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vail_kagamiFandom: Supernatural
Beta: currently unbeated
Characters (overall): Dean, Castiel, Sam, plus a number of angels and demons
Rating (overall): NC-17
Warnings (overall): violence, torture, drug use, insanity, mentions of rape
Spoilers: Going AU during episode 5.18: Point of No Return. No spoilers for after season five.
Words (this chapter): 8,506
Summary: A man wakes up in a ruined wasteland, without memories, without a name, without knowing the strange guy who claims he used to be an angel, or that he once had a little brother. All he knows is that the world is dying, everyone is lying to him and that somehow, somewhere, something went terribly wrong. Because someone said Yes when they should have said No, and someone else paid the price.
Masterpost
The way from Kansas to Florida is long. It takes them months to get there – Castiel knows that both Dean and Sam quickly lose track of time when every day seems to be the same, but he could have told them that they were walking for four months, three weeks and three days by the time they reach their destination, if they asked him. They never do.
The world looks the same as it did before. The dust lingers in the sky, the ground barely hosts any life and the cities are in ruins as ever before. The three of them have to hunt for their food and collect their clothes from the rags civilization left behind. They sleep in caves and curled around campfires. And yet, something has changed since the cage opened and swallowed what should never have left it in the first place.
The weather changes more often now. Some days it’s raining, sometimes it’s windy, then cold, the next day warmer, where before the atmosphere seemed frozen in one state for years or decades. The temperatures are steadily climbing, like a long winter turning into spring. It is, however, the only outward change there is and the only physical sign that something has been lifted off this world that was suffocating it before.
It’s not just Dean, Sam, and Castiel feeling it. They don’t come across other people often, but when they do, the others are more relaxed, less willing to sense betrayal or fight for their life at the slightest provocation. People are still cautious, though – the angels and most demons have left the earth, maybe for good, but no one came and told the people from a ray of light that they have been saved. It will be a long time before they realize that attacks and possessions simply do not happen anymore.
They tell the news to anyone they happen to meet and Castiel can see the willingness to believe them even if there is no proof. The people just know something has changed, and they are so ready for hope.
Dean never says “My brother saved the world,” but he radiates the words with every breath he takes in the company of strangers until Castiel thinks they simply have to understand it. But they don’t. The three of them move on from the chance meetings, sometimes carrying more food than before, sometimes less, and the people they leave behind are none the wiser whom they have just met and let go.
They are not in a hurry. Sometimes they stay for days in one place, sometimes they walk almost without a break, until Sam, for all that he is better than before, cannot go on and forces them to stop. He then lies awake when he should be resting, fighting to draw breath into struggling lungs. It happens especially on cold days, and Dean always hovers and chides when Sam is down, acting like a concerned parent but overdoing it so much it becomes annoying. Castiel believes he does it on purpose.
He can easily see the fear in his friend’s eyes whenever his brother is not well. It echoes Castiel’s own, but Sam always recovers and they travel on.
One time they camp by a river for a while, and Castiel finds an old, wrecked ship at the bank – old, but not older than a few years. It’s salvageable, so Dean salvages it, because that is – as Castiel has realized early in their friendship – what he does. It takes two weeks, and in that time nothing bad happens to them. No attacks, not hunger because they find enough food in the scarce trees around them, no hard weather. In that time Castiel can see, as he watches his friends go about their daily life, that they are ready to settle and rest.
He is quite ready for that himself. After all these years of living with a specific purpose that kept him moving, it is a strange and slightly frightening urge to have.
When the boat is finished, they get into it and go down the river for as long as they can. When the river branches east they take that branch; the water there seems calmer than the main arm and for the longest time, Castiel believes their way to be random. The journey on the water is quite enjoyable. Sam gets a fever once, but it’s not bad and they don’t have to stop travelling for it. Leaning back and watching the world move past them without exerting themselves is a very welcome change to the years of walking that lie past all of them.
They eat a lot of fish, rest at the banks when it becomes too dark to navigate their boat. Once, a storm forces them to seek shelter in a makeshift tent for days, but even that does nothing to lessen the strange emotional high Castiel finds himself on since Lucifer’s downfall. It feels as if he were walking through a dream.
Eventually, the river turns wilder and finally becomes too rough to safely travel on. They turn back to walking, find a street and follow it. Their walk may not be easier than before the end of the war, but it feels like it is. They pass cities and sometimes come across towns full of humans only just beginning to trust the peace that has come upon them. Castiel half-expects the brothers to lead their way there, make friends and settle in one of the houses that are just waiting for someone to need them, but they always bypass the towns and keep going, without ever stopping to talk about their plans for the future.
Perhaps it has to do with the fact that none of them ever thought they would have a future, and now they do, they are lost in it.
Castiel doesn’t know they are aiming for Florida until he sees the forest he and Dean once crossed on their way to temporary shelter, and even then he isn’t sure Dean led them here on purpose. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. It doesn’t matter and Castiel never asks.
Sam has never been to this place before, not consciously. The first time Castiel came here, Sam was resting nestled in the remnants of the angel’s grace. Sometimes Castiel feels the loss where he used to be, but it only ever lasts until the next time Sam smiles, or laughs, or looks at something in wonder like he can’t believe it exists.
The forest is as threatening as it was before. Perhaps Castiel had expected that to have changed. He must have – how else can he explain the disappointment, and the unsettlement that comes over him while crossing it, even though he knows very well that they will have left it behind long before the sun has sunk so low it becomes unsafe?
Sam has never been here before. He doesn’t know the meaning of this place but he is much more sensitive to its nature than Dean is. By the time they see the light of the open meadow shimmering through the final rows of trees, he almost runs to get out of there. Afterwards, he doesn’t speak for an hour, and it takes him a long time to fully take in the beauty of the land they have reached.
“It’s safe here,” Dean just says, sounding apologetic but not sorry. Castiel understands what he means; the angels and most demons are gone and there is little to be feared from the few monsters that stuck around – not for them. But monsters are not the only dangerous creatures that inhabit this planet. Humans will always hurt one another in some way, especially humans who have nothing and grew up in a world that favoured the ruthless for survival and punished the naïve.
Night falls, but they keep walking for a while longer. The forest is harmless behind them, but for Sam’s sake they keep going until it is well out of sight. When they stop they sit in the grass for a long time, listening to the silence that is only interrupted by the wind whispering in the leaves of nearby trees; trees that are just trees, with nothing threatening about them. After a while, even Sam relaxes. He sleeps in the grass that night, his head resting on his brother’s lap, and Dean rests with his back leaning against Castiel’s, who stays awake until morning.
Soon after, they get in sight of the cave and the abandoned farm nearby and stand on the flat, even ground for a long time before moving towards the house. Castiel has never entered it before. The first time he came here he got close, but something – an old instinct that went beyond his nature as an angel – had told him to turn away and he had listened to it. There is a reason, after all, why this land is empty.
Now the feeling of dread doesn’t come, no matter how close they come. Other than the forest, this place has recovered from whatever happened here, or maybe whatever lay on this place simply disappeared together with the apocalypse.
The house is sturdy. It will probably still stand here after another two hundred years have gone by, but the furniture has suffered a lot, the carpets are in a bad shape and the wallpaper is peeling off the walls. It will take time to turn this into a comfortably home, but as Castiel watches Dean wander around with a contemplating expression on his face, taking in everything and already thinking about how to make it better, he finds that this house might be exactly what they need.
It’s a large house, offering much more space than they require for three people with no possessions. From the number of bedrooms they can tell that a large family has lived here once, but Castiel’s fear of finding the mortal remains of the former inhabitants in their new home doesn’t come true. Everyone who lived here is simply gone, and there is no doubt that they will never come back.
They spend a week in a makeshift camp in the living room, not much better than any place they slept in since the world ended, and use their days to explore the farm. There are stables that are all empty and won’t ever be needed for animals again, and Dean says they should tear them down, separate the wood into planks they can use for repairs in the house and those that are too damaged by weather and time so they can burn those. It’s sensible. There are two intact windows that Dean hopes he can use to replace broken windows in the house, but it’ll be difficult because the glass doesn’t have the right size. They decide to keep the shed, because it’s mostly intact, and many of the tools inside are still use- or at least salvageable.
The meadow stretches on almost to the horizon in one direction. In another it ends in a forest (harmless, the trees barely clinging to life but slowly getting stronger with every day) and the North has the rocky hills where Castiel’s cave is located. On the third day, while Dean is working on making the first room of the house inhabitable, Castiel visits his old shelter together with Sam and they wash themselves at the spring between the rocks. Afterwards they gather up the furs and tools from the cave they can still use and then they sit in the opening for a long time, looking down at their new home as Castiel tells his friend of how he came here the first time and how he came here with Dean. It is, altogether, a deceptively boring story that makes Sam smile.
-
The nearest settlement is about a day’s walk from the forest that keeps everyone away and sometimes Castiel or Dean go there to trade deerskin for food they can’t get on their little farm, or for medicine neither of them knows how to make, or for clothes. Sometimes Dean goes and works for their supplies, fixing carriages or the water pump the townspeople use to get water from their well. He jokes, once, that he always knew he’d end up as a mechanic one day. But they only go if they have to, the way too long and difficult to make for fun, and while it’s not as dangerous as it used to be, there are risks and the ones staying behind are always tense until the one making the trip has returned. They always have to go alone; Sam doesn’t leave their land, and without ever talking about it Castiel and Dean agree never to leave him alone.
The townspeople get used to them. After a while they stop asking where they are living, instead just accepting that there is someone around who has knowledge that was lost to them and taking advantage of that in exchange for some supplies they can easily spare. For all they know, Dean and Castiel are two eremites who live beyond the western hills and the names Dean gave them are, once again, Bruce and Clark; no doubt another reference Castiel doesn’t understand.
In the first winter, Castiel brings milk back from the town. He and Dean, they have been drinking it every now and then when visiting, but the trip is so long that during the warmer days, they couldn’t bring it back to Sam before it went sour. He thinks Sam will appreciate the change in his diet, but when he arrives after half a week away from home, Sam is sick and can’t keep anything down.
The next spring, Dean is gone for a week and he brings back a cow.
-
The one cow becomes two cows half a year later. None of them have any intention of starting a herd, but it’s nice to have company and the cows are happier if they aren’t lonely. There is nothing left of the stable, so Dean transforms one of the unused rooms at the far side of the house into one. The cows don’t seem to mind either way.
During the winter, whenever he isn’t too sick, Sam writes down the history of the apocalypse in neat, legible letters in a journal Dean brought back from one of his trips, and when he is done, he writes down facts about the world that was; things now forgotten by those who weren’t there to see them. This is how they pay for the second cow. The farmer who gave the animal to them considers herself a historian, and she promises chicken in exchange for more tales from the past. So Sam writes. And when there is nothing they want or need, he still writes, whenever he can.
He’s sick a lot this the first winter. He has been sick before, every now and then, but in the winter it gets worse, to the point where Dean and Castiel are sitting by his bedside day and night and Castiel can see Dean try to prepare himself for the inevitable loss. It doesn’t come; Sam recovers, slowly. Illness strikes again and he recovers again and as the days get longer and warmer, he gets stronger until he’s almost as healthy as the year before.
They welcome the spring dreading the next winter.
When Sam got gravely ill the first time and could hardly breathe through his failing lungs and hardly think through the fever, Dean took his hand and told him, “I don’t know if Gabriel will keep his promise and take you personally, or if there’s gonna be a reaper waiting for you, but when the time comes, you don’t go anywhere without me, you get it? Stall for time, whatever, just wait for me. I’ll be right behind you.”
Sam is so sick he can’t argue and Castiel suspects Dean timed it like that on purpose.
He still has the book with Sam’s final messages to Dean, written in Enochian for a goodbye that never happened. Dean will not read them – after Sam is gone, there will be no time, and before there would be no point. Castiel keeps them anyway.
He is the one they will leave behind.
Dean doesn’t think of that, of course. Castiel never expected him to, because as much as they are friends and love each other, Dean’s focus will always be only on Sam in this regard. If Dean did consider Castiel’s position in all this, he would feel bad for leaving him but do it all the same. Castiel would not wish him to do otherwise. There is no point bringing it up.
Sam is another matter. Perhaps it is because they spend so much time together, or simply because Sam is Sam, but he worries, and he speaks about it. He doesn’t like the thought of Dean dying, even if there would be no point for him to stay, but he accepts the facts as they are when Castiel explains to him that it is what Dean wishes and needs and that Sam should do him the favour of not forcing him into an unhappy life with misguided requests. Afterwards he asks, “What will become of you?”
“Don’t worry about me. I spend a lot of time alone. I am with you and Dean because I want to be, not because I need to be.”
“But what will happen to you?” Sam’s eyes are large and earnest and so concerned. “Do you even age at all? Will you just go on like this, forever? Can you… can you go home? Ever?”
“If by home you mean Heaven, then yes, I can. But I can never be an angel again.”
“But how–”
“I can die, Sam,” Castiel reminds him gently. “I may not age, but I can get injured. I can get killed. If that happens, I may go to Heaven. Gabriel explained it to me; he visited my dreams the first night of winter. I chose this world and mankind over by brothers so I am to stick around as long as possible. If I kill myself or allow someone else to kill me where it is not necessary, I will simply cease being. But if I stay in this world until my time is up, however long that may be, I can enter Heaven like any mortal soul. I might even see you and Dean again.”
Sam smiles at him, small but genuine. “I’d like that.”
Castiel smiles back. “So would I.”
-
The second winter, Sam’s illness gets worse. It starts sooner and keeps a hold of him longer, barely granting him a break in between. Castiel is convinced that he will not make it this time and thinks of the long, empty and dark months ahead, but Sam pulls through. Even though he remains weak through most of spring and summer, he takes care of the small vegetable garden beside the window to his bedroom, frowning over the cucumbers’ refusal to grow longer than the span of his hand and smiling when he presents them with the first potatoes from the plants he planted the year before. While Dean and Castiel bring him most of the seeds he needs, they never touch the garden. It is Sam’s to care for and be proud of. It’s a simple but beautiful thing.
The house, on the other hand, is mostly Dean’s; while the other two help him where they can, they mostly just follow his instructions, and often he tells them to go away and let him work because they aren’t doing it right. In the end they never clean up more than the rooms on the ground floor, and just four of them are redone to the extent that they can feel comfortable in them: three bedrooms and the living room, where they also keep all the books they could salvage. Dean remodelled the kitchen so that they can have an open flame where the cooking plated used to be, and the bathroom has been adjusted to a life without canalisation. The living room has a fireplace and during the worst of winter, Sam hardly ever leaves it.
The seasons came back the moment the apocalypse ended and all the angels left the world alone, yet it’s not as it was before. Before, it very rarely snowed in Florida, and certainly not as much as it does now, when sometimes Dean and Cas have a hard time making their way through the snow to the forest when they run out of wood. In summer it’s warm, but rarely ever hot, though sometimes it’s so humid just being outside is exhausting, even for someone who’s healthy. They sky remains forever covered, never letting through any actual rays of sunlight, but sometimes, when Sam is working in his garden where the plants try so valiantly to grow despite the bad conditions, Castiel thinks that it’s not too bad that the cover of clouds and dust is protecting them from the sun and keeping the temperatures bearable.
And yet there are no words for what he feels in the fall of their third year when Dean suddenly calls out and points to the sky, and Castiel follows his gaze and sees washed out blue shimmer through a tear in the veil that covers the world. For long seconds they simply stand and stare, and it’s only when the gab begins to close that Dean overcomes his shock and runs back to the house to alert Sam.
But it’s too late. Sam was inside, working on his account of the history of the United States and missed the small miracle that happened above them. By the time Dean dragged him out, the cover of clouds is as tick as ever and the blue sky lost once again.
The happiness Castiel felt at the sight is diminished greatly by the look of crippling disappointment on Sam’s face. Just like Castiel he is aware that this may well have been an isolated incident that will never happen again.
But it does. A month passes and the days have grown cool and dark; it’s not long to the first frost, but the end of fall has a few mild days left for them and on one of them Castiel returns from milking their cows to find Sam kneeling in the high grass behind the house, staring up at the sky. There is nothing but clouds when Castiel looks, but the expression on his friend’s face tells him what he has seen. So he sits beside Sam and they hug, and then Sam cries into his shoulder, but he also laughs, and all is fine.
The winter comes without the sky being seen again. It lasts for weeks longer than the last one and all of them are happy when it is over. The first warm day, Dean carries his brother, weakened by fever and breathing with effort, out to the tree overlooking the rocky hills that contain Castiel’s cave, wraps him in blankets and together they enjoy the air they all sorely missed in the months when even Dean and Castiel only ever went outside to feed and milk the cows in their makeshift stable at the other end of the house, and a few times to hunt when they were short on meat.
In the previous years, the first warm day of the year marked a turn for the better in Sam’s health. This time it doesn’t. His fever lingers for another two weeks and he doesn’t stop coughing blood. It’s almost summer by the time the tense worry that lies over their small family lifts some, but while Sam smiles more and is obviously living up with the life on their farm, it is obvious that his body can’t keep up anymore.
But they keep ignoring the problem as they have always ignored it, simply because there is nothing they can do.
-
Their life is deceptively simple. It’s made of making sure they have enough to eat, making sure they have whatever natural medicine they can get their hands on, making sure their cows are happy, and in the winter they also have to make sure they are warm enough. Castiel would have imagined once that a life such as this would be boring, but it never is. He has lived for too long in a very similar fashion, but on his own and constantly on the run. This is very enjoyable in comparison. He has come to appreciate the time he can spend with his friends or sit underneath the tree and watch the world slowly change, knowing it will still be there next year.
Dean gets restless sometimes, on slow days, but he is able to turn this restlessness into something useful. There is no need for him to go keep moving in search of a hunt, not when there are repairs to be made, errands to run and things to build. He has always been someone who liked to build, to create; to work and see the result of that work. And he has a lot of practical creative energy that he puts into designing and constructing a simply pipeline to get water directly from the spring to the house, and a small wagon that’s pulled by a cow and helps them get wood and the game they hunted for dinner from the edge of the forest to the farm.
Though he never mentions it, it is obvious that Sam wishes he could do more to help. But he never regained even half of his former strength and with every sickness he makes it through he get a little weaker overall. On good days he likes to help his brother with whatever he’s doing, but often even taking care of his garden, small as it is, is taking all he has.
Most of his time he spends writing, drawing maps from memory, or asking Castiel questions about the history of the Earth; the things that no human has ever seen. Sam is writing not only about history, he’s also working on an almanac of monsters, because that they have become rare doesn’t mean no one will ever encounter them again. Also, he’s writing down a list of simple recipes for the food that most people can get without problems, and things he learned from his garden, more for himself than anyone else. In one journal that he holds especially dear, he writes down stories he’s read or heard so they won’t be lost when he and Dean are gone.
He sometimes adds some brief notes for the villagers when Dean or Castiel take his accounts with them to the world outside, but when he is asked, during a particularly healthy phase, if he would like to come along, he declines. Sam has no desire to deal with other people. Sometimes it is hard enough for him to interact with his brother and his friend.
Some days are better than others but his problems never completely go away. There are, for instance, the nightmares. A lot of them. Sometimes whatever Sam sees in his dreams lingers all through the day, making him withdraw from the others and flinch whenever he is touched. He never talks much anymore, is much quieter than he used to be, even on good days, but it happens that he doesn’t speak a word in days.
Sometimes there are long phases in which Sam can’t sleep undisturbed at all, tries to go without sleep and inevitably makes himself sick. Those times are difficult for all of them; Dean’s attempts to make his brother sleep and get his needed rest end up making Sam withdraw further into himself. When he does sleep, Dean holds him but he cannot always keep the nightmares away. When illness finally hits, Sam is mostly unconscious and still the nightmares come. Castiel can only watch them suffer. He takes care of them as best he can and wonders if he is making a difference.
The only comfort both he and Dean can take is from the knowledge that the dreams are just dreams. Lucifer cannot touch Sam anymore.
And in comparison to everything that happened before, these are still the best days of Castiel’s life.
-
The fourth winter is the hardest. Not because it is colder than the ones before or because the snow is piling too high to move far from the house, because it isn’t. Not because Sam fell ill with the first chilly days of fall and is barely able to leave his bed for almost two months, because that is not something they aren’t used to. It’s not even the hacking coughs that keep them all awake through the night or the blood on Sam’s lips or the, thin, painful gasps for air that substitute for breathing at the worst of times.
No, what makes this one worse is that Dean becomes ill as well. Through the four years since the apocalypse ended, he has sometimes caught a small cold, or complained about a headache for a day or two, and once he had cut his hand and it had hurt quite badly for a week and given him a light fever, but he has never before felt so bad he couldn’t leave the bed.
Sam had been feverish and barely coherent for days, both Dean and Castiel fighting to make him at least drink so dehydration wouldn’t make it worse. Even though Sam had been returned from the cage free of all demon blood and spared the withdrawal, solid food never stopped being a problem for him. He can eat, but never gets down much before he feels sick. It took them some time on their way to Florida to figure out what he can keep down, and find a balance between eating enough not to starve and not eating too much so he didn’t throw it all up again. When he’s sick, eating stops completely and it’s all they can do to make him drink broth and teas while his already skinny frame shrinks down to nothing.
Taking care of Sam for any length of time takes a lot out of them in between all the other things they have to do. They do it gladly, but the constant worry and the lack of sleep do take their toll. Castiel has a hard time reminding Dean to eat and sleep whenever he can and in the process tends to forget his own body’s needs. He doesn’t require as much sleep as his human friends, though, and he cannot get sick.
Dean can, and he does. It starts with a scratching feeling in his throat, soon joined by a dry, ugly sounding cough, a headache and a fever. The worst, however, is the separation from his brother – Sam’s immune system is already compromised and they can’t risk him catching what Dean has. And Dean accepts that, he does. He willingly retreats to the other bedroom as soon as he can no longer deny that he’s getting sick, but it doesn’t make him happy. It doesn’t make Sam happy, who is already so sick himself that he can’t understand why his brother is not with him anymore. In bad moments, half waking from nightmares, he thinks Dean is dead. In the worse moments he is convinced that nothing that happened since he came back to life was real and that Dean is still possessed by Michael.
He cries a lot.
Dean, as the fever rises, becomes increasingly restless and worried and plain impossible to stand. Castiel spends most of his time taking care of Sam, but he needs to look after Dean as well, keep him fed and comfortable and warm, and whenever he’s there, Dean snaps at him to go away, look after Sam, not waste any time with the older brother. He’s also miserable and needs more time and attention than Castiel can spare, which causes his sickness to drag on longer than it would have had to, under better circumstances. Between his two ill friends, Castiel doesn’t get any rest at all. They run out of meat after two weeks because he can’t leave them alone long enough to hunt and barely has the time of day to milk and feed the cows. By the time Dean slowly gets better, Castiel is so exhausted he can barely stand, but he hangs on until Dean is well enough to be allowed back with his brother before he collapsed face first onto a blanket on the floor and allows his consciousness to simply switch off.
Sam’s fever has finally broken when Castiel wakes up to find Dean curled up beside his brother and fast asleep. But it’s another week before the younger brother can keep down any kind of food, and when Castiel lifts him off the bed to change the sheets, he is shocked by how light he has become. Sam didn’t have any weight to lose to begin with.
Even though his friend is slowly getting better, Castiel knows it would need a miracle for him to survive the next year. He doesn’t mention it. Sam knows it as well as he does, and Dean…
Castiel sometimes catches Dean looking at Sam with a mix of worry and hope on his face. He’s deluding himself. Every year they expected to be the last and yet Sam still lives. Dean has come to believe that Sam will keep proving their expectations wrong.
For Sam, it will be a relief to go. Castiel has no illusions about that when he listens to his friend’s painful coughs, tries to soothe him through his nightmares or sees him struggle for breath after three minutes of weeding his garden. Other days, when the sun is seen for a rare, brief moment to warm their skin, when they sit at the table and the brothers entertain Castiel by bouncing shared stories off each other’s words or when the simple pleasure of a soft summer breeze makes Sam smile, he forgets, and finds himself sad for all three of them and the loss that is waiting.
This year, Sam’s garden has to wait. It’s a long time before he is strong enough to work in it, but he’s nothing if not stubborn. Castiel leaves for a supply run one day, leaving him sick but calm and relaxed in his bed, the door open to allow view on Dean fixing the stable, and when he comes back two days later, Dean is gone to fish in the river on the far side of the cave and Sam is lying in the gab between his vegetables and the side of the house, giving his friend a scare when he finds him.
But Sam is awake, if dizzy, when Castiel helps him up and drags him back inside. After he’s been settled on the bed and given some water to drink, he even smiles, and says, “The strawberries have survived the winter.”
Castiel shakes his head with fond exasperation. Dean is nowhere to be seen, which means Sam left the house after his brother was out of sight, well aware Dean would not approve. He has been restless for days, fed up with staying in bed, and Castiel isn’t surprised he escaped when the first opportunity presented itself.
Dean and Castiel are doing their best to protect him and keep him safe, but they both also understand how frustrating it is for Sam to constantly be told what he is not up to doing.
Now, even flat on the bed and fighting spells of dizziness after overexerting himself, Sam looks triumphant, once again finding joy in something so simple. He has found the wild strawberries at the edge of the forest last fall and hoped he could settle them in his garden. Dean had welcomed the idea of the sweet fruits with a gleam in his eyes and they have all been curious to see if they would grow and bear fruit.
Castiel decides not to tell Dean that Sam strayed from the house while he was gone. Half an hour later, after Sam has recovered some of his strength, he helps him out again and together they sit in the garden and pull weed from the dry earth.
-
The colour of they sky has changed. Where is used to be a dirty orange bordering on brown before, it is now more yellow than orange, like the sun shining through a thin layer of clouds as it rises. The change happened gradually, so slowly that at first the brothers don’t notice. Castiel was aware all the time, noting every degree by which the sky had brightened, and it never occurred to him that Dean and Sam would miss it – like the slow aging of a face, or the growing of hair – until one day Dean looked up to the sky, narrowed his eyes against the brightness, and said, “Huh.”
There’s still dust in the sky. It seems darker now before the brighter backdrop, drifting in black strands before the layer of clouds like phantom snakes, or mingling with the clouds to form spectacular shapes. There is beauty in it that Castiel has not noticed before although he thinks it must always have been there. Perhaps he can now see it because it is no longer forever.
Every now and then the veil opens, allowing the blue of the real sky to be seen. It is Sam who points out, during a long moment in which they all stare up to the deep purple of an evening sky about to disappear, that the three of them are the only people left on earth who have seen it before.
While the clouds break open more and more frequently, it’s still something rare and wonderful. It happens more often in spring and fall than it does in summer and winter, but when it does happen in summer, the temperature rises enough, for a few minutes, to make them break into a sweat when a now unfamiliar ray of sun hits their skin.
Eventually, the sun will be back to the world for good and then people are going to get sunburned because they aren’t used to it. Heat strokes might happen. Sam writes an article on the risks and has Castiel deliver it to the village with his next trip. The villagers laugh at him in good humour when he hands it over. They will have to learn for themselves.
This summer is the brightest they have had in two hundred years; Castiel is convinced that at this rate the veil of clouds will be too thin to withstand the power of the sun in another two years, and already the plants in the meadow and the forest and the garden are adapting. They are good at adapting. The ones that survived to be still around are the ones who managed to adapt to an existence with little light and they will be able to handle its return.
They were losses, though. Many trees in the forest died in the first winter, more in the second one, but the ones left can handle the changing seasons. Sam’s garden suffers every year, but he just keeps replacing the plants that died and hopes they will make it this time. More often than not, they do.
Now the vegetables suffer more from Sam’s poor health and the resulting absences than the weather. Dean and Castiel still don’t take care of the garden, not really, even though it makes Sam do unwise things like getting out of bed when he shouldn’t, because things need to be cut or moved or watered. It seems wrong, somehow, to get involved. This is Sam’s thing to do. All the other two do is help with the weeding and dig out the potatoes or carrots so the results of Sam’s hard work won’t rot in the earth.
Lately, it’s been raining all the time, so the watering hasn’t been a problem. There was little to be done while the water poured down from the sky and Castiel was glad, because Sam has never recovered from his grave illness last winter and has felt miserable for days. Not as bad as he has been, not by far, but he’s been weak and feverish, and the rattling sound in his lungs seems to get wore every day, even though he hasn’t coughed blood for weeks. (Not that they are aware of, anyway. Sometimes it happens, and Sam manages to wipe the blood off before they notice, and days later they find the spots on the bed sheets.) Dean has been sitting with him a lot, gently teasing him even as he wipes his face with a cool cloth, and Castiel has taken care of the animals, and cooked and cleaned the house and read, and generally given them some space.
Days of rain are followed by a climb in temperature that dries out the ground quickly and for the first time this year allows them to go outside in short sleeves. Sam’s fever passes and he’s more aware, though still too weak to walk on his own. On the third day without rain, Castiel returns from cleaning the stables their cows have been stuck in for days to see Dean carry his brother outside in his arms, towards the lone tree at the base of the first hill.
Sam is pale, his head resting heavily on Dean’s shoulder, but he smiles weakly when he sees Castiel and says something too quiet to make out over this distance. It makes Dean snort softly and say something in return as he kneels down on a blanket spread beneath the tree and carefully lowers his younger brother to the ground.
It’s a bright day, bright enough for weak shadows to be cast even though the sun is nowhere to be seen. Castiel knows, though, that Dean chose the spot underneath the tree less for the shadow and more to protect both their eyes from the yellow glare of the sky that can be painful if stared at too long. That, and because they all like the spot. They sat underneath the tree often.
After settling his brother, Dean settles beside him, Sam’s head resting against his chest. Castiel frowns – because Sam has to be pretty weak if he needs his brother to move him around like that, but also because he and Dean had planned to fix a hole in the roof today. (Since they never use the second storey the hole is not much of a problem, but it will become one if they just leave it be.) By the look of it, Dean doesn’t plan on getting up anytime soon.
With a sigh, Castiel steps into the house through the door that leads directly into Sam’s bedroom. The sheets are crumbled and the room smells ever so faintly of illness, so he keeps the door open and changes the bedding to make it as comfortable as possible for his ailing friend. Looking out, he finds both brothers motionless underneath the tree, obviously asleep. For lack of anything else to do, Castiel sits down to read and edit Sam’s latest journal, since he can’t fix the roof on his own.
The article Sam has been working on was written with the help of Dean, explaining the construction and workings of simple engines. “So they won’t have to start from scratch,” Sam had explained, “provided they ever find gas,” and Castiel had refrained from pointing out that that might never happen. And that there are books that explain it better. There’s no guarantee those books still exist, anyway.
He loses himself in the work for some time, and when he leaves the house an hour later, Dean and Sam are still lying underneath the tree. So much for getting Dean’s help.
It never occurs to Castiel to go over there and wake his friend, reminding him of their plans. Instead, he reschedules and turns to the garden, carefully wandering between the plants that are standing in neat rows. A few of the vegetables need to be harvested in the next few days. Kneeling by the five small strawberry plants at the far end, he turns over the dark green leaves and finds fruits underneath, some of them already deep red. In the days of rain, they ripened without anyone noticing.
The rustling of the high grass in the still air alerts him of Dean’s presence even before his friend says, “Find anything good?”
“The strawberries are ripe.” Castiel turns just in time to see Dean’s face lit up. Within seconds he’s kneeling beside Castiel and carefully plugging a red one off the plant.
“I need to check they’re not poisoned,” he explains before bushing off the earth and showing it in his mouth. It’s small, but it’s the first strawberry he’s eaten in years. For a long second he closes his eyes, then he says, “A little less sweet than I remember, but Sam’s gonna love them.”
He’s right. Sam has a hard time eating anything lately, but he might try with the strawberries – and if nothing else, he will be happy that they are growing in his garden, and that Dean loves them.
“We wanted to fix the roof,” Castiel reminds his friend.
“Hm, yeah. Sorry. Sam wanted to be outside, and I guess I drifted off when he did.” Dean checks the sky, estimating how much daylight they have left, but it’s barely past midday, and twenty minutes later they are on the roof, Castiel holding the planks in place while Dean hammers in the nails. On the ground, their two cows, whom Dean has named Cow One and Other Cow, are lying in the grass, their jaws moving lazily, and in the shadow of the tree Sam is lying where Dean left him, still asleep. From this distance, he looks peaceful. He looks okay.
They keep one eye on him always, because anything could happen out there, even this close to the house, and Sam is helpless.
After they fix the hole that allowed the rain to form unwanted puddles of water in an unused upstairs bedroom unless hindered with the use of strategically placed buckets, they check the rest of the roof and find two more places that are about the break in. By the time they are done, Castiel is thirsty and ready for a break, so he goes to the kitchen for a glass of water while Dean goes to check on his brother and take him back to the house. It will get dark soon.
Castiel watches from the open kitchen door as his friend makes his way towards the tree, his mind going through his planning for the rest of the day. Getting the cows back into the stable. Collect some strawberries from the garden. Make dinner.
One of them will have to hunt next week, or they will run out of meat. Rabbit would be nice.
Sam hasn’t moved at all since Dean left him hours ago. Not once.
Castiel watches, his glass in his hand, as Dean gently shakes his brother’s shoulder, then shakes him again, with more force yet still carefully, like Sam might break. He watches as Dean falls just as still as his brother for an all too short moment before cupping Sam’s face with a frantic gesture, stroking his hair and finally letting his fingers rest on his neck.
There is stillness again. For a long while the two brothers seem to be frozen in time.
Then Dean nods, once, a shaky, jerky movement. From the house, Castiel can see his shoulders rise as he draws in air and nods again, over and over, his whole torso following the movement. He gathers his brother’s limp body in his arms, holds him against his chest.
Castiel places his glass on the table, very softly. He had thought he knew how this would feel.
When he reaches the tree, Dean is still rocking Sam’s body back and forth. He’s crying, but his eyes are clear and staring at something far away. “It’s okay, Sammy,” he says over and over again, his voice stable and soft. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”
-
They burn Sam’s body at dawn, after spending all night building the pyre. Due to the recent drought, the pile of wood burns easily, the smoke making their eyes burn. When the flames start to lick at the blanket they wrapped Sam in, Castiel looks over at Sam’s brother and finds his gaze focused on the deep red line that is slowly spreading over the horizon. “Think he’s waiting for me?” Dean asks without looking at his friend.
“He promised, didn’t he?”
Dean nods. “But what if Gabriel just dragged him away?”
“Then you’ll find him again. You always do.”
Dean’s lips twitch, barely notable. It’s very far from being a smile, but it’s something in the right direction. His eyes wander to the fire and Castiel knows what he’s thinking, what he’s going to do, and he takes hold of Dean’s arm to stop him.
Dean turns towards him, glaring, suddenly suspicious, but Castiel only shakes his head and says, “Not like that.”
Under Dean’s wary eyes he pulls a gun out of his waistband. He collected the weapon from the house while Dean was stacking up the wood they originally intended to burn in the fireplace and now he presents it to his friend as the last gift he will ever make him.
Dean looks at it, and then at Castiel, with gratitude and wary tension before finally he relaxes, standing with his back to the fire that will soon consume his body along with his brother’s. “Are you sure you can’t come with us?”
The question is unexpected and touching, and it makes Castiel smile even as he shakes his head. “I have things left to do. Names to learn. I think it’s time to go on another journey, and see what’s becoming of this world.” He’s already been thinking about it. There are things to be done on the farm, even if it will be abandoned. The cows can’t be left to fend for themselves. There are journals of Sam’s to finish and hand to the people he wanted them to have. He needs to decide what to pack and what to leave behind. “Maybe I’ll collect some strawberries for the road.”
Dean smiles after all, in the end, albeit briefly. He nods his acceptance and closes his eyes and Castiel puts the gun to his forehead and pulls the trigger.
Afterwards, he steps away from the heat of the fire and sits down underneath the tree with his fingers in the grass and his eyes on the horizon, to watch the sun come up.
End
And this is it. Ende. Finito. After almost two years of writing and more than 240,000 words altogether, this is the end. There will be more from this 'verse - one or two timestamps, a prequel I'm writing for a minibang - but the main work is over. On the one hand, I'm very, very happy to be free of this because it was incredibly time consuming. On the other hand, I am actually tearing up as I'm wiring this. It was such a huge part of my life for so long.
What remains for me to do is to thank everyone who stuck with this story from beginning to end and kept me motivated with their comments, speculations, and undeserved praise. Special mention has to be made of
minviendha, my beta without whom I would never have found the courage to start posting this, and of sinka, whose unwavering support and enthusiasm made sure I never missed the deadline for a new chapter.For anyone who would like to download this work I, you can do so on AO3 here.