To Be a Rock
Title: To Be a Rock
Pairings: Sam/OFC, Dean/Castiel
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: mentions of character death, spoilers through 5.10
Summary: Afterward, the world moves on, scars heal, and Sam and Dean do what they do.
A month after the world doesn't end, Sam meets a girl in a bar in South Dakota.
They're not doing anything in particular in South Dakota. They haven't been doing anything in particular since the battle that left a flat stretch of desert where three small towns in Texas used to be. Just following the highway where it leads them. Dean drives, and Sam hasn't complained once about being demoted back to shotgun.
But they stop at this bar, anyway, and it's cool and dark and cleaner than bars of its type usually are. And there's this girl behind the counter.
Not a girl, really. She's closer to Dean's age than Sam's, but it's Sam she's looking at when she pours them cheap beers on tap. She's got a soft cap of golden-brown hair and a sweet, round face, and when she smiles at him her teeth are white and crooked.
Sam smiles back. Dean hasn't even bothered to ogle her. He hasn't bothered with much of anything since Michael's burning sword fell from his hands to shatter on the parched earth four weeks ago.
"You're Sam and Dean Winchester," she says. Her voice has a little bit of Texas in it, and it's not a question.
Dean rolls his beer in a slow circle on the bar napkin and ignores her. Sam brightens his smile a few degrees. "Yeah."
She touches his hand. "Drinks are on the house."
Her name is Emily.
***
Most of the world still doesn't know. Plenty of them guess, sure, but they don't know. And what hunters are left aren't talking.
Emily lives over the bar. She inherited it from her father when he went down to a nasty coven three states over during the worst of it. There's a devil's trap etched above her front door and a knife under her pillow, and her collection of guns could rival the one in the trunk of the Impala. She's nothing like Jess or Madison; her eyes have the same bone-dry look Sam sees every time he looks at Dean, every time he looks in the mirror.
But she still knows how to laugh, and just for that, Sam could love her a little.
They get a room across the street, but after the first week, Sam ends up spending more nights than not in Emily's bed. Dean takes to sleeping in the backseat of the Impala.
Sam wants to protest, tell him it's bad for his back, tell him that he just saved the world and that at least should earn him a bed in a crappy motel room, but he doesn't.
Bobby's dead. So are Jo and Ellen, and a whole lot of people whose names Sam never learned. He can see their faces, sometimes, when he closes his eyes; shocky terrified features that blur together in the battle-glare. They haven't seen Castiel since that last day. Dean's baby is all he has left besides Sam, and Sam can't quite begrudge him the comfort of her steel-and-leather embrace.
Emily offers him the couch in her living room, but Dean just rolls his eyes and tells her to get back to banging his little brother.
She laughs and tells him she'll get right on that, and that's the first real smile Sam sees on Dean in months.
***
"You could stay," Emily tells him one night. They're both behind the bar, drying beer glasses and setting up before she opens. "If you wanted. You and Dean."
Dean's in a corner by the pool tables with a beer and the guitar that he acquired God-knows-where. It's acoustic, worn wood soft and pale in the light from the high window above his head. Between that and the faded jeans and leather jacket and the sawdust on the floor at his feet, he looks like a country singer. Incongruously, he's picking out 'Don't Fear the Reaper' in half-time. His eyes are closed, expression distant. He's actually not half-bad, and it makes Sam feel kind of weird that he has no idea where Dean learned to play.
He's watched his brother fall apart so many times and in so many different ways that he knows what it looks like. This is quieter than Dean's usual style, and sometimes Sam thinks the Apocalypse finally did what even Hell couldn't manage and burned all the fight out of him. He doesn't know how to fix that.
He looks down at the glass in his hand. "Yeah. Maybe."
***
"I was almost done with school," Sam tells her one morning. "Before all this."
It's a Monday, which is the one day the bar is closed. They're tangled up in her jersey knit sheets, still most of the way asleep. He hasn't talked about Stanford for a long time; it mostly seems like another life, like a three-year hallucination of normal in between long stretches of nightmare.
Emily traces the shape of his jaw with one slender finger. Her brown eyes are thoughtful. "You could go back."
"I don't know." Legally, he's still dead. A dead felon. That's not insurmountable, though, and he knows it. They both know it. Hunters do get out of the life sometimes. Not often, but it happens. "I could stay here with you," he says, only half-joking. "Learn to bar-tend."
Like Ellen, he thinks. Like Jo. If they hadn't died burning on the floor of a convenience store a year and a half ago, they might have rebuilt the Roadhouse. It's not what he dreamed about when he was a kid and itching to get out, but now it doesn't sound so bad. Quiet. He could get used to quiet.
"You could," Emily says, smiling, and draws him in for a kiss.
***
Dean plays his guitar, works on the Impala, and doesn't talk much. He hustles pool at some of the other bars in this one-horse town; never Emily's. They don't really need the money, but Sam thinks it's habit for him after all these years. Something comforting and familiar, scamming drunks out of their cash. He's still got his slow charm, but he mostly uses it on the middle-aged waitresses at the diner down the street these days. As far as Sam knows, he hasn't gone home with a single girl in all the time they've been here.
Every once in a while, Sam will catch him absently rubbing the spot on his shoulder where Castiel's handprint is burned into his skin. Not like it hurts; like it's some kind of touchstone.
Sometimes, he takes the Impala and disappears for days. He's not hunting, but Sam has no idea what it is he has been doing. Riding up and down the highway, maybe, letting the wind blow the thoughts clear of his head. Sam had Jess, once, and the promise of normal, but the road is the only home Dean has ever known.
"And the earth becomes my throne," Dean says enigmatically, when Sam remarks on this one night. They're sitting in the front seats of the Impala, parked beneath the neon 'Vacancy' sign of the motel. Both a little drunk, which is why they're talking about it at all.
Sam snorts. "That's poetic."
"That's Metallica," Dean says, and grins. "Develop some musical taste, Sam."
"Mullet rock," Sam mumbles against the lip of his beer, but doesn't complain when Dean slides the Black Album cassette into the tape player.
"At least it's not that emo shit that you listen to."
The guitars scream into the intro to 'Enter Sandman' and Sam closes his eyes for a second. He doesn't like Metallica, has never liked Metallica, but he's heard this album so many times that he could mouth the words in his sleep. They taste of home.
"Emily asked me to stay," he says after a while, eyes slitted to watch Dean's reaction. He doesn't stiffen or go still, but he does roll his head around to look at Sam, face impossible to read in the dark. The green glow of the neon light traces the line of his cheekbone, the stubble softening his jaw.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. You, too."
Dean's mouth slants into a smile beneath the dark hollows of his eyes. "That'd be cool," he says, and Sam knows it's not gonna happen. Not for Dean, anyway.
***
Hunters come in to the bar every now and again. Some of them recognize him and Dean. Sometimes that gets them free drinks and sometimes it gets them wary-eyed glares and veiled insults.
In November, Dean gets into his first bar fight in almost a year, with three grizzled hunters from Des Moines. Sam doesn't know what set it off, but from the way the oldest of the three spits in his face when he pulls him off Dean, he can guess.
He drags Dean out of the bar, slams him up against the brick wall. "What the hell are you doing?"
"Defending your honor, Princess."
Sam opens his mouth to snap something else, then stops. Dean's actually smiling--grinning--wicked and wild like Sam hasn't seen in years. Despite the lines bracketing his mouth and sliced into the corners of his eyes, he looks twenty-six again. Sam lets his reprimand slide out on a breath of air, lets go of Dean's coat. "Thanks a lot."
"Don't mention it," Dean says cheerfully. "Get back inside, Rick Blaine. I'm gonna take a walk."
"And by 'take a walk' you mean--"
"You know, one foot in front of the other? Forward motion?" Dean rolls his eyes and ducks out from under Sam's arm. "I gotta make a phone call. Bug off."
Sam runs through his mental list of people Dean might conceivably be calling at one AM. It isn't very long.
It's also not any of his business, and he's getting better with that, these days. He watches Dean saunter away down the empty street, then he shakes his head and goes inside to apologize to Emily.
As the door swings shut behind him, he thinks maybe he feels a rush of cool air, hears the flap of giant wings, but it's probably just his imagination.
***
"Is this what you always wanted to do?"
"Bartend?" Emily glances up at him. Her smile is a little too knowing. "I guess I just kind of fell into it. The family business, you know?"
"I guess," Sam says. His own family's business is tainted irrevokably with blood and sulfur, and even if he's finally managed to come to terms with it, it's not a life he'd wish on anybody else.
"It's not a bad life," she says gently. "Pass me that box of receipts, would you?"
Sam does, and she kisses his collarbone, the highest part of him that she can reach without standing on a stool. From this angle, he can see the pentacle inked into the pale skin of her shoulder, half-hidden by her hair. She smells good, shampoo and warmth, and the bar is comfortably dim, an early snow coming down lightly outside.
It really isn't such a bad life.
***
They spend Thanksgiving drinking beer and eating pie and watching the Turkey Bowl on Emily's old TV. Dean laughs at the commercials and throws chips at the screen, and he flops down on the couch when they all drink too much instead of stumbling back out to the Impala. Sam and Emily giggle all the way into the bedroom, bumping into walls and tripping over their own feet as they tumble into bed.
"Keep the sex noises down in there, I'm trying to sleep," Dean roars when the mattress squeaks obnoxiously, and Emily lets out a loud fake moan that has Sam smothering laughter into her cleavage.
He's happy, he thinks. He's happy.
***
The next morning, he comes into the kitchen to find a pot of coffee brewing and Dean sitting at the table, fully dressed, methodically cleaning his guns.
"Coffee's on the counter," he says without looking up.
"Yeah," Sam says. "I see that."
Dean grunts in response, but he looks focused rather than pissed, so Sam just pours himself a cup of coffee--good coffee, not the cheap diner crap he got used to growing up--and watches him. "So," he says eventually.
Dean's putting his Desert Eagle back together, quick and competent even though Sam's pretty sure he hasn't so much as touched a gun in the past eight months. He tucks it into its foam-lined case before looking up. "Rufus called. There's a haunting, sounds like, down in Utah."
Just like that, Sam's vaguely hungover good mood plummets. "Dean, we don't--"
Dean smiles up at him. There's gray in his hair now. Premature, yeah; he's only thirty-three, but still. "Sammy, I'm going."
I, not we.
"Dean, just hang on a second--"
Dean finishes packing his guns into the duffel and stands, heading toward the door like he knows Sam's gonna follow. Which he does, barefoot and wearing nothing but a pair of battered sweatpants.
"Dean," he says again when they reach the bottom of the stairs. "Stay. Please. You could stay."
Come with me. You could come with me. Just--to hell with Dad and his crusade.
It's like the inverse echo of a conversation they had, more than ten years ago now, standing in front of a bus station in the sweltering heat of a West Texas August. Except that Dean wouldn't come with him then, and he never asked Sam to stay.
It's cold down here. They'll turn the heat up when they open the bar later, him and Emily, and somehow Sam never even noticed when he decided not to leave. Dean did, though. Dean's always noticed things like that.
"Come on, man, it's over. You don't have to do this anymore. You could--"
"What? Settle down? You know I can't do that, Sam. I'm not cut out for that kind of thing." He doesn't sound bitter, not the way he used to. Now it's just matter-of-fact.
The worst part is that it's true. It wasn't always. Sam can remember the djinn, the fragile hope of Ben and Lisa Braedon, Dean's quiet contentment when they stopped someplace long enough for him to spread his junk across the motel room and work on his car, but now--
Now, he doesn't think Dean remembers how to want anything that isn't the open road. The idea of him driving those lonely highways by himself is enough to make Sam's chest ache.
Like he's reading Sam's mind, Dean rolls his eyes. "I'm not gonna drive off a cliff or anything, dude. Relax."
He shoulders the door open, and Sam's retort dies on his lips. It's snowing again, dry and cold, flurries dancing across the frozen ground. The streets are empty, and there's the Impala parked by the curb opposite them.
Standing in front of it like a pale statue is a solemn-faced man in a tan trenchcoat.
"Dean," Sam whispers, and Dean grins, shouldering his duffel.
"Yeah, funny thing. I guess if you save the world, they'll give you your own personal guardian angel. How about that?"
He goes to clap Sam on the shoulder, and Sam hauls him into a tight hug, heedless of the cold and the way the zipper of Dean's jacket scrapes his bare chest. "Take care of yourself," he murmurs into his brother's hair. "I mean it."
"You're such a girl," Dean grumbles, but he's hugging back just as hard, warm, solid and familiar. "Don't need to break my ribs, Sasquatch. I'll be back."
"You promise?" Sam says, and he knows he sounds like a little kid but he can't bring himself to care. Dean doesn't even laugh at him.
"Yeah. I promise." He pulls away, quirks an eyebrow. "Better go cuddle up with that pretty girl of yours before you catch your death of cold."
It is cold, and Sam can feel goosebumps prickling across his skin, but he still stands in the open doorway and watches Dean cross the street to where his angel is waiting. He stops in front of Castiel, says something too low for Sam to hear, and Castiel reaches up to touch his face, solemn and oddly tender, before crossing over to the other side of the Impala.
Dean half-turns, lifts a hand to Sam, and then he's sliding into the driver's side of his car. The engine starts with a familiar rumble, and Sam steps back inside as Dean pulls away from the curb. Even with the windows closed, he can hear the opening strains of Led Zeppelin IV. Stairway to Heaven.
He has to laugh.
***
Emily's still most of the way asleep when Sam crawls back into bed. She startles a little when he wraps an arm around her waist and presses himself into the soft heat of her body. "Jesus! You're freezing. Where were you?"
"Outside," Sam murmurs against her neck, smoothing a hand over the round curve of her hip, the soft swell of her belly. "Dean left."
She rolls over, squirming around until she can face him, eyes sleepy and concerned. "Is he okay?"
Sam thinks about Castiel sitting in the passenger seat of the Impala listening to Dean's headbanger music, about the way he cupped Dean's cheek and the smile on Dean's face, and he nods, pulls her in closer, closes his eyes. "Yeah," he says. "I think he'll be okay."
***
And as we wind on down the road
Our shadows taller than our soul
There walks a lady we all know
Who shines white light and wants to show
How everything still turns to gold
And if you listen very hard
The truth will come to you at last
When all are one and one is all
To be a rock and not to roll...
-Led Zeppelin
Stairway to Heaven
***
A/N: I don't usually write future-fic, but this one just wouldn't leave me alone :). If you enjoyed this fic, please take a minute to let me know.
Pairings: Sam/OFC, Dean/Castiel
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: mentions of character death, spoilers through 5.10
Summary: Afterward, the world moves on, scars heal, and Sam and Dean do what they do.
A month after the world doesn't end, Sam meets a girl in a bar in South Dakota.
They're not doing anything in particular in South Dakota. They haven't been doing anything in particular since the battle that left a flat stretch of desert where three small towns in Texas used to be. Just following the highway where it leads them. Dean drives, and Sam hasn't complained once about being demoted back to shotgun.
But they stop at this bar, anyway, and it's cool and dark and cleaner than bars of its type usually are. And there's this girl behind the counter.
Not a girl, really. She's closer to Dean's age than Sam's, but it's Sam she's looking at when she pours them cheap beers on tap. She's got a soft cap of golden-brown hair and a sweet, round face, and when she smiles at him her teeth are white and crooked.
Sam smiles back. Dean hasn't even bothered to ogle her. He hasn't bothered with much of anything since Michael's burning sword fell from his hands to shatter on the parched earth four weeks ago.
"You're Sam and Dean Winchester," she says. Her voice has a little bit of Texas in it, and it's not a question.
Dean rolls his beer in a slow circle on the bar napkin and ignores her. Sam brightens his smile a few degrees. "Yeah."
She touches his hand. "Drinks are on the house."
Her name is Emily.
***
Most of the world still doesn't know. Plenty of them guess, sure, but they don't know. And what hunters are left aren't talking.
Emily lives over the bar. She inherited it from her father when he went down to a nasty coven three states over during the worst of it. There's a devil's trap etched above her front door and a knife under her pillow, and her collection of guns could rival the one in the trunk of the Impala. She's nothing like Jess or Madison; her eyes have the same bone-dry look Sam sees every time he looks at Dean, every time he looks in the mirror.
But she still knows how to laugh, and just for that, Sam could love her a little.
They get a room across the street, but after the first week, Sam ends up spending more nights than not in Emily's bed. Dean takes to sleeping in the backseat of the Impala.
Sam wants to protest, tell him it's bad for his back, tell him that he just saved the world and that at least should earn him a bed in a crappy motel room, but he doesn't.
Bobby's dead. So are Jo and Ellen, and a whole lot of people whose names Sam never learned. He can see their faces, sometimes, when he closes his eyes; shocky terrified features that blur together in the battle-glare. They haven't seen Castiel since that last day. Dean's baby is all he has left besides Sam, and Sam can't quite begrudge him the comfort of her steel-and-leather embrace.
Emily offers him the couch in her living room, but Dean just rolls his eyes and tells her to get back to banging his little brother.
She laughs and tells him she'll get right on that, and that's the first real smile Sam sees on Dean in months.
***
"You could stay," Emily tells him one night. They're both behind the bar, drying beer glasses and setting up before she opens. "If you wanted. You and Dean."
Dean's in a corner by the pool tables with a beer and the guitar that he acquired God-knows-where. It's acoustic, worn wood soft and pale in the light from the high window above his head. Between that and the faded jeans and leather jacket and the sawdust on the floor at his feet, he looks like a country singer. Incongruously, he's picking out 'Don't Fear the Reaper' in half-time. His eyes are closed, expression distant. He's actually not half-bad, and it makes Sam feel kind of weird that he has no idea where Dean learned to play.
He's watched his brother fall apart so many times and in so many different ways that he knows what it looks like. This is quieter than Dean's usual style, and sometimes Sam thinks the Apocalypse finally did what even Hell couldn't manage and burned all the fight out of him. He doesn't know how to fix that.
He looks down at the glass in his hand. "Yeah. Maybe."
***
"I was almost done with school," Sam tells her one morning. "Before all this."
It's a Monday, which is the one day the bar is closed. They're tangled up in her jersey knit sheets, still most of the way asleep. He hasn't talked about Stanford for a long time; it mostly seems like another life, like a three-year hallucination of normal in between long stretches of nightmare.
Emily traces the shape of his jaw with one slender finger. Her brown eyes are thoughtful. "You could go back."
"I don't know." Legally, he's still dead. A dead felon. That's not insurmountable, though, and he knows it. They both know it. Hunters do get out of the life sometimes. Not often, but it happens. "I could stay here with you," he says, only half-joking. "Learn to bar-tend."
Like Ellen, he thinks. Like Jo. If they hadn't died burning on the floor of a convenience store a year and a half ago, they might have rebuilt the Roadhouse. It's not what he dreamed about when he was a kid and itching to get out, but now it doesn't sound so bad. Quiet. He could get used to quiet.
"You could," Emily says, smiling, and draws him in for a kiss.
***
Dean plays his guitar, works on the Impala, and doesn't talk much. He hustles pool at some of the other bars in this one-horse town; never Emily's. They don't really need the money, but Sam thinks it's habit for him after all these years. Something comforting and familiar, scamming drunks out of their cash. He's still got his slow charm, but he mostly uses it on the middle-aged waitresses at the diner down the street these days. As far as Sam knows, he hasn't gone home with a single girl in all the time they've been here.
Every once in a while, Sam will catch him absently rubbing the spot on his shoulder where Castiel's handprint is burned into his skin. Not like it hurts; like it's some kind of touchstone.
Sometimes, he takes the Impala and disappears for days. He's not hunting, but Sam has no idea what it is he has been doing. Riding up and down the highway, maybe, letting the wind blow the thoughts clear of his head. Sam had Jess, once, and the promise of normal, but the road is the only home Dean has ever known.
"And the earth becomes my throne," Dean says enigmatically, when Sam remarks on this one night. They're sitting in the front seats of the Impala, parked beneath the neon 'Vacancy' sign of the motel. Both a little drunk, which is why they're talking about it at all.
Sam snorts. "That's poetic."
"That's Metallica," Dean says, and grins. "Develop some musical taste, Sam."
"Mullet rock," Sam mumbles against the lip of his beer, but doesn't complain when Dean slides the Black Album cassette into the tape player.
"At least it's not that emo shit that you listen to."
The guitars scream into the intro to 'Enter Sandman' and Sam closes his eyes for a second. He doesn't like Metallica, has never liked Metallica, but he's heard this album so many times that he could mouth the words in his sleep. They taste of home.
"Emily asked me to stay," he says after a while, eyes slitted to watch Dean's reaction. He doesn't stiffen or go still, but he does roll his head around to look at Sam, face impossible to read in the dark. The green glow of the neon light traces the line of his cheekbone, the stubble softening his jaw.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. You, too."
Dean's mouth slants into a smile beneath the dark hollows of his eyes. "That'd be cool," he says, and Sam knows it's not gonna happen. Not for Dean, anyway.
***
Hunters come in to the bar every now and again. Some of them recognize him and Dean. Sometimes that gets them free drinks and sometimes it gets them wary-eyed glares and veiled insults.
In November, Dean gets into his first bar fight in almost a year, with three grizzled hunters from Des Moines. Sam doesn't know what set it off, but from the way the oldest of the three spits in his face when he pulls him off Dean, he can guess.
He drags Dean out of the bar, slams him up against the brick wall. "What the hell are you doing?"
"Defending your honor, Princess."
Sam opens his mouth to snap something else, then stops. Dean's actually smiling--grinning--wicked and wild like Sam hasn't seen in years. Despite the lines bracketing his mouth and sliced into the corners of his eyes, he looks twenty-six again. Sam lets his reprimand slide out on a breath of air, lets go of Dean's coat. "Thanks a lot."
"Don't mention it," Dean says cheerfully. "Get back inside, Rick Blaine. I'm gonna take a walk."
"And by 'take a walk' you mean--"
"You know, one foot in front of the other? Forward motion?" Dean rolls his eyes and ducks out from under Sam's arm. "I gotta make a phone call. Bug off."
Sam runs through his mental list of people Dean might conceivably be calling at one AM. It isn't very long.
It's also not any of his business, and he's getting better with that, these days. He watches Dean saunter away down the empty street, then he shakes his head and goes inside to apologize to Emily.
As the door swings shut behind him, he thinks maybe he feels a rush of cool air, hears the flap of giant wings, but it's probably just his imagination.
***
"Is this what you always wanted to do?"
"Bartend?" Emily glances up at him. Her smile is a little too knowing. "I guess I just kind of fell into it. The family business, you know?"
"I guess," Sam says. His own family's business is tainted irrevokably with blood and sulfur, and even if he's finally managed to come to terms with it, it's not a life he'd wish on anybody else.
"It's not a bad life," she says gently. "Pass me that box of receipts, would you?"
Sam does, and she kisses his collarbone, the highest part of him that she can reach without standing on a stool. From this angle, he can see the pentacle inked into the pale skin of her shoulder, half-hidden by her hair. She smells good, shampoo and warmth, and the bar is comfortably dim, an early snow coming down lightly outside.
It really isn't such a bad life.
***
They spend Thanksgiving drinking beer and eating pie and watching the Turkey Bowl on Emily's old TV. Dean laughs at the commercials and throws chips at the screen, and he flops down on the couch when they all drink too much instead of stumbling back out to the Impala. Sam and Emily giggle all the way into the bedroom, bumping into walls and tripping over their own feet as they tumble into bed.
"Keep the sex noises down in there, I'm trying to sleep," Dean roars when the mattress squeaks obnoxiously, and Emily lets out a loud fake moan that has Sam smothering laughter into her cleavage.
He's happy, he thinks. He's happy.
***
The next morning, he comes into the kitchen to find a pot of coffee brewing and Dean sitting at the table, fully dressed, methodically cleaning his guns.
"Coffee's on the counter," he says without looking up.
"Yeah," Sam says. "I see that."
Dean grunts in response, but he looks focused rather than pissed, so Sam just pours himself a cup of coffee--good coffee, not the cheap diner crap he got used to growing up--and watches him. "So," he says eventually.
Dean's putting his Desert Eagle back together, quick and competent even though Sam's pretty sure he hasn't so much as touched a gun in the past eight months. He tucks it into its foam-lined case before looking up. "Rufus called. There's a haunting, sounds like, down in Utah."
Just like that, Sam's vaguely hungover good mood plummets. "Dean, we don't--"
Dean smiles up at him. There's gray in his hair now. Premature, yeah; he's only thirty-three, but still. "Sammy, I'm going."
I, not we.
"Dean, just hang on a second--"
Dean finishes packing his guns into the duffel and stands, heading toward the door like he knows Sam's gonna follow. Which he does, barefoot and wearing nothing but a pair of battered sweatpants.
"Dean," he says again when they reach the bottom of the stairs. "Stay. Please. You could stay."
Come with me. You could come with me. Just--to hell with Dad and his crusade.
It's like the inverse echo of a conversation they had, more than ten years ago now, standing in front of a bus station in the sweltering heat of a West Texas August. Except that Dean wouldn't come with him then, and he never asked Sam to stay.
It's cold down here. They'll turn the heat up when they open the bar later, him and Emily, and somehow Sam never even noticed when he decided not to leave. Dean did, though. Dean's always noticed things like that.
"Come on, man, it's over. You don't have to do this anymore. You could--"
"What? Settle down? You know I can't do that, Sam. I'm not cut out for that kind of thing." He doesn't sound bitter, not the way he used to. Now it's just matter-of-fact.
The worst part is that it's true. It wasn't always. Sam can remember the djinn, the fragile hope of Ben and Lisa Braedon, Dean's quiet contentment when they stopped someplace long enough for him to spread his junk across the motel room and work on his car, but now--
Now, he doesn't think Dean remembers how to want anything that isn't the open road. The idea of him driving those lonely highways by himself is enough to make Sam's chest ache.
Like he's reading Sam's mind, Dean rolls his eyes. "I'm not gonna drive off a cliff or anything, dude. Relax."
He shoulders the door open, and Sam's retort dies on his lips. It's snowing again, dry and cold, flurries dancing across the frozen ground. The streets are empty, and there's the Impala parked by the curb opposite them.
Standing in front of it like a pale statue is a solemn-faced man in a tan trenchcoat.
"Dean," Sam whispers, and Dean grins, shouldering his duffel.
"Yeah, funny thing. I guess if you save the world, they'll give you your own personal guardian angel. How about that?"
He goes to clap Sam on the shoulder, and Sam hauls him into a tight hug, heedless of the cold and the way the zipper of Dean's jacket scrapes his bare chest. "Take care of yourself," he murmurs into his brother's hair. "I mean it."
"You're such a girl," Dean grumbles, but he's hugging back just as hard, warm, solid and familiar. "Don't need to break my ribs, Sasquatch. I'll be back."
"You promise?" Sam says, and he knows he sounds like a little kid but he can't bring himself to care. Dean doesn't even laugh at him.
"Yeah. I promise." He pulls away, quirks an eyebrow. "Better go cuddle up with that pretty girl of yours before you catch your death of cold."
It is cold, and Sam can feel goosebumps prickling across his skin, but he still stands in the open doorway and watches Dean cross the street to where his angel is waiting. He stops in front of Castiel, says something too low for Sam to hear, and Castiel reaches up to touch his face, solemn and oddly tender, before crossing over to the other side of the Impala.
Dean half-turns, lifts a hand to Sam, and then he's sliding into the driver's side of his car. The engine starts with a familiar rumble, and Sam steps back inside as Dean pulls away from the curb. Even with the windows closed, he can hear the opening strains of Led Zeppelin IV. Stairway to Heaven.
He has to laugh.
***
Emily's still most of the way asleep when Sam crawls back into bed. She startles a little when he wraps an arm around her waist and presses himself into the soft heat of her body. "Jesus! You're freezing. Where were you?"
"Outside," Sam murmurs against her neck, smoothing a hand over the round curve of her hip, the soft swell of her belly. "Dean left."
She rolls over, squirming around until she can face him, eyes sleepy and concerned. "Is he okay?"
Sam thinks about Castiel sitting in the passenger seat of the Impala listening to Dean's headbanger music, about the way he cupped Dean's cheek and the smile on Dean's face, and he nods, pulls her in closer, closes his eyes. "Yeah," he says. "I think he'll be okay."
***
And as we wind on down the road
Our shadows taller than our soul
There walks a lady we all know
Who shines white light and wants to show
How everything still turns to gold
And if you listen very hard
The truth will come to you at last
When all are one and one is all
To be a rock and not to roll...
-Led Zeppelin
Stairway to Heaven
***
A/N: I don't usually write future-fic, but this one just wouldn't leave me alone :). If you enjoyed this fic, please take a minute to let me know.