Author Note: Fear not, SPN fans! This one is for you! Lots of different things and words running through my brain lately, but I was able to pin these particular ones down. Like the summary suggests, this is a sort of hybrid tag for 12.22 and missing scene for 13.01, and isn't all roses and kittens.
I'm off for vacation in a few days, and will be spending what time I'm not basking in sunshine downing delicious fruity drinks working on getting the rest of Be All Our Sins Remember'd drafted and outlined.
Heavy
Dean blinks.
There's less blood than he would have expected, for such a sudden, vicious strike. He knows what death should look like.
But the external violence of the act was actually quite understated. There's a neat, stark crimson stain on Castiel's crisp white shirt, but he looks otherwise peaceful. The worst of the damage done isn't visible, and wasn't done to the angel.
But it's not the body of an angel that Dean's staring down at. It's the body of a friend. Of family. Two things he'd dared to forget he's not allowed to have. And now another friend is growing cold, because he'd doomed them by caring about them, and got them killed on his watch.
Crowley, and Cas, and Mom.
He barely slowed Lucifer down.
Mom…God, he and Sam won't even be granted the courtesy of closure. They didn't get the chance to say goodbye, and she won't get the hunter's funeral she deserved – the one she earned. She's just gone.
Dean hopes, with any pathetic inkling of hope he's still capable of, that Lucifer had the decency to make it quick, when he killed her. But he has enough experience with the son of a bitch to know otherwise.
You make such funny noises.
He's not making funny noises now. Not even a single sound. Kneeling in the dirt at Cas's side, at the spot where his best friend – his only friend – just died and his mother disappeared into some hellish reality, Dean isn't even sure he's breathing. It seems beyond his present abilities.
A previously stealthy cracked rib barks at his uncertainty, reminds him with an icy jab that if nothing else, he is definitely breathing.
"Dean. Let me." Sam had dragged him aside, voice low and eyes narrowed as Dean first tested the weight of the gun. "Let me do this."
He gave a violent shake of his head, not even looking up at his brother. "You're not going near him." Leveled like a threat, instead of the same promise he'd made and broken more than once. He'd already sidelined himself once, but Cas healed up his bum leg and he wasn't about to stand back and watch Sam take on Lucifer.
Taking a hit for Sammy? That's what he's meant for.
Not that it mattered.
Not that any of it mattered.
I have faith in us. You, me, Mom, Cas. And Crowley. Sometimes.
Dean's head is thrumming, a dull, steady pulse at the back of his skull that matches the one in his face, where Lucifer planted the toe of his boot. His bottom lip feels hot and fat, with a bloody split a mile wide, and there's an interesting pain rising in his lower back that has him certain he'll be pissing some blood for a few days.
The physical pain from his pointless confrontation with Lucifer is piled on in torturous layers that are just starting to make themselves known, but that only scratches the surface of what he's feeling.
There's an easy, immediate flash of rage, and the same boiling, self-destructive desire for vengeance he'd dragged both his Dad and Sammy back from the brink of. Regret and sorrow tug at him from the edges of his awareness, and guilt presses down on him like a horribly heavy weight. He feels so much, so fast, that the sum of it almost feels like nothing at all.
Then, suddenly, like he'd made a wish or a deal, he feels nothing, The violent crash of emotions fades quickly, replaced by a sense of utter emptiness, growing like a cancer. A yawning, bottomless chasm in his chest stretched wide enough to encompass the full breadth of every hit he's just taken, every loss.
They're gone.
And they're not coming back. He's not getting them back.
Rage comes back for an encore performance, so ferociously that Dean's vision swims.
Because whatever that…that thing is, whatever hellspawn just came into this world, it's inside the house, with Sam.
Sammy.
He can't let anything happen to Sammy. Not now. He's all Dean has left.
His fingers twitch, nails digging into only dirt and dewy grass as he reflexively reaches for his brother.
He settles for his gun, and shoves up to his feet, moves quickly toward the house.