Sam was trying to sleep. He'd heard it all before, whether he was trying to sleep in a hotel, the Impala, or the bunker. But this was different. He sat up in bed, listening to his brother and one of his best friends arguing about the end of the world. "Every time we get close… this life is nothing but pain, horror, and death, and now we're on our own!" The alarm clock on his nightstand read 1:31 in the morning. Sam groaned, knowing that it was going to be another sleepless night. "What else are we supposed to do? He's taken everything away from us!"
"You're not on your own," Grace reminded him, trying to keep Dean from sweeping an empty beer bottle onto the floor. "You have me. You have Sam, and Cas, and Bobby, and Charlie… We have friends out there. Friends that'll help us fight."
"Gracie, you're talking about fighting God!"
"I know." She took his hand, saying, "I've got an idea. You're probably not going to like it, and it'll probably get us killed, but it's an idea. If I'm a secondary character -"
His expression softened, Dean shaking his head. "Gracie, you can't get hung up on all of the crap that Chuck -"
"No, it's important. If I'm a secondary character - me - then the only main characters he's got are you, Sam, Michael, and Lucifer. Maybe Cas. Nobody thinks about the secondary characters until they become useful. He said it himself, he wrote me out of a lot of the books, and when I was there, I was a passing thought or a fantasy when -"
"You weren't."
"Dean, just listen to me for five minutes. Now if I'm a secondary character, so is practically everyone else. And if Chuck isn't watching his secondary characters because he cares about you and Sam too much, we have a chance to start something while he's not looking. I have a chance." He frowned, but held his tongue. "I have some sort of a… bond with the Warrioress of Hell, the Queen of Demons, the second-best torturer under Alastair, the - whatever you want to call her, Miczael knows how to lead an army. The demons aren't too happy with Chuck. They never have been. With Lucifer gone and Rowena presumably on the throne, I can get an army. Then we have all of the hunters, all of the people on our side. I'm sure Cas can get some of the angels on our side. Most of them will be in Chuck's army, but all of the ones who have ever been to Earth - well, most of them - we could get them on our side too. I know it's probably a lost cause, but we can at least try to fight. We get every secondary character we can get on our side, and we fight."
"You want to kill God?" he asked slowly.
"Sam shot him! If he's going to try to kill us off, we need to go down fighting. We've lost almost everything. This is the only chance we've got."
"I'm tired of losing," Dean sighed, twisting the ring on his finger. "I'm tired of losing people, and if we do this, we're bound to lose more."
"If we don't, there will be nothing in the way of the ending Chuck wants. Millions of years all leading up to Winchester killing Winchester. We can't let that happen. We can't let him win."
"Let's go for a walk. I want to show you something." Dean stood, knowing that their constant arguing had been waking Sam up nearly every night. He didn't want to argue. He didn't want to do much of anything. Resigning himself to the inevitable wasn't a good option, but it was an option. Fighting Chuck seemed impossible. He led her upstairs, out of the bunker and away from the house. When he finally stopped and turned back to look at what lay behind them, Grace had grown fairly confused. "See that?"
Grace looked at the house, noticing how none of the lights were on. Both of them had retreated to the bunker, living there instead. The house was full of too many memories. The kids, Mary, the hunters who had been in and out for so long before going off to set up their own lives in cities and towns across the country. When the last of them had left, Grace found herself only going up there to do research when she wanted to be able to look out of a window instead of at the solid walls of the bunker. "The house?"
"I had a dream that I came home to that house. I was running late because you'd asked me to pick up some candles for Sam's birthday. We were all there - us, the kids, Sam, Cas, Mom, Bobby, Jody, everyone. I remember standing there with you, singing Happy Birthday to Sam and realizing how happy I was. We'd managed to find a normal life, finally. You know, I never told you about the djinn Dad and I were hunting one of those summers when you were staying at Bobby's."
"Dean, what does this have to do with anything?" Grace sighed, sitting down on the grass.
Dean sat down beside her, both of them staring at the house. "When it got me, the first thing I saw was you. I don't know if it was a memory or reality, but Dad was yelling at me to just kill it. I couldn't. It was you. I knew it was you. Not really, but it was you. There was no way I could bring myself to hurt you."
Grace smiled, tugging at his hand as they made their way through the field. When the wheat finally gave way to the sand surrounding a glittering pond, she stopped, kicking off her shoes. In that moment, the sun shining down on them and the warm Kansas summer breeze sweeping past, Dean realized once again how lucky he was. This was one of the moments he never wanted to end. His dad had left him at home to watch Sam while he was out on a hunting trip in Kentucky. Sam was hanging out with some friends, and besides, he would be fine by himself for a few hours. For a brief window of time, there was nothing to worry about. He felt himself relax, the sun shining off of Grace's hair as she grinned at him. She pulled her shirt up over her head, telling him to, "Come on. The water's great. No sharks."
Suddenly the image darkened, someone yelling at him through the field. "Dean!"
"Dean, c'mon," Grace told him, beckoning for him to follow her into the water.
"Dean, kill it!" He looked out into the field, but there was no one there.
Turning back, he followed Grace into the water. It felt like bathwater, just as warm as the air in the middle of July. Grace pulled him closer, Dean inhaling sharply at the feeling of her skin on his. Something felt wrong. Her eyes. Her eyes glowed blue as she sunk her teeth into his neck. "Kill it!"
The mirage faded as a shining silver knife pierced through her stomach, the image of Grace looking down and cursing. "What the hell were you thinking, boy?" John asked, coming into view as Dean scrambled to get up off of the floor.
Still in shock, all he could manage to mumble was, "Gracie -"
"Her? Really? That's what it showed you? You almost got both of us killed, and for what? That girl I told you to forget about? She's gone, and if you can't keep your head screwed on right you really will kill all of us one day." John walked off, cleaning the knife on his pants leg as he went. Dean had no choice but to follow, knowing that it would be better to stay silent than to dare to apologize.
"All I'm saying is that you're my weak spot. You are. You always have been. And I'm yours. Chuck wrote us like that for a reason. He gave us all the… all the good memories we have for a reason, and it just might be that he's going to use us as weapons against each other. We already know he wants Sam to kill me, or me to kill Sam, which ain't gonna happen. If you lead this army like you want to, the first one Chuck is going to come for is gonna be me. He won't kill me, but he'll make me regret the day I was born. He'll do anything to me to get you to drop your weapons. You have to be ready to kill me, if it comes to that."
"Dean," she began, but he didn't give her much of a chance.
"You have to promise me. Please."
Grace shook her head. "If you know you can't bring yourself to kill Sam, and he can't bring himself to kill you, what makes you think I'll be able to bring myself to do it?"
"I don't know," he confessed, still refusing to meet her eye. "What I do know is that I have a bad feeling we're not all going to come out of this. We're fighting God. We're fighting the inevitable. We're fighting against a story that's already been written."
"Then we go down swinging. Maybe there's more that we don't know. Maybe… Why don't we just try to enjoy what we've got left?" she leaned her head on his shoulder, Dean putting an arm around her as they stared at their old house. "Maybe we'll get lucky and Chuck will stand down like the Darkness did."
"When have we ever been lucky?"
Grace tilted her head slightly, reaching up to give him a soft kiss. "Well, we have each other, and Sam, and Cas. I'd say that's pretty damn lucky. Even if Chuck wrote it all, it doesn't make it less good. Like you keep telling me, it doesn't make it any less real. If Sam could shoot him, that means we've got some choice, even in the big things. Which means we've got each other, we chose each other, we chose to stick around for a reason. Even if Chuck steered us together, and brought us back together after so long, we did have a choice. Sure, I was made for lovin' you," she smiled, trying not to sing it. "But we still made a choice. And I think that's enough."
"Can you promise me something else, then?" he asked, looking up at the stars.
Grace was naturally wary. "It depends."
"Promise me we won't give up on each other. Angel, demon, whatever. No matter what universe, no matter what fresh Hell Chuck comes up with, promise me we won't give up on each other."
"Of course I won't give up on you." She paused, but made sure to add, "But if that day comes, if you die, and I know for a fact that you're in Heaven, I'm not bringing you back. You find the kids, you find your mom, and you wait for me. I'm not dragging you back into all of this. And you better do the same for me. I know it'll hurt, but it's better that way. We'd finally get to rest, even if it's not what we meant when we said we wanted to retire."
"Okay. For now, though, just, uh, try not to die. I'm not ready to let go of you, Gracie. I don't think I ever will be."
"I'll do my best, but that means you have to do the same."