Scene from an Alt!Dimension

Chapter Title: Hey Look, There's An Epilogue

.

What happened after the boys – all four of them – returned to their own world? How would the 14th season of this alternative Supernatural unfold? I only know pieces of it, which is why this is all the epilogue I can provide.

Firstly, it was just the boys, Mary and Lucifer that returned to their world. The alternative versions of their friends – Castiel, Bobby, Charlie – all stayed behind to use the road map Crowley provided them to rebuild as much of their world as they could.

Of course, the season would focus was on regaining Jack and stopping Michael. Who knows what good the boys were, against an archangel and a nephilim battling it out over their world? But we know the Winchester family. They gave it everything they had, and somehow, at the end, succeeded. Regardless of the cost.

And the cost was high.

Somewhere over the course of events, Crowley had to become a demon again. Hell was unraveling, and with the gates thrown wide open in the battle between Jack and Michael, demons threatened to pour out over the earth. And there are only two known ways to close the gates: the trials, and from the inside. Crowley had offered once before to shut the gates. And this is how it goes with these boys. They make grand sacrifices for each other and for the world.

It wasn't what Crowley wanted, and it hurt like Hell itself. It hurt him to give up his humanity, to be remade through some spell or some other means back into a demon. Hurt Dean and the others to know he was forced to do it. Becoming a demon again awoke old fears, both for Crowley and the Winchesters – could he be trusted, was he still on their side? Even Crowley wasn't entirely sure, at times. And there was always the intention for Crowley to undergo the cure again, once the gates were shut. But you know how it goes – apocalypses and such got in the way.

Rowena and Dean stubbornly refused to give up on him. Rowena knew she had abandoned him too many times before; she wasn't about to give up on her son when it mattered most. Not after everything she had been willing to do to get him back. Rowena herself had changed, after everything that happened with the Darkness and Lucifer and the Winchesters. She had grown in power, but also in heart. She learned how to be empathetic, that it was safe to be vulnerable surrounded by this small family. And less selfish – no longer needed to be, as a means of survival. The past looked less like a series of choices made to protect herself and more like a regretful long line of missed opportunities, among them her latent love for her son. That doesn't mean things were easy between Rowena and Crowley after he came back from that alternative dimension. Nothing between those two could ever be easy. But I hope they reconciled their more venomous feelings towards each other, and settled into an appreciative if prickly affection for one another.

And Dean. I don't believe for a moment that after everything that happened, that Dean would give up on Crowley, any more than he had given up on Soulless!Sam or Godstiel, not now that he considered the demon-turned human-turned demon to be family. Dean who looked at Crowley and saw himself – a man who considered himself a lost cause, damned from day one, willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of those he loved. Dean who knew what it was like to be a monster and hated himself for it. Dean who had lost too many people already. Dean never gave up on Crowley, not after the rift. Not after finding him standing in the midst of that battle, worn and hurting and resolute. For that man, just as he would for his brother and his angel, Dean would go to Hell or wherever else he needed to go to get him back.

Of course, demon or otherwise, Crowley chose the Winchesters. Chose his family. Found his way back to them, as he found his way back to them across dimensions. There's no other way for this to end. I don't know if by the end of this alternative Season 14, he chose to complete the cure or stayed a demon teetering on the edge of humanity, more soul than smoke. So long as he had family and belonging and purpose, it likely wouldn't matter either way. Not to him, not to the others, and not to us.

You're probably wondering about what happened to Lucifer, and the role he played in all of this, especially after the last chapter. Well, Lucifer played along once they got back, for a while. He had to, being practically human at that point, with all his grace drained away. There were confrontations with just about everybody. I imagine certain key conversations were had: between Lucifer and Mary, the archangel arguing he wasn't to blame for Mary's choices. Between Lucifer and Cas, about rebelling against heaven and their differences, about what it meant to uphold free will and the value of humans.

And most importantly, between Lucifer and Sam, in which Sam laid out how what Lucifer did to him, how being his chosen vessel messed Sam up almost beyond repair. And how Sam had chosen to not let that define him, was defiant and stronger for it. And that resonated with Lucifer, now that he was human and had some semblance of a soul. He was fucked up, too, after all. Chuck had allowed Amara to destroy his son, and then failed to lift a finger to save him from the corrupting influence of the Darkness seeping through what became known as the Mark. Sam's defiance and self-determination to carve out his own path resonated with him. But of course, Lucifer was still Lucifer, self-excusing and self-pitying. Unable to see that the wrong done to him at the beginning didn't justify all the wrong he chose to do after. What little one-sided empathy he established with Sam was never going to be enough. And when he got the chance to run off and join dark, power-hungry Jack, Lucifer took it.

And Lucifer died protecting him. Because that seems like a fitting end for Lucifer. He could never come full circle, never be anything more than what he was. Unlike Crowley, Lucifer's capacity to be something better was minimal. But Jack was something – someone – who could have come to truly matter to Lucifer, as more than just something to control or hold over his own father. I like to think that in this reality, at the very end of the whole arc, Lucifer died to protect Jack from Michael. Maybe even protect his son from Jack himself.

In the end, Lucifer gave his son the one thing he had never been able to acquire and always wanted: the approval from and protection by his own father. Lucifer refused to stand aside and watch Michael destroy or further corrupt his own son. Refused to let his son follow in his own footsteps. Lucifer surely caused a lot of pain and suffering along the way, for the Winchesters and others, and it doesn't even remotely redeem him. But it is a fitting end for Lucifer. Satisfying in a way that his death in the canon, for me, was not.

And then there is Mary.

Mary, who for so long was characterized by nothing more than dying to save her sons. The embodiment of the trope in which women die for the men in their lives, who serve as emotional motivation for revenge or character growth. Mary who was made into the martyr for ten seasons, and then made herself into a false martyr at the end of Season 12. When she challenged Lucifer and fell through the rift – when Mary thought she was going to die – that had less to do with saving her sons and more to do with attempting to escape the hardship of this strange life she had found herself in: removed from time, her boys grown, her husband dead, her mistakes laid bare and having produced rotten fruit. It was, as Crowley challenged her, about her. Not them.

And I don't blame her for that, only for attempting to wrap herself once more in martyrdom, further diminishing herself rather than laying open claim to her pain. What was done to Mary, both as a character and as a person, was unfair. Her portrayal solely as the loving wife and mother taken before her time by a sinister being, put upon a pedestal as the familiar domestic angel, was a disservice to someone who, as we saw in later seasons, was a whole person separate from this two-dimensional narrative. To replay that role of martyr over and over – in the nursery, at the rift, at the mercy of Jack's fury – is a failing on the part of the writers on par with the narrative murder of Crowley's redemption arc for no other reason than a lack of imagination on their part.

What was done to Mary to return her to life – a soul ripped from heaven, out of place now in the world – was not done out of cruelty, at least not on the part of the characters. (Outside of the narrative, it is a continuum of the writers' victimization of female characters through martyrdom, and is an uncomfortably common trope.) Dean could hardly have known the pain his mother would experience, being returned to the world, returned to him. But eventually, that suffering needed to end. And I would have liked to have seen it end not in more martyrdom, but more like this:

Once Jack was defeated and restored, once the worst was over and this season winding down, Billie came for Mary. She made her offer again. And this time, Mary accepted. She bid her boys tearful farewells. She told Sam and Dean just how proud she was of them and charged Cas to look after them. Gave the Impala a loving look. And then, with aid from Billie and Naomi, Mary walked through Heaven's gate and back into peaceful non-existence. It was her choice to go. Dean let his mom go knowing she was happy, that he had gotten to say goodbye. And though it hurt, it was a hurt he could live with.

And doesn't that just sum up SPN in so many ways – the hurt we all learn we can live with.

Mary's peaceful end, chosen through free will, would be counter to the "peaceful and conclusive" end supposedly given Dean at the canonical series end. The failure of the trope "Closure Through Death", in which the suffering of a character ends only through the willing embrace of death, is common for characters facing complicated or "morally or socially unacceptable" choices. In Dean's case, being bisexual is somehow still controversial, even in a supposedly liberal and inclusive Western country. And it was therefore "better" for him to find "peace in death" than to be obtain happiness and deal with the emotional and psychological trauma of his life.

Mary's ending in this alternative reality is not "Closure Through Death" experienced by so many marginalized characters. What Mary ultimately wanted – for her sons to be little again, for her husband to be the man she remembered, for her life to still be ahead of her – was not something that could be obtained by persevering and living. It was not something that could be given to her by anyone, nor could it be obtained by her changing how she felt about life, or any external societal change taking place that would allow her to live her life as she wanted. Mary had suffered enough, and wanted to return to the comfort offered her by Heaven. In the canonical finale, Dean didn't choose that ending – it was forced on him. And if we really believe in the value of free will, then a character choosing peace and laying their weary head to rest should be an acceptable ending for them. It is not "she could live no other way, and thus better off that she's dead." It is the end of Lord of the Rings, with Frodo and the elves sailing off into the myth. And I hope readers take that in the spirit it is meant.

So how would it all end, other than the world having been once again saved? It would end with Jack keeping his word to Dean and returning to that other dimension. It would end with him wishing the Winchesters well, opening up a rift, and going where he was needed most. He'd always be family. And it would be one goodbye that wasn't sudden, or brutal, or maybe even permanent. Maybe one day, Jack would be back. Maybe he wouldn't. Maybe his purpose was to travel between realities, seeking out each of his grandfather's unraveling worlds. Not mending the stories, not making happy endings out of dust and blood and tears, but at least making them a little more bearable. Reminding the Winchesters or distant, similar family he found along the way that it wasn't about living in the best possible world at any price, but about the struggle to make that world even just a little better than it was. The rebel editor of all of Chuck's work, the lightbringer, the disseminator of free will, the best parts of Castiel and Sam and Dean, out there, somewhere, winking back at the boys whenever they looked up into the night sky.

So that's how it would end. Would there be some new apocalypse on the horizon? Maybe. It doesn't matter, though. Not so long as the boys – Dean and Sam and Cas and Crowley – are there to face it together.

Thanks for reading.

-The Demonologist In Denim