A/N: Hi! So, I'm a dean!girl and a Dean/Cas shipper and I have a lot of feelings to work through about the S8 finale, so this is an attempt at that. Haven't been on this website for a while so we'll see how this goes. This will probably end up being mostly about Dean's misery and pain and eventual happiness (I will try my hardest though Dean seems to resist happiness with all his being) because that is my everything and the main reason I watch this show.
Sam was asleep next door, recuperating, and when Dean pressed his ear against the wall that joined their two bedrooms he couldn't hear anything, so he assumed Sam wasn't tossing and turning any more than he usually did. Dean rolled onto his back, laced his fingers together, trying to lie still so that the darkness of sleep could swallow him. It might bring nightmares - Benny's head severed cleanly from his body as Dean's blade sliced through air and cut through flesh, Cas's hand slipping from his fingers, Sam falling to the floor, hell's gates closing and the light fading from his brother's eyes, the air suddenly sucked out of Dean's world, these precious few gone through his own failure - but sleep was better than wakefulness. Better than this agony of guilt and indecision, reliving the past few days over and over.
Had he made the right choice? He had been clinging onto the idea of closing the gates of hell and preventing anyone else throwing their soul away the way he had through his deal. No matter how ready for hell you thought you were, you weren't ready for the blackness and the searing brightness, the pain, the scalpel cleanly carving lines in your flesh. Traitor. Weak. And again, and again, skin wiped clean like a blackboard readied for the next day's lesson. This is what you were born for, to carve and be carved. The Winchesters had failed, as usual, but he still had Sam. His boy, sleeping safe and sound.
Was Cas out there somewhere, struggling, foundering, crawling through the darkness? Was he watching as the meteors streaked to Earth? Dean drew strength from the knowledge that he had finally had a chance to lay it out for Sam: "Don't you dare think that there is anything, past or present, that I'd put in front of you." It was freeing to be able to spell this out, to know that the sickening devotion which was causing his heart to thump right now still had the capacity to save. His heartstone, the rock he laid his sacrifices upon, breathing in and out safely in the room next door. Dean couldn't afford to doubt his choices.
There was a knock on the door of the bunker, a weak thumping that kept on going until Dean could no longer ignore it. He rose, wrapping himself in his dressing gown, hurrying in the hope that the noise wouldn't awake Sam, and peered through the spyhole in the door. It was Cas - staring blankly at the door, weariness in his eyes. Dean slid the chain and pulled the door open hurriedly. Cas made no move to enter, his eyes still fixed on Dean. The sky was lit with occasional patches of brightness from the glowing trails streaking towards the ground. Angels - heavenly beings made tangible. So this was what it looked like as God's first creations, beings of light and fury and wasted devotion, were torn from one realm and deposited in another.
"Jesus, aren't you gonna come inside?" Dean said roughly, tugging at Castiel's arm and closing the door behind him, implacable steel blocking out the silent streaks of light.
Castiel pushed past Dean and seated himself on a chair. "They're here. On Earth. All of them," he pronounced.
Dean pulled up a chair, the legs scraping over the wooden floor as he tugged it closer to Cas. "I know. What does this mean?" he asked.
"It means... I don't know. Usually when an angel falls they're reborn as a child and are pulled from the womb, but this many angels... this is the host of heaven infiltrating life on a scale never seen before in heaven before. And they're reluctant... they'll cling to their intangibility." Cas fixed his heavy eyes on Dean. "But they have no choice. They'll emerge, somehow," he concluded. "We must hope they don't do so with their barbaric plans intact."
"So you're saying we might have a generation of angry baby warlike angels who don't even know they're angelic?" Dean asked, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. "Because to be honest that sounds far preferable to the squabbling hordes up above armed with the ability to wipe out humanity." He felt a bead of hope that perhaps Sam's relinquishing of the burden of the trials wouldn't be totally bad for the world. Perhaps, by inadvertently neutralising the angels, they had managed to do some good after all. The Winchester motto: family in front of everything - despite those hundreds of weak helpless, suffering individuals who might bury a tin full of deadly bones at a crossroads and suffer the consequences for the rest of eternity. Having experienced a fraction of this eternity, Dean felt a shudder run through his bones. Or then again, perhaps this was just a new twist in the convoluted path they were forging, one that only lead deeper into the darkness whichever way they turned. It was so hard to keep fighting when every decision you made seemed to cause death.
"Maybe. But - I think they will manifest sooner," Cas said. There was dirt under his hair and bags under his eyes, and he looked lost, un moored.
Dean reached his hand across the table slowly, brushing his finger against Cas's grubby sleeve. "Ok," he said. "We don't know what the hell's gonna happen with these falling angels. We don't know whether Sam's gonna be ok and we don't know when or how we're gonna close the gates of hell. But you're gonna stay here for the time being and we'll take things as they come." At this pronouncement, his plan laid forth in front of Castiel, Dean felt a deep weariness overtake him. "We'll - we'll figure it out, Cas," he muttered as he slumped forward until his forehead rested on the smooth wood of the table.
"Yes, Dean. I trust you," came the gravelly response, followed by the scrape of a chair being pushed back. Cas leaving. He would find a bed somewhere in the bunker, or who knew, the floor if he found it more suitable for his penance. Castiel the angel of the Lord, now a human man, bound to his body. Dean mumbled something supposed to indicate goodnight and let the antipathy of sleep take him .