confederation got fed up with their "cradle of civilization" superiority complex shit and bombarded them into the Stone Age. He sees the Pyramids and Stonehenge and the Great Wall, the ruins of Jerusalem and what the tornado left of the Eiffel Tower, saunters up Mount Everest without a pack and spends the better part of two years lost in a cave complex somewhere in what used to be Ukraine. He learns how to cuss in most of the world's languages, learns more in a few, tries a lot of weird foods, marries and then outlives several women, and wonders where the hell the flying cars are. Weren't they promised flying cars? Or spaceships. Where are the damn spaceships? Are they ever gonna get off this rock?
He's in southern Europe when an earthquake causes enough uplift along the Italian shore that Venice comes out of the sea. The rest of the world is immediately obsessed with archeology, but all he can think of is a dirty, rundown diner in what used to be in Michigan, where a long time ago he read about how the city was sinking.
It's time to go home.
***
Sam looks up from the table where he's directing two very young-looking strangers in some kind of book-preservation project, and blinks. Clearly, he was expecting someone else.
All he says, though, is "Welcome back," and turns his attention back to the project.
And just like that, Dean's home.
Later, he finds out that the entire time he was gone, Sam never left. Oh, he took little trips, to town, one or two hunts when there was nobody else, but not one of his rebooting-his-life trips.
Cas tells him that quietly, knowing Dean will understand the meaning.
The fact that the Impala is still shiny, not the least bit dusty, and the engine still starts, tells him more.
***
Climates change, turning the land outside the bunker into desert and then rain forest. Continents move. Coastlines withdraw and march and withdraw again. The Mississippi moves to Alabama. Britain and Ireland merge and then join with Europe and then separate again. The Mediterranean dries up and refloods. The language brought in by the hunters and MoL apprentices is completely alien to the English Dean and Sam grew up speaking, something Dean doesn't even realize until one night when he tries to re-read Dad's journal.
Sam might, because Sam keeps better track of these things, but Dean doesn't even know what country they're in anymore. Five hundred years ago, when he married Kalandra, whose picture was the first on the third wall of his room, it was the Fourth Republic of Kansas, but he's pretty sure the Winnipeg Communes took them over awhile back. Somebody might have taken them out by now. Just off the top of his head, he remembers two wars with Texas, three with the Cherokee, one with Belize, and four invasions by what has apparently become a very aggressive bunch of Vermonters.
War just kind of breaks around the bunker, like they're not really here. In the world, not of it. Maybe it's luck. Maybe it's some sort of spell left over from the MoL.
Maybe it's just because that where there's people, there's always monsters, and where there are monsters, there are always hunters.
Dean wonders, sometimes: If the need went away, would their immortality fade? If nobody needed the vast treasure trove of information and artifacts stored in the bunker, if nobody came looking, would they eventually wither away and die like everything else? Or is that just something he thinks to make himself feel better, to persuade himself that there will eventually be an end?
He's been around Cas too long. It's making him philosophical.
***
They're alone tonight, no would-be hunters begging a free meal. "I heard about a ghost today," Sam says while Dean's digging into the spaghetti.
Dean raises an eyebrow. Dinner conversation is a rare treat. And they haven't gone after a mere ghost in-a thousand years? Two? The MoL babies handle ghosts.
"It sounds serious," Sam goes on, "and there's no local hunters."
First conversation, and now a hunt? This is the weirdest apology Sam's ever tried to make.
But if Sam wants to head out, the three of them together, like old times.... Well, he won't say no, even if they can't take the Impala. "Sure. Where is it?"
Sam gives him a shit-eating grin he hasn't seen in ages. "The Alpha Centauri colony."
"The- Wait, we have space colonies now? When the hell did we get spaceships?"
Sam rolls his eyes. "Four hundred years ago. Pay attention."
"No, I mean, don't we need our own spaceship to get there? Did you buy us a spaceship without telling me?" If they have a spaceship, he's definitely going to have to expand the garage.
"I can take you," Cas says. "It's not that far. Cosmically speaking." They both stare at him. "It's really quite pleasant at-"
"Cas, so help me God, if you say it's nice this time of year, I will hit you in the face with a meatball."
"It's nicer in the fall."
"It is fall!"
"Winter," Sam corrects.
"It's summer there," Cas goes on. "Probably not as warm now. With the terraforming and all. It was fairly inhospitable for humans the last time I visited."
Dean decides he doesn't want to know exactly how long ago that was. "So. It's a ghost hunt, in space, and it's warm? Where the hell did we put the rock salt, Sammy?"
***
Maybe, in the end, there's no end.
But him and Sam and Cas, burning bones under two moons and a sky full of constellations that haven't even been named yet?
Eternity could be worse.
Title: Shadow of the Day
Word Count: 4200
Rating: PG-13 (language)
Summary: AU, post season 8. Infinity divided by two is still infinity.
Why, yes, this actually has been sitting on my hard drive(s) since the end of season 8, why do you ask? I told you I was finishing stuff.
God, it turns out, likes symmetry-yeah, like that whole brother-angels in brother-vessels wasn't a big fucking clue on that.
Three trials to lock the demons in Hell, and three trials to lock the angels in Heaven. Metatron's lie to Cas worked so well because it was so damn logical, because Cas expected that kind of symmetry.
And just like the Hell-trials, the Heaven trials have a cost.
The price of Hell is life.
The price of Heaven is death.
***
Sam's in no shape to undertake the Heaven-trials, assuming that he even could-that seems like the kind of thing God won't allow. Cas is such a wreck that there was no way he can, either. So it becomes Dean's job.
And Dean's doing it on his own. Garth's gone. So's Kevin, leaving behind a stack of half-illegible notes. Cas isn't any help, even after the shock wears off. Discovering that he had been nothing but Metatron's puppet scrambled his brains again, making him so convinced of his own worthlessness that keeping him from killing himself might as well be trial number seven. Just keeping him sober is an adventure. He may not have the angelic tolerance to drink an entire liquor store any more, but that sure as hell doesn't stop him trying.
There's days when Sam can't get out of bed because he's coughing up so much blood and Cas can't get out of bed because he's discovering the wonders of a fully-human hangover, and on those mornings, Dean seriously considers shooting them and then himself. And then he eats breakfast and shoves the appropriate medication into the appropriate idiot.
If it's a real fun day, he gets to stitch up Cas' latest suicide attempt before lunch. At one point, he finds himself wondering if he should resort to truly desperate measures and find a shrink who'll work on fallen angels.
Really, once Dean finds the page in Kevin's notes that lists the Heaven trials, he just plain doesn't have a choice. It's either take the chance, or stay in the bunker and go batshit crazy taking care of these two.
Besides, he's not sure there's any other way to pry Metatron's ass off Heaven's throne and keep all the confused angels wandering the earth from doing any more damage than they already have.
***
Dean's fully prepared to start falling apart, like Sam. That's how he decides to take care of Cas' suicidal tendencies-train him in first aid and browbeat him into promising to take care of both of them, no matter what. And then he attempts to teach Cas about money and sends him out to buy enough medical supplies to stock a hospital.
Of course, he comes back with a lot of alcohol too. In his defense, Dean didn't tell him not to stop at the liquor store.
But his trials go differently. Even as Sam continues to deteriorate, hacking up both lungs, going blind, losing muscle control, Dean's just...better.
He doesn't realize how much better until after the second trial, when he stands watching a building burn-the so-called church of one of those insane hate-groups that thought they spoke for God, purify the lair of a false prophet-and realizes that the gunshot wound he remembers taking in his leg doesn't hurt. That it's not bleeding.
That it's not even there. The only evidence that he didn't imagine it is a hole in his jeans edged with a spatter of blood.
Sam ignored orders and got himself a lungful of smoke, and it hits him so hard they have to take him to a real doctor for oxygen and medicine, but Dean....
Dean hasn't been this healthy since before Mom died. Maybe not then.
The scars he's accumulated since his last angelic full-body healing vanish. Ditto his hard-earned tolerance to alcohol and painkillers; one whiskey knocks him flat on his ass. He even has to take to carrying an anti-possession charm again, after the third attempt at re-inking his tat heals.
Which sounds great and all, but he's still watching Sammy fall apart and Cas is only moderately sober, so...yeah, things could be better.
***
Luckily, they didn't have to start all the way over again. Sam would never survive it. Cas points out that Sam technically completed the Hell-trials, lacking only the final invocation-and there's absolutely nothing in the tablets-Kevin had checked-about having to say it immediately, simply after.
Dean is starting to believe that the universe runs on loopholes.
So they say those final invocations together, over a confused and recently-resurrected saint.
This time, Dean sees the golden light that begins to eat at his brother's body-the price for Hell is life-just as he sees the silver light that makes the blood sing in his veins, and he simply reacts, the only way thirty-odd (seventy-plus) years of take care of Sammy lets him. Simply reaches for Sam and pulls him into the silver light, too.
The price for Heaven is death.
Hell destroys. Heaven preserves.
Infinity divided by two is still infinity.
All the damage the trials did to Sam heals in that moment-that and more. If Dean hadn't felt it then, he would have known when he turns and sees Cas-Castiel again, because part of that silver explosion was angelic grace surging out to the vessels scattered across the globe-staring at them in stunned disbelief.
***
"You'd think he'd be grateful," Dean grumbles to Cas.
"Dean, the last time you pulled a stunt like this, we wound up neck-deep in the Apocalypse!" Sam shouts.
He hasn't been able to shout in months. Dean kinda missed it. "Well, they won't kill us this time!"
"I am not entirely sure this is an improvement," Cas says.
Dean sighs. "Thanks a lot, buddy."
***
The angels have a name for the time before: the Age of Archangels, even though the archangels were all gone for a couple of years before Metatron's hissy fit.
Nobody ever tells them what happens to him when the angels go back home, but hey, as long as he doesn't come sniffing around the bunker expecting compassion or a handout, Dean doesn't really care.
The Heaven spell is different from the Hell version. It banishes the demons screaming into Hell, no arguments, but for the angels, it just seems to give them the ability to make their own decisions for once.
Most of the angels accept the return of their grace with an almost-sheepish dignity and skedaddle back home as quick as their new wings will take them, hopefully less dickish for their time spent as mortals. A few choose to reject their renewed grace so they can remain in the mortal lives they've built for themselves.
Even fewer-a scant handful-accept grace but do not return, preferring to stay on Earth, forever exiled.
Like Cas.
Dean's suspicious of them at first-if ever the phrase once bitten twice shy applies to a situation, it's this one-but after seeing how Cas reels from the restoration, he's glad for them. Much as he hates to admit it, Cas needs more support than him and Sam, and his social skills with humans were never all that great.
Still doesn't mean he wants them glaring at him over the dinner table, though.
***
It's not so different at first. The healing's very useful, since there's still places to go, things to hunt, people to save. The demons are gone, sure, but the various massacres and disasters of the past few years have left hordes of new ghosts in the night, and putting them to rest isn't always as easy as torching bones. Leviathans don't leave bones.
But the old monsters remain-vampires and wendigo, werewolves and shifters. Turns out that they're not so much super as they are natural. Humans might very well still be the top of the food chain, but that doesn't mean the lower predators can't get a snack in here and there. Without angels and demons and Leviathans meddling with them, their populations stabilize, at least.
Hunters are still necessary, may always be necessary, and as word spreads, new ones show up to ask them questions and get training. When they finally give up on Garth ever reappearing, Sam and Dean and Cas start taking over the things that Bobby used to do. And Sam gets it into his head that now's the time to really resurrect the Men of Letters, without the anti-hunter snobbery. All that snobbery just got the old ones killed, after all, and kept valuable resources out of the hands of those who needed them. There's acres of storage rooms to sort and catalog, phones and e-mails and texts to answer, lore to learn, things to kill.
For awhile, life is good.
It's just not enough for Sam.
Dean's not sure why. Maybe Sam had just really resigned himself to dying for the trials. Maybe Sam just naturally needs...more. More than the bunker and Dean and Cas and a good hunt every now and then.
Whatever the reason, Dean's not really surprised the day Sam leaves. "Just for a while," he says, in that pleading voice he damn well knows Dean can never argue with, the voice he used to wrangle extra Lucky Charms when they were little, the voice he used to convince Dean that saying yes to Lucifer was a good idea. "Just-let me go."
And Dean does. Even offers Sam the Impala, but it's nearly impossible to get parts for her these days, and Sam has his own car now-grace-powered angels, it turns out, actually are able to transform lead into gold, and where the hell was that talent back when they were trying to stop the Apocalypse on stolen credit cards? Cas can keep an eye on him, and Sam knows better than to not call. Mostly he writes, though, old-fashioned letters and postcards sent through his growing Men of Letters network or the post office box they keep in town. He shies away from the Internet as if he fears Dean can actually watch him through it.
It's been fifty years since they shut the gates, and for most of the four decades before that, they lived inseparable lives. It's time to let Sam have some time apart. And now, finally, it's safe to let him. If there's anything out there that can kill them, they haven't found it yet, and it's not for lack of trying.
So Dean plays library security guard, reviewing the credentials of anybody who shows up wanting access, hunts when he wants to, and occasionally he lets Cas zap them somewhere fun. (Roller coasters and angels: Bad idea.) Cas drops in on Sam to make sure he's okay when old habits make Dean worry, and the years aren't the best but they pass okay.
Then one cold night, there's a pounding on the door, and when Dean opens it, ready to tell the would-be Man of Letters that the library's closed till morning, he finds his brother standing on the doorstep with tears in his eyes and a baby in his arms.
***
Johnny's the first child they raise there in the bunker. He's got a grieving father and a thrilled uncle and a bemused angel for a playmate, and between the three of them, they raise him into a decent man and Man of Letters. But like all children, eventually, he has to leave the nest, though when he flies, it's to Purdue, not Daddy's Stanford, and it's a joyous occasion, not the bitter aftermath of years of father-son feuding. He becomes an electrical engineer, because if there's one thing Johnny has in common with his uncle, it's his ability to take apart just about anything and put it together new and improved. Sam's a grandfather and then a great-grandfather before he becomes a still-thirtyish-looking father whose only son just died of old age, and that night he tries his best to prove that enough alcohol will pickle the liver even of an immortal.
That's the night Dean leaves. Really leaves. Cas will take care of Sam. Dean just needs to get out.
Dean learned this with Jess and Amelia, Dad and Bobby. Sam grieves just like Dad: hard and selfish. He doesn't mean to be such a hateful dick, it's just that when he hurts, he has no room for anyone else's pain.
Maybe it's just as well that Sammy never had anything more to mourn of Mom than the concept of "mother." Dean's not sure he would have survived two helpings of that kind of hateful, destructive grief. Not at once. Not without winding up even more fucked in the head than he already was.
He never planned to stay gone more than a few weeks. But then he runs into Monica in a bar in Winnipeg-what? Immortal centenarians can't go to Canada every now and then?-and the next he knows, it's been four years and they have an apartment and a sedan, he has a day job, and the cheap wedding band on his finger is starting to tarnish.
Kids never come into the equation for him. Neither does death. But Monica ages, and he doesn't, and when he realizes that he can no longer pretend he just won the genetics lottery, even with all the advances in medicine, he wraps their car around a tree, making sure it's something nobody could survive, and leaves.
When he walks into the bunker, Sam's sitting at the library table with a pair of shiny new Men of Letters wannabes, Cas is puttering in the kitchen, and it's like he never left.
***
And that's how it goes. It becomes a cycle, eventually. Sam leaves and settles down, every time hoping that this time it'll be different, and it never is. Within five years, he's back, with a wife dead of cancer and a little boy or two-because apparently Sam only shoots Y, never X, which is just as well, because Dean's not sure they could raise a young woman, or at least, not so that she can actually function out in civilization-and the bunker echoes with children's laughter for a few years. Eventually, of course, they leave, and eventually, of course, they die, and Sam never learns how to handle that grief, so that's when Dean leaves, because in a way, they're his kids too, and this is the one pain he can't help Sammy with, any more than he was able to leave Sam dead back in Cold Oak.
Sometimes he marries, most times not, but most of the women Dean loves don't die young. He stays as long as he can, fakes a death if he has to, simply leaves if she believed him when he told her, and then comes home. Children are never an issue for him, and they don't know why, any more than they know why Sam can only father sons or why his wives all die of the same cancer. But Dean finds his nephews, and the occasional stepchild he raises outside, are enough to satisfy any itch for fatherhood.
Sometimes, late at night, he wonders what happened to Ben, wonders if maybe Lisa was lying, but he never looks it up. If Ben was his.... Well, his great-great-great-grandchildren are dead of old age at this point.
It doesn't matter when he comes home, though he does try to call and give them some warning. Sometimes, if there was an accident, if there were stepkids, if she knew and was just too damn understanding about it, he's torn up enough that he forgets. Sometimes they've just gotten too far behind the tech for him to contact them easily, though they do their best to keep the bunker updated.
But usually he walks through the door-the one to the garage, which he built back when he finally admitted he couldn't keep the Impala street-legal anymore and she had to retire (dammit, she deserved better than the scrap heap, she'd saved the world, so she got the best car palace he could design)-and Sam is sitting in the library, possibly consulting with a hunter or teaching the latest MoL apprentices, and Cas is puttering around pretending to be the patron saint of housekeeping. Dean's room will be the same as he left it, although cleaner, and maybe with new linens, depending on what state they were in when he left. He drops the bag that holds whatever remnants of this life he plans to keep, and then he adds a new photo to the neat little gallery on the wall that faces his bed.
Every girlfriend. Every wife. All the way back to Cassie and Lisa.
Sam never wants to remember his wives. He won't even say their names. It's Cas who ferrets those out and steals photos from the lives Sam abandons, Dean who frames them and puts them beside the kids' beds, teaches the boys what "mother" means and who the women in those photos are. It's easier when the kids can't remember.
But advances in medicine mean that sometimes Sam's wife survives long enough that their firstborn is four or five when the inevitable cancer kills her. Nick is six before Leticia dies, old enough to know that there's something not-quite-right about life in the bunker, at least compared to the outside world, old enough to have gone to school and have friends of his own.
Dean loves him, but raising that boy's a nightmare. Sam hasn't fought with anybody that way since Dad. (Cas seriously asks, at one point, if it's possible that Leticia was descended from one of Sam's other children, but Dean shushes that before Cas goes on a genealogy quest, because he's pretty sure Sam's not ready to face the possibility that he married his own great-great-etc.-granddaughter.) Maybe it's not surprising that Nick's one of the few who turns his back on education and the Men of Letters entirely, stalking out of the bunker at seventeen to become an old-school lone hunter, one of the few who refuses to take any aid from the MoL.
Word of mouth brings word of his death at the hands of a banshee seven years later. It hurts Dean more than it does Sam this time, but Dean leaves anyway-out of sheer rage at Sam's easy acceptance. Sam's grief is there, but it's-it's abstract, is what it is, like the way he used to mourn Mom, like Nick wasn't there and real for twenty-four years. Madison got more tears and he knew her for three fucking days.
Dean doesn't come back for centuries. Cas finds him now and then, checking up on him, but if there's a message in that from Sam, Cas knows better than to give it.
***
The first time Cas comes looking, Dean's in the ass-end of South America, but when he asks, Cas poofs him to Europe, no airplanes need apply. Might as well see the place sometime. More than just one graveyard in Scotland, anyway. He wonders what happened to Crowley. But that was-shit, seven hundred years ago? More? Time has no meaning in the bunker, in their life. The news stories on the net just blur together, same old shit, different day, an endless repeating cycle of human stupidity.
Some days, Dean can understand why the angels had such a bad opinion of humanity. They really never do learn.
Dean wanders Europe and Asia and what's left of the Middle East, which is way more peaceful since the African Confederation got fed up with their "cradle of civilization" superiority complex shit and bombarded them into the Stone Age. He sees the Pyramids and Stonehenge and the Great Wall, the ruins of Jerusalem and what the tornado left of the Eiffel Tower, saunters up Mount Everest without a pack and spends the better part of two years lost in a cave complex somewhere in what used to be Ukraine. He learns how to cuss in most of the world's languages, learns more in a few, tries a lot of weird foods, marries and then outlives several women, and wonders where the hell the flying cars are. Weren't they promised flying cars? Or spaceships. Where are the damn spaceships? Are they ever gonna get off this rock?
He's in southern Europe when an earthquake causes enough uplift along the Italian shore that Venice comes out of the sea. The rest of the world is immediately obsessed with archeology, but all he can think of is a dirty, rundown diner in what used to be in Michigan, where a long time ago he read about how the city was sinking.
It's time to go home.
***
Sam looks up from the table where he's directing two very young-looking strangers in some kind of book-preservation project, and blinks. Clearly, he was expecting someone else.
All he says, though, is "Welcome back," and turns his attention back to the project.
And just like that, Dean's home.
Later, he finds out that the entire time he was gone, Sam never left. Oh, he took little trips, to town, one or two hunts when there was nobody else, but not one of his rebooting-his-life trips.
Cas tells him that quietly, knowing Dean will understand the meaning.
The fact that the Impala is still shiny, not the least bit dusty, and the engine still starts, tells him more.
***
Climates change, turning the land outside the bunker into desert and then rain forest. Continents move. Coastlines withdraw and march and withdraw again. The Mississippi moves to Alabama. Britain and Ireland merge and then join with Europe and then separate again. The Mediterranean dries up and refloods. The language brought in by the hunters and MoL apprentices is completely alien to the English Dean and Sam grew up speaking, something Dean doesn't even realize until one night when he tries to re-read Dad's journal.
Sam might, because Sam keeps better track of these things, but Dean doesn't even know what country they're in anymore. Five hundred years ago, when he married Kalandra, whose picture was the first on the third wall of his room, it was the Fourth Republic of Kansas, but he's pretty sure the Winnipeg Communes took them over awhile back. Somebody might have taken them out by now. Just off the top of his head, he remembers two wars with Texas, three with the Cherokee, one with Belize, and four invasions by what has apparently become a very aggressive bunch of Vermonters.
War just kind of breaks around the bunker, like they're not really here. In the world, not of it. Maybe it's luck. Maybe it's some sort of spell left over from the MoL.
Maybe it's just because that where there's people, there's always monsters, and where there are monsters, there are always hunters.
Dean wonders, sometimes: If the need went away, would their immortality fade? If nobody needed the vast treasure trove of information and artifacts stored in the bunker, if nobody came looking, would they eventually wither away and die like everything else? Or is that just something he thinks to make himself feel better, to persuade himself that there will eventually be an end?
He's been around Cas too long. It's making him philosophical.
***
They're alone tonight, no would-be hunters begging a free meal. "I heard about a ghost today," Sam says while Dean's digging into the spaghetti.
Dean raises an eyebrow. Dinner conversation is a rare treat. And they haven't gone after a mere ghost in-a thousand years? Two? The MoL babies handle ghosts.
"It sounds serious," Sam goes on, "and there's no local hunters."
First conversation, and now a hunt? This is the weirdest apology Sam's ever tried to make.
But if Sam wants to head out, the three of them together, like old times.... Well, he won't say no, even if they can't take the Impala. "Sure. Where is it?"
Sam gives him a shit-eating grin he hasn't seen in ages. "The Alpha Centauri colony."
"The- Wait, we have space colonies now? When the hell did we get spaceships?"
Sam rolls his eyes. "Four hundred years ago. Pay attention."
"No, I mean, don't we need our own spaceship to get there? Did you buy us a spaceship without telling me?" If they have a spaceship, he's definitely going to have to expand the garage.
"I can take you," Cas says. "It's not that far. Cosmically speaking." They both stare at him. "It's really quite pleasant at-"
"Cas, so help me God, if you say it's nice this time of year, I will hit you in the face with a meatball."
"It's nicer in the fall."
"It is fall!"
"Winter," Sam corrects.
"It's summer there," Cas goes on. "Probably not as warm now. With the terraforming and all. It was fairly inhospitable for humans the last time I visited."
Dean decides he doesn't want to know exactly how long ago that was. "So. It's a ghost hunt, in space, and it's warm? Where the hell did we put the rock salt, Sammy?"
***
Maybe, in the end, there's no end.
But him and Sam and Cas, burning bones under two moons and a sky full of constellations that haven't even been named yet?
Eternity could be worse.