"You have to get yourself better first," Sam says, parking the Impala. Not in front of the art school, like Sam said they were going, but instead in front of Lizzy's office. Dean hadn't been there since he walked out that first appointment, even though she kept refilling his meds. "I'll melt the blade down, but you need to focus on you right now. Okay?"

Dean wants to argue. He and Sam had agreed, they were in this together. But he bites down on his lip. Sam's not entirely wrong, but Dean can't bring himself to focus on Dean. He's never been allowed to worry about himself. It was always Take Care of Sammy, Look After Sammy. And then it became Saving People, Hunting Things, it's the Family Business Dean. It was a learned habit, enforced by his dad. It was the devotion that led Dean to selling his soul to save Sam that prevented him from being able to focus on himself.

And…Sam had been right, a while ago. When he said that Dad was dead, that he wasn't there to order them around anymore. Wasn't there to dictate Dean's life. Maybe Dean could learn to focus on himself.

Baby steps.

"Okay," Dean says, licking his lips. He goes inside, hears Sam drive off the moment he steps past the threshold. Dr. Lizzy is there and she smiles at him when she sees him. They shake hands. Her handshake is firm and solid, screams confidence.

"It's good to see you again, Dean," she says. "How are you doing?"

"Not well, doc," Deans says, stuffing his hands into his jacket pocket. He fiddles with his medication bottle. He only has three pills left, and the idea of a cold turkey detox makes his muscles tense. Besides, he can't detox, not now, he tells himself. He needs the pills to focus, to keep out the knocking. Otherwise, he'll be like he was for those first few weeks. He barely remembers it now, but it comes to him in flashes at times. Sam crying, Bobby yelling, stashing a bloodied coat underneath his pillow and keeping a fist clenched around it in his sleep. More alcohol in his veins than blood, he couldn't function.

The pills help him function. And he needs to function.

"You ready to talk about it?" Lizzy asks.

"No," Dean says honestly. He shrugs, "But I think I need to."

"Come on," she says and she leads Dean back to her office.

"Your brother has been keeping me updated on your condition," she says as they sit down.

"Doesn't that break some kind of confidentiality agreement?"

"There's no confidentiality if you don't ever come in."

Fair enough, Dean thinks.

"So," she clicks her pen and opens her legal pad over her knees. "What do you want to talk about?"

Dean talks. He talks about his mother and her singing, how she spoke of angels watching over him, protecting him. He chokes up when he talks about how his mother died (house fire, is all he says; serial arsonist. It's not technically a lie.) He talks about how his dad went crazy with grief and dragged him and Sam across the country to track the killer. He talks about Sam and Dad always fighting, always the cause of tension and of Sam's scholarship to Stanford, then Dad's disappearance, then Dad's death. He leaves out a lot, too, though, keeps it vanilla. No mention of monsters or demons or biblical prophecies. He skips over the first time Sam died and how he sold his soul to bring him back. He tells Lizzy Sam was comatose after a mugging and how he prayed to anyone who would listen. He skips over his trip to Hell, too, because how would he explain that to a doctor without sounding crazy? Dean had lived it all and he still thought he was crazy.

He tells her that, uh, circumstances separated him and Sam for a few months and that those few months were unpleasant and felt more like decades than a season.

"And is that where Cas came in?" she asks.

Dean swallows. "Yeah." His lips and throat felt dry. "I guess you could say he pulled me from Hell."

Lizzy smiles at him and Dean's stomach curls.

"What was he like?"

Dean frowns for a moment. "Castiel was…" he starts slowly, tripping over the past tense briefly, "…a pig headed, proud, self-righteous, self-destructive son of a bitch." He looks Lizzy in the eye as she waits patiently. "But he was also the biggest dweeb I've ever met and he was a friggin genius and so sincere…you didn't want to like him on principle, but you couldn't help it. It was like, he had this orbit, a gravitational pull and you just got sucked in.

"And it took me a while to see it, but I realized we had a lot in common. Cas came from a…a pretty big family. They were strict, kind of kept the kids locked away, especially Cas. He was an angel."

"That's really sweet, Dean."

Dean sniffs and rubs his nose with his hand. "Before she died, Mom used to always tell me I had angels watching over me," he doesn't know why he's telling her this. He's barely told Sam this and that took years to admit. Lizzy is practically a stranger. "Bet she never guessed that I'd end up watching over one myself." Or that he'd do such a horrendous job of it. If she were alive, she'd be ashamed of what a horrible friend he was.

And if Dad were still alive, he'd be ashamed too; ashamed that his son fell for a non-human, supernatural creature.

"And Castiel's family. They didn't approve of you two being together?"

"Um," he and Cas had never been "together". They pussyfooted around it and now it was just a what could have been. "No," Dean says. "Cas got kicked out of his family when they found out…about us."

"And you feel responsibility for that?"

Dean shrugs. "It was my fault. I pressured him into turning his back on them. And they disowned him and humiliated him for it."

Lizzy shifts so that she's leaning closer to Dean. "How did Castiel die?"

"It wasn't in Iraq," Dean says, remembering what Sam had told her last time they spoke. "His brother killed him."

And I watched him die. I carried his body to the backseat of the car. I drove the forty miles to the secluded woods. Sam helped me build the pyre, but I'm the one who lit it.

"And the police?"

Dean chews on his lip. Right. Normal people went to the police when their friends got hacked to bits. "The trail's gone cold. No one knows where he is."

"And you want to seek justice yourself?"

Dean stiffens and Lizzy raises an eyebrow. "I still have my notes from last time. You said something about 'ramming his halo up straight up his ass'?"

"Somebody has to," he says quietly.

"And uh, care to explain what you meant by halo?"

Dean digs his nails into the meat of his thigh. "No. It's complicated."

"What is it you need Dean?"

"Pills." The answer stumbles out his mouth. "I can't concentrate without them."

She scribbles on her notepad. "Okay, I can do that. What else do you need?"

"My brother. He gives me a reason to get up every morning. If I didn't have him…well, I wouldn't be here."

"Is there anything else you need?"

"Cas. But he's been dead a long time already."

Lizzy smile sat him and rips off a prescription slip. "Oh, sweetie," she says, "just because he's dead doesn't mean he's gone."

888888

They got back to the motel after they finish with Regina. Cas hasn't flapped back off to Heaven yet to go on a suicide mission, so Dean considers it a good night so far. He sits on the bed and digs out one of his old Vonnegut novels. It's well worn, with a folded over and dog eared pages, but it's a favorite and he likes to re-read it every few months.

Sam sits Cas down at the mini table by the air conditioner and pulls out a deck of cards he found in the glove compartment of the car.

"You know how to play Blackjack?" he asks, shuffling the cards.

"I am…familiar with the rules," Cas says. "But I have never had the opportunity to play."

"Looks like today's your luck day then." Sam deals the cards. "It's usually more fun if you get more people to play, but you can just play against me for now."

Dean doesn't miss the shy smile that tugs at the corners of Cas's lips. "Card games are one of humanity's oldest inventions," he says, sneaking a look at his hand. "Uh, I believe the terminology is, 'hit me'".

Sam lays down another card. It's a six. "How old?"
"Cards were invented in Imperial China, during the Tang dynasty."

"Tang? That was, uh, from 600 AD to 900 AD, right?"

"Approximately. I find them one of humanity's most interesting inventions. Fifty two painted pieces of cardboard create a near infinite combination of games."

"You want another hit?"

"No."

"Okay, reveal."

If Dean's paying more attention to their game than his book, he's not going to admit to it. Sam and Cas don't get to just kick back together and hang around. Dean's slightly jealous of just how much easier it seems for Cas to talk with Sam than Dean. Dean's deduces it to the simple fact that they're both massive nerds—seriously, who the hell knew that card games were invented in the Tang dynasty?

And it's weird just how easy they seemed to get over their clunky, bad first introductions when Sam was just the Boy with the Demon Blood and Castiel was just another Dick with Wings.

They're friends. Dean doesn't know why that's so important, but it is. And they can converse with each other easier than Dean does with either of them.

Because they're nerds and because Sam's a girl who talks about his feelings and there's still so much about humanity that Cas doesn't understand.

"Nineteen," Cas says.

"Twenty three," Sam says sourly. "Reading minds is cheating, you know."
"I would never," Cas says in mock indignation, based on the inflection of his voice. Or maybe he is serious. Cas doesn't do sarcasm. Dean legitimately can't tell and he laughs, his book long forgotten. Sam does too.

"What is funny?" Cas asks. "What did I do?"

Dean laughs harder.

888888

When he exists the building, Sam is leaning against the Impala with his hands stuffed in his jacket pockets.

"Did you do it?" He asks. The plan itself had been pretty simple. Go to the art school, borrow a kiln and melt the blade down. From there it was just about re-building. Dean's a mechanic at heart. Building and rebuilding is his specialty.

He's also pretty good at destroying things, he thinks with a sour frown, but he doesn't express that to Sam.

He rebuilt the Impala from scratch after the semi accident all those years ago, made an EMF detector out of a useless Walkman and made a sawed off when he was twelve. Making a sword didn't seem all that hard in comparison. Besides, he knew how to do it too. If he wasn't sleeping or smoking, he was researching weaponry and blacksmirth…ery, whatever, he was a mechanic, not a grammarian.

"Yeah," Sam says, wearing his pity bitch face and he pulls out of his pocket a small tubberware container and hands it to Dean.

Dean takes it carefully, consciously, like a baby. He peers threw the plastic and sees the liquid silver with the tiniest bits of blue specks floating, like stars in the sky. He swallows a hard lump that grew in his throat. This was what was left of the angel blade Cas made himself. Light as air and only enough volume to fill half a container they put leftovers in.

"The professor gave me a weird look when I threw it in," Sam says. "I told him it was a prop for an anti war piece I'm doing. Needlessly to say, he didn't ask many questions after that."

"So what now?" Dean says. He feels the need to keep the remnants of the blade close to his heart. There are specks of Castiel's grace in there—pieces of Castiel, that Castiel cut out and put into his illegal weapon he made himself.

"Now we go back to Bobby's. I'm gonna go to bed, you're gonna make an archangel blade and then we are gonna gank Raphael."

"Sounds good," Deans says, mildly disinterested. It's not that what Sam is saying isn't good—it is. And that's the problem. It's too good to be true. It's too simple. In reality, there are too many things that can go wrong, horribly wrong. Dean could fuck the blade up, would have destroyed Castiel's blade for nothing. Raphael could kill both him and Sam before they even turned to face the fucker. Raphael could send Sam's soul back to the Pit to get ass reamed by Lucifer and Michael forever and Dean's stuck with an apathetic, sadistic robot of a brother.

Sam's plan is nice in theory. But Dean's been around the block more than once. He doesn't get happy endings. He tried once, after Dad died; back and forth across the country, hunting, helping people. But then Sam died and Dean sold his soul. He tried with Lisa, but he was only content with her and Ben, not happy.

And if, say if, he does manage to kill Raphael…then what? He still wouldn't get a happy ending because Castiel will still be dead.

And Dean can't imagine a happy ending for him that doesn't involve Cas.

But he can't let these fears and doubts stop him. He owes it to Cas to try. Dean sticks the tubberware into his pocket and zips his jacket all the way up. It's warm against his stomach—like butterflies, Dean thinks idly, before he claps his hands.

"Let's go," He tells Sam. "I'm driving." He steals the keys from Sam and pats the hood of the Impala. Out of the corner of his eye, he thinks he sees out of the corner of his eye Sam laughing and shaking his head at him, but Dean can't find it in himself to care.

"Hear that, Cas?" He whispers gently. "We're gonna win this thing. I'm gonna do you right."

And hearing the purr of the Impala's engine makes Dean feels nearly orgasmic.

"Dude," Sam says, now sporting his bitch bitch face, "seriously, don't jizz in the car."

"Excuse you," Dean snaps, "but Baby's been there with me from the beginning."

"Ew! Things I Do Not Need To Know About My Brother: When and where he lost his virginity is at the top of the list."

"Eh, don't worry Sammy, we'll get you laid one of these days. Just not in the back of Baby. You can only be christened once, y'know."

"La la la I'm not listening," Sam says, covering his ears.

Dean huffs as he switches the ignition into drive, keeping the warm metal close to his skin. As he drove, it drummed against his stomach like a heartbeat.