So Ends the Reprieve...

Dean awoke to the curious sound of insistent beeping. Even before he opened his eyes, he knew something was wrong. That familiar cold weight had settled in the pit of his stomach, making him feel ill at ease. The beeping was high pitched and electronic sounding. It was a painfully familiar sound, reminiscent of bad times, a hospital-sound. He dragged his eyes open, squinting at the light.

In a white room, on a single-size bed with white sheets, thirty-one year old Dean Winchester was laying half-asleep in his jeans, boots, dark blue tee and olive green flannel button-up. The room was bright with sunlight coming in the windows, and was utterly plain, painted in nothing but shades of white.

Dean rolled over, blinking his eyes to force them to focus and there, sitting on the edge of his bed, was Castiel, looking as young as the day they met.

The Angel smiled at him.

Dean bolted upright immediately, looking Cas over, barely believing what he was seeing.

"Cas?" he asked breathless.

"Dean," he greeted calmly.

Dean immediately pulled him in for a hug.

"You have no idea how good it is to see you, man," he laughed, teary-eyed into his shoulder. "I thought I'd lost you, I was so..." but Dean couldn't continue. There was that pesky beeping again... "Do you hear that?" Dean looked around the room, not really absorbing that its blankness didn't entirely make sense. No doors. No pictures. No clock. No nothing - just white. The beeping was constant in the background, and he squinted, listening more carefully. "What is that?"

Castiel didn't respond, he simply continued staring at Dean fondly.

"Don't you hear that?" Dean demanded.

The cold foreboding he used to get years ago shot through his body at once. He could feel it seeping from his stomach and chest up into his brain and out to his very fingertips.

Something wasn't right. Something in the way Cas was looking at him... It was beautiful sure, but also somehow unsettling.

It wasn't altogether... honest. It didn't feel real.

Suddenly the room shook around him, flickering like a ghost or apparition does when it is poised to disappear. Dean jumped up off the bed, his Hunter instincts kicking back into gear. He could almost swear that in that flicker he'd seen something, something all around them, something on the bed. He knows he saw it, he's sure, but it's almost as if he can't remember what it was - like a dream that fades instantly upon waking.

He stared around warily, "What was that?" he asked Cas. But Castiel only reached up and traced his fingers over Dean's face and lips.

"I love you, Dean."

Dean's brow furrowed at him, "Yeah... I love you too, Cas."

The light in the room flickered, and Dean's eyes shot around, killer instincts ready for a fight. But when he looked back to Cas and saw him still only smiling fondly, seemingly unaware of anything around them, Dean's heart began to sink. He looked once more around this impossibly white and clean room.

Now he saw it -

there was no door. Just windows on every wall, white plastic blinds slatted open to let in the impossibly pure white light.

Dean turned his eyes up to Cas' big blue ones, "You're young," he realized sadly. He was piecing it together slowly. "You're not real are you?" Cas looked apologetic, like he felt bad for Dean. He didn't answer, but Dean knew. Is this a dream? If so, it was both glorious, and cruel.

Suddenly, there was a familiar voice, a female voice, "I'm sorry, Dean. I tried to give you as much time as I could. To be with him."

He knew her voice. Dean turned and looked at her. Beautiful. She always was - pale, pretty, with dark hair and strangely empathetic eyes. Dean swallowed hard, "Tessa."

Tessa smiled kindly at Dean, "Hey."

Cas flickered, and disappeared, and Dean's eyes shot around the room in vein. "This isn't real... This is some kind of... hallucination?" he asked, realizing the truth.

She gazed on him sympathetically. "I'm afraid so. In the real world, it's been three days."

"It seems so... real." He glanced around at the room he now understood to be fantasy. "So..." he looked at Tessa for confirmation, "I'm dead. ...Again."

She nodded.

"I can't even remember when my real life ended and the illusion started..." Heis face screwed up with the effort of remembering, "After I buried Cas, I went to sleep. That's the last thing I remember. I guess that was it."

Tessa stared at him in sad disapproval of his estimation, and Dean couldn't miss that expression of pity.

"What? Since when are you sentimental about some guy kicking the bucket?" he tried to joke. But her expression remained. "Why are you looking at me like that?"

"I let this go too long. I should have taken you sooner."

"What?"

"You're confused."

"Can't blame a guy for being disoriented. This aint exactly the average Tuesday night." He tried again to joke, but Tessa continued to stare at him, now extremely concerned.

"Dean, you've been gone far longer than you think."

Dean's smile fell. He couldn't remember dying? How is that possible? He'd had plenty of death-related experience to draw from, and one thing he knew was that he sure as Hell remembered it every time. He wagered another guess, "Was it last year, the heart attack?"

Tessa shook her head. "You know it wasn't."

"No, it had to be after Cas died... I went to sleep, then I was here. That was it right?"

She looked at him, genuinely sad to break the illusion. "No. You know it wasn't Dean."

Dean fought against the realization trying to claw its way through. All that cold terror in the back of his mind, in the pit of his stomach, for the last forty years coming to the surface in one instance of momentous panic and confusion.

"Go back further," Tessa urged.

Dean shook his head, unwilling to believe that any part of the life he and Cas had lived was facsimile. "No."

"You're thirty one years old. You were in an accident, and you were gravely injured..." she tried to make him remember - he shook his head against it, his fists balling up tightly, arms pinned down at his sides. She stepped closer to him, her voice gentle, "There was a flood, and the house just couldn't take it-"

"No," he rejected it, shaking his head violently. It was too much, too much to handle. Thirty one had been years ago - so much had happened since then, important things...

"You slipped into a coma," she continued, gently but honestly, "and you never woke up."

Dean was loosing it, and Tessa could feel it - Dean can see it in his memory, feel it... when he'd woken up that first morning he'd felt the warm sheets, Cas' arm around him, the way he nuzzled into his face. He remembered the feel, the smell of Cas, the trembling of his fingers the first night they'd really been together. It had to be real.

But... It wasn't. He just... never woke up.

Dean collapsed onto the floor, knees buckling under him almost without his knowledge, hitting the cold white tile of a vacant hospital room. He saw his reflection in the metal panel on the door's base - he was young, he was thirty one.

Tessa crouched down beside him, a soothing hand on his back.

"It didn't happen? None of it? I never told him... We never..."

If Tessa'd had a heart to break it would've. She rarely knew the people she came to reap, almost never had a rapport with the person whose most intimate dreams and fears she would inevitably interrupt in that flash of hallucination as their lives gave out.

This was new for her, and that in and of itself was a rarity.

"It never happened. My whole life - my family's lives - none of it was real..." Dean fought against it one last time, trying to wrap his mind around the impossibility of the thing. His brow creased heavily, "No... It's not possible. It's been years. Decades-"

"For you," Tessa offered. "The mind does strange things in its last moments. In your mind you can live a whole lifetime in a minute. You can create yourself a whole world, if you give in to it."

Dean's heart felt like it was being squeezed in a vice covered in poison, crushing his chest while making all of the rest of his body slow and sick. He felt full of lead. He should have known - a happy ending was never in the cards for him. Not even a bittersweet one. His life of love and friendship - a lie. His brother, safe and loved - a lie. Maria - never even born.

How could so much be ripped away from him, in addition to his life? In addition to the chance to make it all right now that he finally understood... Unfair, he thought. So unfair.

"Death is always fair," Tessa answered his thoughts. "It comes to everyone, equally. It doesn't judge, it doesn't have favorites. It just is."

"You can save the speech," Dean bit. He just couldn't listen anymore. He took a deep breath. He closed off his heart, shut down his emotions as best he could letting it turn to anger and indignation and trying to pull himself from the floor to save a final shred of dignity. He gave Tessa a brave face. "Why would I do this to myself?"

"I don't know. Some of it is chemistry - sparks in a dying brain. Some of it is soul, wanting to help you feel comforted, complete. Maybe some of it is God. I couldn't say."

Dean shook his head, trying to keep his voice from warbling, "But now... all I can think about is..." He didn't dare say Castiel out loud, but she heard it nonetheless. And Dean knew she did. "I can't stop thinking about how I... loved him. What I never said."

He looked into her eyes and she saw what he wanted.

"Don't ask, Dean. We've been here before, you and I. You know there's nothing I can do but take you home. There is no second chance goodbye here. Everything gets left where it lies."

"If I could just tell him-"

"Dean," she laid her hand comfortingly on his cheek, "No."

He'd known that would be her answer. If nothing else, Tessa was a professional. You could always count on her to do her job. In his desperation to find some way to get back to Cas, if even for a moment his eyes darted around the room, as if looking for him in every corner, just in case. He cocked his head, squinting at Tessa, "Why can't I see him? Why can't I see the real world, like before, like the first time you and I met?" She looked as though she didn't want to answer. Dean continued, "I just want to look at him. And I want to see Sammy. But this... what the Hell is this place?"

Tessa sighed, knowing he wouldn't give it up. "Death is different for everyone. And you're one of the few people to find out, it tends to be different every time." Dean thought about that a moment, and she watched his wheels turn, "You made this. To protect yourself."

"From what?"

"The truth."

Dean didn't bother to fight that logic - he knew she was right. "Tessa, please," he barely got the words out and held the tears in simultaneously, it felt a nearly impossible task. "Show me him, one last time. Let me see Cas, and Sammy and Bobby, one last time and I promise I'll go with you."

Tessa cocked her head in pity, "Dean, you'll go with me either way." And it was true. "You have no hand here and you know it."

"Fine, I have no leverage. Just do it anyway, please."

Tessa took a deep breath. She examined this freckled, obviously fallible man before her, and after a moment of consideration she closed her eyes, shaking her head.

How Dean Winchester, of all people, managed to always get his way with Death and the like, she would never understand.