Chapter 7
Everything's going to be ok in the end. If it's not ok, then it's not the end.
(Oscar Wilde)
Thursday. The last shovel was done, Dean met a simple wooden coffin. The metal tip bored through the rotten box in one hit and brought out a pile of decayed bones, clothed in a white lace dress. A view darker as a stomach could bear, but akin and almost banal in Dean's death-adjusted soul. It had something calming to see the end in sight. It had daily life.
Regarding the dead woman for a moment, as if he wanted to memorize the picture, before nobody would ever see it again, he eventually destroyed the rest of the coffin's top. A musty steam of age-old dust and ugly scent streamed against him and, just a bit, he had to cover his face with his sleeve, as if he was scared dead dust would kill him. Eventually he reached into one of the bags of his brown leather jacket and took out a box of salt. In the end also a generous amount of gasoline as an accelerant and the haunting would come to an end eventually.
But before he could throw his match into the coffin, standing above it and holding on, as if he would think about changing his mind, something bashed against him like an invisible power. With his back first he fell into the grave that threatened to become his, with him the match that inflamed the air around him like an explosion in a big cloud of burning gas.
"DEAN," he heard the angel cry, but wasn't able to see him. Everything around Dean was bright and yellow and red and hot and dead. Desperately he embraced the walls of the wooden box and strained he tried to free himself from the flames' hell. He felt how the fire burned into his clothes and tried to melt his skin. Sweat dripped down his throat and pain seized his conscious. The shrill light of the fire gleamed in the eyes of his distorted face and fiery heat pulled on his skin, until it threatened to burst open.
Then he felt a hand on his shoulder, far too quickly and barely noticed, he found himself on a soft bed of grass, which seemed so much colder than before. His body shouted pain and burn, his instinct demanded getting up. He turned and braced himself on his arm, coughing and almost done, his lungs exhausted by thick smoke and hot air and panic.
A shrill light exploded the remains of Allison Campbell, who had tried a lot, but came too late. Beside him sat Castiel, the sleeve of his trench coat charred like the skin of his arm and hand. Sitting on same grass, staring into the flames, which had endangered and rescued them. A paradox-on. And however, beautiful to look at and catching your eyes like almost nothing else on this planet was capable of. An element, which enabled life and destroyed it. Eliminated and recreated.
Because as you go through water, I want to be by your side, that the streams shall not drown you, and as you go into fire, you shall not burn, and the flame shall not singe you.
(The Bible, Jesaja 43.2)
Dean's eyes glowed in the bright flaring flames of the burning bones of a murderer and something inside him seemed to turn to ashes. Barely even able to picture, what would have happened, if Castiel hadn't been here. A second time rescue from hellish agony by an angel, who probably earned more rating. More respect. And gratitude. His life was hardly worth anything and not a bit good, but it was his. And Castiel had given it to him a second time.
And something changed. It was like he would lose something. But abandonment requires expectation, even when nobody could know, what was to expect. Because nothing in a caterpillar tells you it's going to be a butterfly. And whatever it was, quiet and secretly it sneaked into his tortured self, invisible like a ghost of the world between.