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A Little Rain Must Fall
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It's a sunny afternoon in mid-June when Sam gets the call.
He and Eileen are just bringing Dean home from a check-up. Dean – nearly six years old now – leaps from the back seat of the van as soon as Sam slides the door open, running up the porch steps and bouncing impatiently from foot to foot when he realizes the front door is locked.
"I knew taking him for ice cream after his appointment was a bad idea," Eileen signs to Sam as she circles around the nose of the van. "He's loaded with sugar."
Sam snorts, grabbing his bag from the car. "Hey, buddy, how about we fire up the sprinkler in the back yard?" he calls.
"YEAH!" Dean shouts, jumping up and down in excitement.
Sam grins and turns back to his wife. "Problem solved," he signs. "He'll tire himself out by dinner."
Dean thuds back down the steps and bumps against Eileen's hip to get her attention. "Mom, can I have a juice box?" he asks, deftly switching to ASL.
"More sugar?!" Eileen replies, feigning shock. "No, you can have water if you're thirsty."
Sam's phone rings in his back pocket just as he's sliding the van door shut. He fishes the phone from his pocket, tosses the house keys to Eileen and follows behind as Dean dashes back up to the door. Sam waits to answer the call until he's dropped his bag inside the entryway.
"Hey, Donna!" he greets her cheerfully. "Been a while."
Dean's already sprinted upstairs, all too eager to retrieve his swim shorts, but Eileen's still setting her things down. At Eileen's questioning look, Sam taps a D into the dimple on his cheek for Donna's name sign.
"Hi, Sam," Donna says on the other end.
Eileen gives a small wave and heads for the back yard to set up the sprinkler.
"Eileen says hi too. What's up?"
"Sam, I—" Donna starts, and her voice hitches slightly. "Honey, is Dean with you right now?"
Sam stops short at that, rooted to the tiles under his shoes. Donna only ever calls him 'honey' when something is wrong. "Uh. No? He's upstairs."
"Okay, well, you might wanna have a seat," she says. Her words tremble through the phone.
Sam does not sit down. He stands in the middle of the entryway and demands that Donna spit it out.
Somehow. Somehow. He knows what she's going to say before she says it.
It still hits him like a knife to the gut.
"Cas died, Sam."
The details are unimportant. Sam is silent as Donna explains the case she and Claire were working in Denver, that it was a pack of Nachzehrers gone rogue, that Cas came along to help and was killed for his efforts. That somehow, the monster got ahold of Cas's gun and he was gone before they knew it.
Dean thunders back down the staircase in bare feet and swim trunks. "Come on, Dad!" he shouts as he runs past, through the kitchen and out the back door.
Sam is falling through space. A tether inside him has snapped, leaving him reeling.
Dean graduated kindergarten less than two weeks ago, and Cas was there in the audience with Sam and Eileen cheering him on as he received his star-studded certificate from his teacher. Cas never missed anything when it came to Dean.
After the ceremony, Dean ran up the aisle and, rather than jumping into the arms of either of his parents, he'd gone instead for Cas. Cas hoisted him up, all bright smiles and laughs and hugs and beaming pride.
That was the last time they saw him.
"Sam?" Donna cuts through the haze, snapping Sam back into the present. "Sam. Are you there?"
Sam clears his throat. "Yes. Yeah, I'm here."
"Do you want us to wait for you?"
He blinks, shaking his head as his vision goes glassy and blurred at the edges. "For what?"
"For the funeral."
Sam draws a long breath, sways slightly on his feet, and braces a hand against the wall. Practicality sets in, the still-familiar logistics of a hunter's funeral arranging themselves as tasks one after the other in his head. Meet up with Donna and Claire. Buy gasoline. Find a secluded area. Build a pyre. Salt. Burn.
"Hey, do – do you remember the spot where we had Dean's funeral?" Sam manages to ask.
"Outside Lebanon, yeah. Sure do. You want us to meet you there?"
It's a big ask, he knows, to drive six hours with a body in her truck. But Donna doesn't bat an eye. She and Claire will be there.
Hunters' funerals are rapid affairs. Embalming is not part of the process. It's also wise to leave as little time as possible for the person's soul to attach itself to something earthside. The faster the funeral, the less painful. It needs to be quick. It needs to be quick.
Yet, Sam can't bring himself to move.
God, what is he going to tell Dean?
Eileen finds him ten minutes later when he still hasn't joined them in the back yard, and she freezes the moment she sees the look on his face. "Who?" she asks.
Sam draws a C from his shoulder to his flank. "Cas."
It strikes her like a physical thing; she grabs the banister, her fist on her chest. "Where?"
"Colorado. He was on a hunt with Claire and Donna." Sam speaks only in sign. His throat is closing up.
Eileen sinks down to sit on the lowest stair. Distantly, Sam can hear Dean in the yard, shouting something to an imaginary nemesis and practicing the moves he's learned at karate as he jumps through the sprinkler.
"They're bringing him to Lebanon," Sam signs. "I have to be there."
"You mean we do," Eileen replies, and a little wave of relief settles onto Sam's shoulders.
They don't tell Dean, that day, that Cas is gone.
After a somewhat lengthy discussion, Sam and Eileen come to the conclusion that Dean is too young to attend a hunter's funeral, and they agree to tell him later, once they return home. It's not an easy decision, but they've never wanted hunting to affect Dean's childhood and Sam is desperate to protect him for a little while longer. Apart from Sam and Eileen, Cas has been the most important person in Dean's life since his birth, and Sam isn't quite willing to let Dean watch Cas burn.
So they leave Dean with a sweet elderly woman who lives across the street and has babysat for Dean before, and they make up an excuse, and they drive to Lebanon.
They arrive at the meadow just before sunset, when the summer light is fading into gold. Donna's truck is there, and Claire's Fox Body Mustang, and even from a distance they can see two blonde heads working to collect firewood. When Eileen pulls the van to a stop beside the truck, Donna and Claire pause their work to greet them.
Claire rushes to Sam and throws her arms around his torso, crying into his shirt. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, it was all my fault—" She's babbling and shows no signs of stopping, so Sam grips her shoulders and pushes her back to look her in the eyes.
"Claire, I don't know what went down, but I know that it definitely wasn't your fault," he says firmly, despite the rock in his throat.
Her face is blotchy and she looks more like a child than she has in years, chin trembling, but she nods and swallows and doesn't argue with him.
Donna approaches from behind Claire, her face drawn and solemn. She looks exhausted. "Hiya, hon," she says softly, and wraps her arms around Sam's shoulders.
"Where is he?" Sam asks, voice cracking.
Donna cups his face momentarily, comfortingly. "In the back still. I had to cover him up for the drive."
Sam nods and turns to approach the back of Donna's truck. When Eileen moves to accompany him, he gestures for her to give him a moment.
He unlatches the tailgate with his heart pounding. There's a blue tarp covering Cas's body where it lays next to a large tool box. Sam allows himself a single nerve-steeling breath, then pushes the tarp aside. Instantly, he recoils.
"Donna," Sam says hoarsely, fighting a wave of nausea. "I thought you said he was shot."
Donna follows him to the truck bed and squeezes his arm. "He was. But we were on a roof, and he was close to the edge when it happened. He fell."
Sam winces, unable to pull his eyes away from Cas. Leaving Dean at home was the right decision.
Cas's body is a smashed, broken thing, limbs at all the wrong angles and the back of his head caved in. Blood has dried in rivulets from his nose and ears. A fractured bone protrudes from his arm. It takes Sam a moment to spot the bullet wound in his chest – a shot to the heart that would have killed him anyways, fall or no fall.
It's all Sam can do not to scream, and he pulls the tarp back over Cas's face before going to help with the pyre.
Eileen helps Sam tie the shroud.
Donna helps to carry Cas from the truck.
Claire lights a match.
For the second time, Sam stands in this same field, surrounded by family, and watches someone he loves disappear.
It takes a long time for the pyre to burn down to nothing. Sparks whirl up into the ether, the sunlight bleeds from the sky and the night sweeps in. By the time the moonglow is poking through the trees to the east, the pyre has reduced to a patch of glowing embers, casting them in pulses of soft red light. Fireflies emerge and wink in eddying circles, a choir of crickets and tree frogs filling the spaces.
Donna and Claire say goodbye with fierce hugs and more than a few tears. The taillights of their vehicles bounce along the dirt road out of the field and are swallowed by the dark.
Sam and Eileen stay for a while longer, sitting on the grass until the smoke fades. They can't see each other well enough to talk, so they don't.
They drive to the bunker, afterwards, and park at the front door beneath the stars. Inside is an unearthly quiet so heavy and thick that it fills Sam's lungs, rings in his ears, presses into every corner of the library. The lights clank on as he flips the switch, and their steps echo on the staircase as he and Eileen descend to the war room.
Eileen's hand brushes Sam's arm. "You okay?" she signs.
He gives her a smile and squeezes her hand, but it's all he can manage in the moment. The bunker doesn't quite seem real around them, the surfaces intangible and the air ill-fitted to the space. He was only here a month ago to help Cas with re-organizing the archives and nothing's changed, not really, but for the first time in nearly fifteen years it doesn't feel like home.
Eileen leans into his side and cinches an arm around his waist. "We do this together," she says, and a breath punches out from Sam's chest.
In the kitchen, there are still dishes in the sink. The trash is a few days old and halfway full of empty Chinese takeout boxes. A few empty beer bottles sit on the counter. It's a small mess, left behind with a clear intention to clean it up soon.
Eileen sighs, swallows, and begins to pull perishables out of the fridge.
Not quite knowing what else to do, Sam leaves Eileen in the kitchen and walks down the hallway. He's detached from the floor beneath his feet, the back of his head prickling with exhaustion. He's got no idea what time it is but it must be well after midnight by now.
Sam passes the room that used to be Dean's, and the room that used to be his own. The door to Cas's bedroom is cracked open, just a hair, and when Sam pushes it open the room smells like laundry detergent, sage and gun oil. He flips the light on and finds the bed halfway made, books still open on the desk, a recently-used jacket hanging from the back of a chair.
He sinks into the desk chair, flipping a book closed to see what Cas had last been reading. A History of Shapeshifters, Skinwalkers, and Other Transformative Creatures, by Mathias Henley – a name he recognizes from the early 20th-century Men of Letters roster. Sam sets the book back on the desk, wondering if Cas had been reading it for a case or just out of curiosity.
A mug sits on the desktop to his right, drops of coffee dried in the bottom of it. He remembers buying the mug for Cas as a joke shortly after Dean was born. In blocky printed letters, it reads: I'M THE COOL UNCLE.
A gasp of a sob bursts out of him.
It's not just Cas. Sam has lived almost his entire life accustomed to losing loved ones. His memories are filed in eras of After Dad and Before Bobby. He lost Cas over and over again, and he lost Dean more times than he can count. Grief has been as much a companion to Sam as anything else in his life – just a fact, always there, some days a shadow in the corner of his eyes, some days sitting so heavy on his chest that it's hard to breathe. But he's used to it.
His son, however, is unaccustomed to loss. And that's a good thing, Sam knows. That was the whole point – of giving up hunting, of moving out of the bunker, of creating a life in a place where if his child was afraid of the dark, he could plug in a night light instead of handing his child a gun.
But Dean's family has just been made significantly smaller, and it will be a hard conversation, and Sam is so angry that he has to introduce his son to death so soon.
Sam holds the mug in his hands for a moment before deciding to take it back home for Dean.
When he stands back up, he glances at the shelf above the desk and stops short.
He'd almost forgotten completely about Dean's Top 13 Zepp Traxx, but there it sits with its insides still halfway spilled out, the tape dusty yet still glinting in the dim light of the bedroom. The handwriting is still faded but not any more so than the last time he'd seen it, sprawled out on his kitchen table at three in the morning nearly two years ago.
"Hey," says a soft voice to his left, and Sam turns to see Eileen leaning against the doorframe. She holds up the Impala's keys and jingles them with a twitch of her wrist. "The car's in the garage. I guess Cas didn't bring her to Colorado."
Sam nods. "Okay. Good."
"Are we bringing her back with us?"
He doesn't know where they're going to put her, but there's no other possible answer. "Yes," he replies, already making plans in his head to clean out the garage. "Of course."
Eileen checks her phone momentarily before tucking it back into her jacket. "It's almost four. If we leave now we can get back home before Mrs. Mendez tries feeding him veggie bacon for breakfast."
Another nod. Sam agrees with her but can't help turning slowly in place for a minute, grasping at the details of Cas's living space as he left it.
Eileen seems to understand, and doesn't pressure him to leave.
They'll come back, he knows. Soon, even. They'll be back to pack up more of Cas's things, or maybe to bring Dean here and let him have the opportunity to say goodbye in his own way. Sam knows the bunker won't be empty forever – someone, some hunter, will move in eventually, however far down the line. The legacy won't end.
But for now, Sam takes the mug and the mixtape from Cas's desk, and then goes with Eileen to retrieve the Impala.