Epilogue – The Summit: Earthly Paradise
But Virgil had deprived us of himself,
Virgil, the gentlest father, Virgil, he
To whom I gave my self for salvation.
And even all our ancient mother lost
Was not enough to keep my cheeks, though washed
with dew, from darkening again with tears.
~ Canto XXX, lines 49–54
Dean stared out the window without really making sense of anything that lay beyond the pane of glass. He had just about gotten to that level of drunk where things stopped making sense anyway. The sort of drunk that far outreaches those sappy assholes who pay $15 a martini to get shit-faced and rub up against each other until they have stranger-sex in a bathroom at a club. He was pretty sure he was getting to the level of drunk where you're beyond caring that you're doing irreparable damage to your liver. A tiny smile quirked his lips when he thought of how pissed Cas would be when he found out he'd have to fix Dean's liver again. And then the smile slipped from his face when the alcohol slipped away in an unfortunate second of clarity and he remembered.
Cas wouldn't be pissed. Cas wouldn't be anything. Cas was gone. Dean threw the end of his glass of whiskey down his throat and reached for the next full bottle.
He should have seen it coming, really. Dean Winchester couldn't have people he cared about. The world wouldn't allow him. Fuck, the only reason why he and Sammy were still together was that God was too much of a fucking sadist to just take pity on them and either leave them the fuck alone or just let them both die. Sammy was pretty much the only person he had now, and although his brother was here with him … he wasn't really. Dean couldn't entirely blame him, much as he might want to. He'd gotten a taste, just a little finger-lick really, of what it would be like to care that much about someone and then have it all yanked away, and he wasn't exactly handling it like a champ.
A glance at the clock told Dean that he really should be sleeping, if for no other reason than to give his body a few hours to burn off the booze before he had to be alert enough to drive. But he couldn't. Three weeks out of Monster Land and he still couldn't sleep more than an hour or two a night; even then, he kept waking up expecting to feel Cas's warm palm on his chest, his slim body pressed tight against Dean's back. And once that illusion shattered around him, there was no sense trying to get to sleep again. He'd never been able to get back to sleep when he had nightmares of Hell, either. Except that these weren't really nightmares, and that was half of what was fucking with his head. Part of him tried to stay awake as long as possible so he wouldn't have to live in that half-awake place where Cas was still with him, but the other half ached to sleep for days just to have the chance to feel the angel's breath against his skin again.
Dean stared down at that the sudden puddles of wetness on his t-shirt, completely blank and confused. When it dawned on him that they had dripped from his chin, he swiped a hand across his face, far more astonished than he should have been to realize they were tears. That clinched it for him: if Dean Winchester had gotten so drunk that he had turned into a sniveling teenage girl crying over her boyfriend, then it was time to put down the booze.
Staggering to the bathroom, Dean left a trail of clothing that he couldn't really be bothered to pick up. In the bathroom, Dean shucked his boxer shorts and took a moment to stand in front of the mirror naked, just gazing at his reflection. On some levels, the man in the mirror was who he had always been. Chaos, combat, and loss had been a part of Dean's life for so long that he was pretty damn certain that the average person wouldn't be able to see another layer on his face. But Dean saw it. His eyes had a few more wrinkles at the corners. His cheekbones stood out a little more from over a year of little food and the ravages of detox. The hollows under his eyes told of both his lack of sleep and his reacquaintance with his drinking problem. Below his chin, he was remarkably untouched. Maybe it was all of Cas's healing, maybe it was the fact that he had made it out of most of his fights in Purgatory without letting his opponent get the upper hand on him, but his skin was as smooth as it had ever been. Well, as smooth as it had been since Cas had needed to start healing him on a regular basis a few years ago. He ran a hand across his chest, feeling the planes of muscle and trying to imagine how it would have felt to someone who had never had a male lover before. How it would feel to someone like Cas, who could see and hear and feel things Dean couldn't even imagine.
Because the heavy snores from the other room told Dean that he wouldn't be interrupted by his little brother any time soon, he indulged himself in a moment to turn this way and that, looking at his body from a few different angles. He hadn't really thought much about his physique as it might appear to a sexual partner in a long time. Dean kept himself in good shape – didn't really have much of a choice – and he knew he was pretty damn attractive when he wanted to be. And between the physicality of hunting and regular sex, Dean knew every inch of his body and how it worked. As such, he didn't really think much about how his body looked to someone else since women's reactions usually told him all he needed to know. After being with Cas, though, he felt different. Just the fact that it involved Cas made it different. He turned his back to the mirror and glanced over one shoulder and then the other, trying to hear in his mind what Cas would say about how he looked. Probably something incredibly awkward followed by something insanely blunt but touching.
Thinking about Cas and touching made his cheeks heat, a mixture of embarrassment and arousal. Dean couldn't help but think how strange it was to experience that pleasant swoop of sexual thrill in his belly when thinking about the angel. Even if Dean had ever had any inkling that he would go for a dude, if you had told him even a month or two before it actually happened that said dude would be Cas, he would have laughed right in your freakin' face. Removed from all the context, the idea of Heaven's Most Socially Awkward Angel indulging in 'sins of the flesh' would still seem pretty damn ridiculous to him if he didn't have the sensations of the angel's body burned into his memory. Dean supposed that anyone who had ever wondered if he might be a switch hitter – and he knew that there had been a few who wondered – would never have imagined that the person to get him to cross to the other side of the plate would be someone like Cas. Cas, who didn't understand the concept of sexuality enough to understand porn. Cas, who had gone into his potential first sexual encounter not with excitement but with complete white-knuckled terror. But to Dean, all he could think was that he was also Cas, who threw away everything comfortable and reassuring just to stand up next to Dean when he asked for support. And Cas, who tried so damn hard to do whatever he thought was the right thing no matter what it cost him. And Cas, who came every time Dean asked for help. And Cas, who looked at him and saw someone righteous, someone beautiful. Cas, who took his battered and broken soul from darkness and raised him into the light. It wasn't anything to do with Cas being a woman or a man. It was about Cas being his salvation.
Eyes beginning to fill again, Dean slid his hand up to cover his left shoulder. In a flash, he felt the shock of it like a punch to the gut: the hand print on his shoulder was gone. He didn't know when it had disappeared, whether it had been one of Cas's night time healings or something about being torn away and leaving Cas in Purgatory, but the skin on his left shoulder was now as smooth and unmarked as his right. Dean lifted shaking fingers to splay out over where the print used to be, practically nauseous when his fingers confirmed what the mirror told him. He squeezed his eyes shut and fought against a wave of anguish. He had hated the damn thing when he first noticed it branded onto his skin when he crawled out of that grave, but over the years it he'd come to be fond of it. It had come to feel like a link between them, a tangible lifeline between him and the first being other than Sam who believed that Dean was worth saving. The fact that it was gone now not only left Dean feeling hollow but hammered home the truth he had been trying to drink away: Cas was gone for good this time. And Dean had left part of himself tethered to the angel back in Purgatory.
In the weeks that blurred by, Dean tried to crawl back out of the bottle in the only way that had ever succeeded: by burying himself in the work. Telling himself that the only way to make up for Cas getting left behind was to be the best damn hunter he could, and right now that meant figuring out what the fuck was going on with the chain of natural disasters that seemed to link up with all the kidnappings. The signs of demonic possession were obvious but the link between the people being kidnapped was … well, quite frankly, there wasn't one. Except that there had to be. There's no way that any of this shit could just be a coincidence. Coincidences didn't exist when it came to supernatural shit; at least, not in Dean's experience. But he just couldn't seem to make sense of it.
Dean scrubbed at his eyes as he stared at the screen of Sam's laptop, glaringly bright in the dark motel room. A flash of lightning from outside made him blink several times to try to rid his eyes of the after-burn image of the web page he'd been looking at a moment ago. Ever since coming back from Purgatory, he'd started to feel his age which, for a hunter, was actually relatively over-the-hill. He really needed to get some sleep. Lightning flashed outside again and the downpour lashed even more heavily against the windows. Sighing, Dean made to move the computer off his lap, resigning himself to the fact that he needed to get at least a couple hours of shut-eye regardless of how frustrated he was by the dead end. The next burst of lightning made Dean double-take. He'd have sworn that something had appeared outside the motel window. Something that couldn't possibly have been there.
Something … someone that Dean had been sure he'd seen by the side of the rode earlier.
Every ounce of Dean's self-control funneled into willing his legs to move him across the room without stumbling. His breath caught in his chest, banging against his ribs like there was a bird in there trying to escape. If his eyes had been tired before, they'd forgotten their fatigue in exchange for a laser-keen focus as Dean scanned the spaces between rain drops just outside the window where he'd been certain he'd seen … he'd seen Cas.
But … that was impossible ….
"Dean?" Sam's voice, heavy with sleep, came to him from the bed behind him. "What's going on? You all right?"
He couldn't help but stare, dumbfounded, out the window.
"I dunno," he mumbled after a moment. "I think … I just saw something."
"Uh … you saw what?" Sam mumbled.
Dean's lips worked soundlessly for a moment while he gathered himself to say the word out loud. "Cas."
"Cas? Where?"
Hauling his body out of bed, Sam padded over to where Dean stood still gazing out the window, searching for some sign that what he'd seen hadn't been a mirage of his mind, twisted in grief.
"Right there," he said, nodding to the space just outside the window. And then, almost unwillingly, he admittedly, "A-a-and then earlier, on the road. I feel like I'm seeing him."
Sam paused for thought and Dean knew that he was just trying to find a way to be kind about what he was going to say. "That's … not possible. You said it yourself: you made it out, he didn't right?"
Dean nodded, trying to keep his face stony. Dean made it out; Cas didn't. He knew it was the truth, and yet, the last few hours were making him doubt everything he knew.
"I tried so damn hard to get us out of there."
"I know you did," Sam responded quickly.
Not able to bring himself to look in his brother's eyes and see sympathy and pity, Dean strode across the room, clenching his eyes shut so he didn't have to see the empty space beyond the window. "You know, I could have pulled him out. I just don't understand why he didn't try harder."
"Dean," Sam said in his come-on-now-let's-be-reasonable voice. "You did everything you could."
"Yeah, then why do I feel like crap?"
Sam shrugged and heaved a small sigh. "Survivor's guilt?"
Dean very nearly rolled his eyes. Their entire freakin' lives were made of survivor's guilt.
"If you let it, this is going to keep messing with you; you've got to walk past it."
Sam clapped a hand to his shoulder for a moment of solidarity – all Dean could really stand – before shuffling off towards the bathroom. Dean just nodded, balled his fists at his side, and tried not to let too much of his last moments of Purgatory spool before his eyes.
Walk past it. He had to just keep walking.