Chapter Text
How Dean makes it the half mile to the bunker, he’ll never be sure.
He crash lands in a cornfield. He loses Michael’s grace somewhere in the skies over Nebraska — yanked unceremoniously from his body mid-leap — and from there it’s sheer luck, his body a long-range missile plunging unmanned toward its original destination, or something close. He sees the Platte River flashing in the sun away to the north, the river of semis crawling down I-80; familiar truck stops, railroads, an abandoned grain elevator he and Sammy exorcised one time, the river and its ribbon of cottonwoods, and then it’s the Haskins’ back stoop, bent and rocking-chair-weathered, rushing up to meet him, and he has only an instant to hope he neither crashes through its failing shingles nor impales himself on the pole holding up the scarecrow behind it before everything goes black.
He comes to what he thinks is only moments later. There’s something at work there, some vestiges of the angelic healing he worked wildly on his own body, mere minutes ago in that playa in Nevada — there’s salt dust on his face, his palms, his knees — and his leg is broken again, twisted and shattered beneath him, he’s bleeding freely inside and out, but he’s alive, and that means it’s no time to lie back among the corn stalks and wait to see whether the scarecrow works on whatever scavengers come to investigate the carrion that used to be Dean Winchester.
You beat him, he tells himself. You won. You won. His whole body still screams with the effort of turning himself over, and his shoulder doesn’t want to move. His entire right leg is a useless, bloody mass, dead weight, but he gets himself up on his elbows, somehow, and peers through the stalks.
They’re heavy with tasseled ears, standing straight and tall like an alien regiment in phantom symmetry. There’s no obvious path through them, but the bunker is south, and he’s not so addled he doesn’t still know which way that is.
He moves like a beached seal, heavy and awkward, his one functional leg beating weakly against the dirt to help him along. The first corn stalk cracks under his weight and jabs up beneath his breast bone, and his vision nearly whites out with the pain — internal organs, not okay — but he keeps going anyway. And going. And going.
Everything hurts, without the white fire of Michael’s grace brimming in his cells. His limbs weigh a thousand pounds; his blood beats, beats, and a thousand tiny lacerations pulse with every thump of his heart. There’s blood pooling in his abdominal cavity, welling in his lungs. He coughs, and it dribbles down his lips.
He’s going to drown in his own blood. He’s going to drown in his own blood, and Haskins will follow the trail through his cornfield and find him here, eyes pecked out, mere minutes’ walk from safety, from home —
No. Dean fights down the eddy of panic and drags himself on, shuts his eyes against the memories and fears and the incomprehensible magnitude of the task before him. He focuses until he is nothing but a single point in space, in time, in sensation — pain, determination, the god of putting one elbow in front of the other, Michael liked when people thought he was the god of things — be the god of this, this motherfucking cornfield — he has never known anything else, has never been anything else, he will crawl through this cornfield until the Earth stops spinning and the sun engulfs them all — and then he’s tumbling down the bunker’s steps, dust and straw clinging to the sticky, congealing blood of open wounds he didn’t know he had.
He finds that he’s laughing. Impossible, that laughter remains among his body’s array of functions, but there it is. It works bone splinters deeper into the tissue of his lungs. Did he always know the map of his own body so well? Or is it the artifact of an angel’s awareness, an internal geography that can’t be unlearned?
He can’t open the door laughing. He can’t do anything if he keeps laughing, he’ll laugh himself dead and they’ll find him here and that’ll be worse, that’ll be worse — than if he never made it home at all —
He stops. Time slides. He finds the doorknob and turns it, slumps through — they should’ve unkeyed him from the wards, why haven’t they unkeyed him from the wards — and then it’s just the second, interior doorway. The only obstacle left.
Sam and Cas are in there. Jack, maybe, Mom; the refugees from Michael’s world. He doesn’t remember killing any of them, in his time as the Sword. He doesn’t remember killing any of them —
He wrestles himself upright in a burst of reckless, terrified energy, gripping the doorframe and hauling, leaving bloody handprints on the wall. He nearly blacks out, but when his vision clears, he’s balanced on his one good leg, hip braced against the jamb, forehead resting on the cool surface of the door.
His left hand is still gripping on for dear life. His right is in the doorknob. He turns it, lets it swing open, doesn’t quite fall in after it as it goes.
It’s just the three of them at the war room table. Cas, Sam, Jack, and they’re lurching to their feet and Dean’s vision is swimming and Sam’s palming his angel blade, Jack’s mouth is open, he thinks they must be yelling but he can’t hear anything, his ears are ringing, but Cas —
Cas is halfway up the stairs already, and it doesn’t matter that Dean can’t hear him. His hands are empty, eyes wild, and his lips move and his voice sounds as clear in Dean’s head as if he’d spoken aloud — which he has — it’s all confused, but Cas is saying, DEAN, and Dean lets his head rest against the doorframe and says, through the dizzy lights in his skull, “Hey Cas. Miss me?”, or at least he thinks he does.
Cas comes up short on the mezzanine, body a thrumming wire, lips pursed and pissy, and Dean smiles, because something about that makes him ludicrously happy, a bubble of joy expanding in his chest — or is that the pneumothorax?
It sounds like the start of a joke. Is that a collapsed lung in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?
He’s not sure if he says that out loud, or tries to. All he knows is that a moment later, Cas’s lips are tightening further still, and he’s stepping forward, reaching out to press two fingers to Dean’s forehead, and the entire world goes finally, blessedly black.
---
He wakes with Sam’s puppy dog eyes intent and too close to his face.
He’s in his own room, with his own record collection stacked on the dresser, his own photos in a little pile on the nightstand where they’re always falling once he’s propped them up. He blinks.
“Where’s Cas?” he asks, and his mouth feels like a small rodent died inside it; his words come out muzzy, but Sam seems to understand.
“He’s resting. Healing you took a lot out of him.” He frowns, eyebrows drawing together. “You nearly died, Dean.”
Tell me about it. Dean takes stock of his own body; it hurts, but his muscles and organs are whole. He can feel where his tissue is knitted together, erasing the marks of Michael’s beating in the desert, his own half-assed healing, the fall. He never realized how much skill this shit took; Cas is good.
“I gotta check,” says Sam, reluctant. “You’re really you? I mean, this isn’t some trick of Michael’s, right?”
Dean frowns. “Can’t Cas tell?”
Sam hesitates. He glances at the door, then rubs at his knuckles like he’s nervous. “Cas — hasn’t exactly been himself, with you gone.”
“What?” Dean struggles to sit up. “You saying he’s —”
“No, no-no-no,” Sam interjects hastily, pressing his shoulders back to the bed. Dean groans, stunned at how easily he goes. “You remember how broken up you were when he died?”
What does that have to do with anything? “Yeah?”
“Well —” Sam spreads his hands. “Cas has been grieving. All right? I mean, we all have, but he’s — you know.”
Dean really doesn’t. He chooses to ignore that. “So you’re saying you don’t trust his read on me.”
“I’m not saying I don’t trust him,” Sam says quickly. “I’m just saying he’s — been pretty desperate to get you back. He might be… seeing what he wants to see.”
Dean slumps back against the pillow. “So cut me. See if I bleed angel grace.”
Sam hesitates.
“Go on. I’m not made of glass.”
“Tell that to the guy who didn’t spend all night waiting up for you to stop breathing. Again,” Sam mutters, but he pulls out his angel blade all the same, and slices a thin line over the skin of Dean’s arm.
For a moment, Dean’s irrationally terrified that they’ll both be wrong; that grace will come spilling out, that Michael’s just been there, biding his time, all along.
Nothing happens. Just a thin trickle of blood. They breathe simultaneous, shaky sighs of relief.
“All right, then,” says Sam.
“All right,” agrees Dean. He’s home, he’s whole, he’s human. “So. What are we doing about winning this fucking war?”
---
What they’re doing, it turns out, is a whole hell of a lot.
Some things, Dean remembers himself, if only in bits and pieces. Naomi’s successful defense of Heaven — the negotiation at the gates, and the clang of their closure, echoing through every dimension of his grace-self like an enormous bell. Michael’s still a lone actor, at least; loose on Earth, devoid of an army or Heaven’s might behind him. Maybe that’s why he’s taking a more discreet approach to world domination than last time around. He hasn’t started smiting whole towns yet. Dean hopes that’s a good thing.
At home, there’s more news still. The bunker is quiet these days — just Sam, Cas, and Jack, who’s been a shadow of himself, Sam says, since Lucifer stole his grace — but that’s because they’re mobilizing almost everywhere else. Bobby and Mary have been touring the country, galvanizing every last hunter they know from both worlds to prepare for battle. They’ve successfully reclaimed a dozen Men of Letters capitula to use as bases of operations all over the continent. At the moment, they’re in Chicago, helping Maggie’s team set up a forge to melt down angel blades for bullets.
Jody’s got Lorraine Fox pulling Canadian hunters together at her place in Saskatchewan. Cesar and Jesse Cuevas are raising the battle cry in Mexico. Ketch is on his way back to Europe in an attempt to re-infiltrate the British Men of Letters; he believes they’ve undergone some soul-searching in the wake of the American catastrophe. At this rate, Team Free Will is rapidly expanding into a trained, highly organized paramilitary fighting force with strongholds in at least three countries. It’s more than Dean could ever have hoped for.
It isn’t nearly enough.
He tells Sam, in low tones, what he does remember. Michael is terrifying; stronger than anything they’ve ever seen, stronger even than Lucifer. Grappling with him for control was like battling an ocean of power, seizing at a single scale within the coils of an immense snake.
He managed it, though. Three times, once he’d battled out of the soporific illusion Michael cast around his mind — should’ve known a quiet night with a glass of whiskey in the bunker’s TV room would seem a pale imitation of the real thing, without Sam or Cas there to drive him up a wall.
The first he’d spent turning a circle with his hands in his hair, trying desperately to come up with a plan. He’d barely completed a single revolution before he’d lost his grip again, Michael roaring up to consume him like a speck of driftwood in a maelstrom.
The second time, he’d been busy plummeting through the stratosphere and trying to figure out how angel wings worked without Michael’s experience to back him up. The third, he’d zapped himself to Charlie and Rowena — still road-tripping, apparently, though with a hell of a lot of weaponry — in the hopes that they’d be both smart and unsentimental enough to come up with a plan.
He’d been too afraid to return to the bunker. Dreaded, somehow, that he’d be playing directly into Michael’s hands — or that he’d only leave with his entire earthly family dead around him and any hope of salvation dashed to smithereens. Rowena, though, knew how to bind an archangel; Charlie knew this Michael as well as anyone. He’d misjudged slightly and crashed physically through the roof into the rear seat of their car, managed a several-minute conversation and the bare threads of an idea, then felt Michael rallying for control and threw himself desperately clear.
He still doesn’t know if Michael caught the gist of that conversation; if he’s left Charlie and Rowena in danger. He doesn’t remember much but haze, after that. Landing on his knees on a sun-baked valley floor among alien mountains of twisted black rock. Michael’s rage, incandescent as the hammered-blue bell of the sky. Red blood, white sand; gathering thunder and the crack of lightning, cloud to furious cloud. Sheets of rain that evaporated into the baking desert air before ever reaching the ground.
Getting worked over by someone who lives in your own skin fucking sucks, and his body still twinges with the residual horror of it. For a moment, he’s back there, dust thick behind his eyelids, throat searing with dry heat and Michael’s rage.
He survived it, though. Snatched desperately at the bleeding edges of Michael’s grace, pouring like the sun’s corona from the inferno of his wrath. He’d gotten a sense in there, somehow, that Michael was not only angry at his defiance — that Dean had wrested control — but at a decision of his own: the Sword was more trouble than he was worth, and he was going to have to leave him, abandon the most perfect weapon God had ever seen fit to create. But he wasn’t going to relinquish it without damaging it beyond repair —
Dean’s voice shakes in the retelling. Sam watches him with quiet, patient sympathy, and Dean says, “He didn’t, though. He was messy — too angry to hold all his grace out of my reach, and I kept healing myself with it, but I don’t think he noticed. He left me for dead, and I used the last scraps when he left to blast myself here.”
He imagines, for a moment, the alternative. Bleeding out a hundred miles past the far edge of nowhere, instead of riding the final, supersonic clap of an angel’s wings home.
Sam’s grip tightens on his own hand for a moment, and then he reaches out, awkward, to pat Dean’s arm. “Do you think he knows you’re alive?”
Dean smiles thinly. “He didn’t mean for me to be. I’d guess no.” His amusement fades. “Sam — he wants to open another rift.”
“Yeah.” Sam looks down. “We figured. Bring his army through, right?”
Dean nods. He feels weak; the conversation has sucked his meager energy reserves dry.
Sam asks, “What’s stopping him?”
“He’s —” Dean coughs, dry and hard, and doubles up. The pain is fire in his lungs. He quells it with difficulty and lies back, panting.
Sam’s watching him, careful, face tight. There’s sympathy in his eyes, but also a need to know.
“He’s got the ingredients,” Dean manages. “I’m guessing he’s been gun-shy about using his own grace for it, though. Especially with me lurking around making grabs for the reins.” It clicks into place. “With me gone —”
“He might take the risk in a new vessel,” Sam says grimly. “That or look around for another archangel, but with Gabriel and Lucifer gone, he’s —”
“Shit outta luck,” Dean finishes. He casts for Sam’s gaze, holds it. “Unless…”
Sam blinks, then draws back in surprise, and Dean wonders if it isn’t a little feigned; if he hasn’t been thinking of this, and dreading it, all along. “Dean —”
“I didn’t tell him,” says Dean hoarsely. “Didn’t even dare think about it. And hell, I’m not sure myself. It’s not like we saw hide or hair of him or Adam, when we were down in the Cage.”
Sam swallows, and a vein in his throat jumps. He looks down. “They’re not — dead, ” he says.
“Yeah,” says Dean, as gently as he can.
“You wouldn’t have seen much of me either,” says Sam, “if —”
He stops short.
“Yeah,” says Dean again.
“It was Lucifer’s,” and there’s that whole-body shudder, even though Lucifer is gone, dead, they killed him, saw his wings burned into that church’s paving stones, “his —”
“Yeah.”
Sam closes his eyes. He inhales, settling himself. Dean thinks, this whole mess is worth it, if it means his little brother feels safe enough to show the cost, the work of being fine.
“Sam,” he says, when a long enough moment has passed. “You know what this means.”
His brother’s eyes snap open.
“It means we know something Michael doesn’t. We’ve got something he doesn’t.”
“We don’t have anything,” Sam says sharply. “Unless you’re proposing —”
“Think about it,” Dean interrupts. “It makes sense. I’ve got a handle on resisting possession now.” Sam’s looking skeptical, two shades shy of aghast. Dean talks faster. “We need the firepower, you know we do. If I —”
He’s cut off by the sudden crack of the door banging all the way open. His head jerks around, sending shocks of pain through the muscles of his neck.
Cas’s palm rests flat on the wood. His hair is sticking up in all directions, in a way that gives Dean an odd urge to touch it. His eyes are bloodshot red and, presently, murderous.
“You,” he says, “are fucking joking.”
Dean tries to unstick his tongue from the roof of his mouth. He’s frozen. He feels suddenly, unaccountably — shy.
He swallows twice before he can find the voice to speak. “Hey, Cas,” he manages, and it sounds about as threadbare as he feels.
Cas’s expression doesn’t budge an iota. He just stands there glowering at them both.
At Dean’s right, Sam clears his throat. His face performs brief, guilty acrobatics.
He says, hopefully, “Coffee?”
---
Coffee doesn’t thaw the fury spiking off Cas’s hunched shoulders. Neither do pancakes, after Dean browbeats them both into letting him get up to make them — “you guys have been eating like college kids since I’ve been gone, come on, admit it” — though they both devour them readily enough.
So does Jack, when he fades quietly into the kitchen a little while after, gulping down large syrup-drenched forkfuls in a way that makes Dean wonder if he’s been eating at all. The kid looks thin. There are blue shadows under his eyes and a hunch in his posture that Dean doesn’t remember.
They don’t talk about his idea.
Dean figures that’s to his advantage — he needs to recover anyway, make the pitch when the marks of Michael’s battering aren’t quite so obvious on his face. Cas is still glowering, though, and Sam is still laughing a little too quickly, too forced.
Some of it’s relief, Dean figures. The sheer, bloody-minded relief of having his brother back; it’s been bred into them, over the years, worked into the molecular fabric of who they are. They’ll always feel easier with each other at their backs. A part of Dean feels a pang at that. Wishes, fruitlessly, that Sam felt as comfortable, as solid, with Cas, or Mom, or even Jack.
That’s just some of it, though. Some of it is — something else.
So he can bide his time. He can cook and clean and work himself back up to strength, bask a little in the soul-deep balm of home, and family, and bully them all into laughter when they start watching him like he might vanish if they look away.
There’s something prickly and strange and deeply satisfying in that, he thinks. It’s different from Sam digging desperate claws into the last scraps of Dean’s demon-dealt life; it’s different from the dread of Sam coming to look for him in Purgatory, and the shock of betrayal that he never tried. It’s — more like that day in the cemetery, I want a big funeral, all right, I’m talking epic, open bar, choir, Sabbath cover band, and realizing absurdly in that moment that they’d fucking give it to him, that Sam would move heaven and earth and possibly commit felonies in several states to get Gary fucking Busey to a cemetery in Lawrence, Kansas to read his eulogy, or at any rate he’d try before Cas set him right and went to deal with it the angelic way, and that —
— that’s an image that will never leave him, but for now, he doesn’t want Gary Busey, or a Sabbath cover band, or even a goddamn drink. He wants pizza. He wants old school, fast-food pizza, the greasy shit he secretly knows is way worse than what they make at the wood-fired place in Smith Center, but it’s his goddamn back-from-the-dead day, and he’ll eat bad pizza if he wants to.
Sam protests, predictably, that pizza can have vegetables on it, Dean, and that that stuff isn’t even cheese, you know they call it “dairy product” on the packaging, right, and then there’s a door slamming down the hall and they follow it to the garage to realize Cas’s truck is gone.
He’s back forty-five minutes later with three steaming boxes, and Dean could kiss him, for all that he’s still glaring and bloodshot and tight-lipped. Three boxes means Dean gets one for himself, which is frankly fucking appropriate, Sam can roll his eyes right back into his head if he wants to, and the next day Dean wants Chinese all the way from Hastings, and Cas goes and gets that too.
It’s a strange sort of truce. Cas is still pissed at him — every line of his body makes that clear — but he hovers anyway to watch Dean eat, shoves more food at him wordlessly whenever he runs out, even starts glaring Sam to silence when Sam tries to comment. It’s good all around, Dean thinks — Jack’s looking a little healthier, too, got more meat on his bones — and of course it can’t last. Of course the truce has to end when, on the third day, Sam walks into the library, clears his throat, puts down his beer with a firm clunk, and says, “I think Dean is right.”
Dean blinks. He’s finally cracked Cas’s shell of frosty remove; he’s spent the evening catching up with the news since he left, and reprimanding Cas for failing to apprise him of all the important developments. The Warriors won another championship — predictable — but so did the Caps, less so. Coco is out on Netflix — gotta make time for that, might actually get Jack to crack a smile, and the whole raising-the-devil’s-kid thing has perks when it comes to watching animated movies without the snide remarks — and he’s actually got a laugh out of Cas just now, something approaching forgiveness in his eyes, and then Sam has to go and torpedo it.
Still, Dean says, “What, about Jennifer Aniston pulling a Julia Louis-Dreyfus?”, just to make sure.
Sam exhales through his nose, mouth thinning. “No,” he says, “about Michael. Our Michael.”
“Ah,” says Dean. “Right. That.”
“Unless —” Sam backpedals, looking suddenly caught off-guard. “Unless you’ve changed your mind?”
Dean sighs. Cas is looking thunderous again; in his armchair in the corner, Jack’s eyes are round, mouth open in surprise.
Might as well rip the Band-Aid off. He says, “I haven’t changed my mind.”
Cas says, “Dean,” and Jack says, “What are you talking about?”
So Dean explains. The whole history of Sam jumping into the Cage as Lucifer’s vessel, and taking Adam and Michael with him; his eventual rescue at the hands of Cas and, subsequently, Death. He glosses over the years of torture, but by the look on Jack’s face, he’s reading between the lines.
“So,” he finishes, “point is, Michael’s still down there somewhere. Our world’s Michael. From what we’ve heard, he’s a little — cuckoo for cocoa puffs — but he’s there, and he’s an archangel, and that means —”
“That means you want to use his power.” Jack’s voice is calm, but he looks sick, furious, and the word power comes out heavy with self-loathing. It twists in Dean’s gut, to know how viciously the kid blames himself.
All the more reason to take this on. Powers or no, it’s not Jack’s job to stop Michael.
Cas says, “Absolutely not.”
Dean sighs. He sets down his pizza. “Cas.”
“Dean,” Cas echoes, spiteful, almost, mocking. “Do you have any idea what it was like? The last time? To sit here, alone, with no idea if any of you were ever coming back? Or worse, when Sam and Jack did — and you weren’t with them?”
Jack flinches at that, like it’s his fault. Sam doesn’t. Dean meets Cas’s eyes steadily and says, “Yeah, actually. I do.”
“And you think,” snarls Cas, ignoring him, “that you can fall through that door bleeding from every capillary and two heartbeats away from dying, and I’ll let you just waltz out to do it all again? ”
Dean says, “I didn’t fall.”
He didn’t fall.
Cas’s nostrils flare. His face is white with fury.
“Cas,” says Sam cautiously. “Dean thinks he can control our Michael, and I — I think he’s right. I know what it’s like being possessed, remember, and once you’ve got that first handle —”
Cas wheels on him. He bites out, “I know what it’s like being possessed, too.”
Sam swallows. “I know,” he says, raw. “But I also know our Michael — better than any of you do, at any rate. He’s — broken. He’s powerful, yes, but it’ll be more like dealing with a kid than a full-blown archangel. And Cas, we need the help. You know we do.”
Cas’s jaw works. A muscle jumps in his cheek.
“I’m not gonna run off without talking it over with you,” Dean says softly. He means all of them, he thinks, but his eyes are on Cas. “I’m not. If I’m gonna do this, I — want you to have my back. All of you,” he adds, because it feels a little weird, suddenly; a little too intimate.
Abruptly, Cas sags in his chair. He rubs his hands over his eyes, and holds them there for a moment before dropping them back to his lap. He says, “Then let’s talk.”
---
They do, late into the night. Dean listens patiently to Cas’s litany of arguments; he’s got a lot of them, a fresh one every time one line of debate is exhausted, and yeah, some of his points are valid. Sam shuffles off to bed while they’re still talking, and Jack follows not long after, and then Cas just stops, mid-sentence, and slumps in his chair and closes his eyes and chokes out, “I can’t, Dean. I just — when they got back, and you weren’t — I can’t go through that again.”
Dean thinks, suddenly, of Cas throwing him against the wall in that alley, all those years ago; of his voice, loud and fraying: I rebelled for this?!
That was the first time he said yes to Michael, or tried to. Third time, he thinks, is the charm.
“Cas,” he says, and he hears his own voice catch. He reaches for Cas’s arm, squeezes it hard. “Cas, buddy, I know.”
“Of course I’ll have your back,” Cas says thickly. “And if Michael hurts you, I’ll — find some way to tear him to pieces. Both of them. I don’t care.”
“I believe it,” says Dean.
“But not yet,” says Cas, in a rush. “Just — think about it. And —” He breathes in, heavily, and out again. “I just got you back,” he says, dropping his head. “Don’t go. Not yet.”
Dean swallows. His own throat feels thick, suddenly, with unnamed emotion. “If it goes how I think,” he says, “I won’t go away at all.”
“Still,” says Cas. “Give me — a week. Can you do that?”
Dean nods. His face shouldn’t feel so tight; his eyes shouldn’t prickle so sharply. “I can do that,” he agrees.