a/n: Do we have me writing spn fic in 2020 on the bingo card?
Disclaimer: ha ha ha ha ha
Title: masquerading as a man with a reason
Word Count: 755
Summary: Ten alternate endings if the writers weren't cowards.
the dead became the living until the living became the dead. an eternal recurrence. a circle. this was the oldest and most important story humankind told itself: that it could transcend death. all religion, all stories boiled down to this: we are born. we live. we struggle. we love. we search for meaning. we die. again and again and again.
libba bray
i.
The Righteous Man pulls him out of the Empty.
Cas is breathing, a handprint burns on his shoulder, ozone and lightning crackling around him because Dean fought every natural law to bring him back.
"Dean," he says because he knows nothing else. He is no longer an angel—the Empty has burned up every inch of his Grace once going topside. The price of his resurrection.
"I got you," Dean says. It's a promise. Their foreheads touch, the gesture enough to mean all and more.
ii.
Chuck writes a new chapter. Writer's block is a special kind of Hell.
iii.
Eileen lives. She appears in a diner in Lebanon some blocks away from the Bunker. Sam feels the way her name is inscribed on his heart and is there by her side in moments.
They don't fully give up hunting. Instead, they take on the mantle of Bobby and The Roadhouse and the Men of Letters. They create something new. Saving people, hunting things. Information is shared among a network of safe houses.
The torch is passed.
iii.
Dean dies in fucking Ohio in that barn.
Excepts he wakes up in the Impala with a cassette tape already playing on a loop.
"Hello, Dean," Cas says in the passenger seat. This is heaven, after all.
iv.
Becky becomes the new Scribe of God, why not?
She writes Cas and Dean reuniting in an abandoned barn somewhere in rural Ohio—because who doesn't love a good parallel? Dean buries his face in Cas's shoulder, gripping the back of the familiar coat.
Becky writes Sam and Eileen. They create a new home thanks to Charlie and Garth and Jody and Donna. She likes having cameos. It's a guilty pleasure to have Jody and Sam check out a haunted bed and breakfast, the clerk there remembering them from being by a ghost some years back. A hunter they meet in passing learns from them. The girl who helps them stop a witch becomes an archivist at the Bunker. The cycle continues.
That is the nature of human things, to always have a connection.
Becky is pleased with her work.
v.
Dean dies saving Sam. In the process, he pulls Cas out of the Empty and they're together in Heaven.
vii.
The Ghostfacers survive everything. Somehow.
Don't ask.
They rebuild the world out of the ashes—Sam and Dean die from fighting God; Jack is now the new God. Everyone is back except for the Winchester brothers. The word is spread of the Winchester Gospel and people now curse the name Dean whenever things go wrong.
viii.
Dean dies. The Heat of the Moment plays. Sam wakes up again.
iv.
Jack is God.
Sam is a hunter.
Dean is Death.
Forever parallel, because life is full of cruel ironies, the brothers only meet in brief moments when Sam is able to summon him with bell, book and candle. It's their way of a family reunion. Dean's there to guard Sam and Eileen's son when he becomes sick, when the boy goes on hunts with Jody and Donna's girls.
A whole new generation of hunters knows that Death is a gruff figure who leads them to the afterlife in an Impala with classic rock hissing from the speakers. In the back seat is a dark-haired man with a crooked blue tie.
"Is that all there is?" one of Sam's descendants ask.
Dean grins. He pushes down on the gas pedal.
x.
In the end, while roads diverge and the game is played out in countless permutations—Dean says yes to Michael, Sam becomes the Boy-King of Hell, Dean never makes a deal for his soul, John raises them to be normal boys, Chuck gets bored and finds new characters to torture, Cas stays human, the universes don't bleed into each other, just somewhere, somehow—
Dean drives the Impala on a road that reaches the horizon. Sam is going over his notes for a case Eileen found, talking on the phone with Jack. Cas is in the back seat, looking out the window with his Grace crackling over his skin.
Kansas plays on the radio.
They carry on.