All Complexities of Mire or Blood
K Hanna Korossy
Dean shut the door hard behind them and turned toward Sam, whom he'd just ushered insistently into the electrical room.
"What're you doing?" Sam asked, impatient. Every minute, Jack's corpse was getting colder and the chance to save him was slipping farther away.
"What am I doing?" Dean asked, sounding incredulous. "What're you doing? Dude, I can't believe you're about to consider another soul deal."
Ah. Sam shook his head. "It's not like selling your soul, Dean. It's only going to shave off a little of his to bring him back and keep him alive."
"Right," Dean nodded. "'A little.' No big deal—it's only Jack's soul we're talking about here."
Sam gave him an exasperated look. "I thought you wanted him back."
Dean threw up his hands. "Of course I want him back! I just don't think this is the right way to do it!"
"And what if it's the only way?" Sam asked point blank.
That pulled Dean up short. But only for a few seconds. "Then we let him go."
"Dean—"
"What's dead should stay dead, right? I mean…" Sam watched all of Dean's anger drain away into a raw sadness that caught his breath. "We've seen this movie before, man. Mom died because of her deal. I went to Hell and started the domino chain to the Apocalypse, and you ended it in the Cage." His jaw rippled. "Haven't we learned this lesson, Sam? Things do not end well when we'll do anything to bring one of us back."
And...he wasn't wrong. They'd had this conversation many times before, too. Sam had cut his brother deepest when he'd once claimed he would just let Dean die. Dean had given Sam over to a rogue angel rather than risking losing him. They had learned this lesson the very hard way.
But. This wasn't the same as trading Jack's soul. With any luck, the cost would be minimal, not even missed. Jack had only lived two years; it wasn't right that he wouldn't get more.
More importantly, they were pretty much Jack's family. Dean had already lost so many people he was responsible for, and Sam feared this one would be the final straw. Sam himself had never experienced paternity before, but he wasn't sure he couldn't lose this kid. And Sam knew Cas pretty much considered Jack his son.
So Sam ditched the logic, the pressure, and the pleas, and went with simple honesty.
"You really think we can say goodbye?"
Dean's mouth opened, closed, and he looked away.
"I know it sucks," Sam admitted, voice low. "We usually only have crappy options. But you really think we can keep going if we knew we could save him and we didn't, because we were worried about something that might happen? Because I'm not sure I can."
Dean closed his eyes. "Sammy..."
"I'm not trying to...guilt you into this, Dean. I'm not. But we don't know what'll happen. Some of those stupid decisions we made ended up coming back to bite us, yeah, but they also led to good things we hadn't even seen coming. Maybe Jack'll be the key to stopping Michael, or bringing back angels. Or maybe he'll unleash another bigger threat. Maybe he'll just be another hunter when he grows up, or a librarian, or a doctor. But that's the kind of dice we throw every single day."
Dean rubbed a hand wearily over his face.
Sam moved into his space, his final admission quiet, just between them. "And even when all kinds of bad things happened? Not getting you back from Hell, or Purgatory, or that...eternal nothing Death offered would have been so much worse." His eyes blurred staring into his brother's.
Dean looked at him a long moment, face impassive but eyes a storm. Then he sighed and shook his head. "Dude, Stanford Law really missed out on you."
Sam choked a laugh.
Dean was slowly shaking his head, but it was more resignation than disagreement. "You know we're gonna regret this, right?"
"You know we'd regret it if we didn't, right?" Sam countered.
Dean sighed. "Yeah, okay. One more soul deal it is. But this is the last one, you hear me?"
It would take more than a year for Sam to piece together that that's about when, up in Heaven, Castiel traded himself for Jack.
And just a little bit less than that before Jack saved the world one more time.
The End
