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Dean had barely heard Jack shut his bedroom door behind him when he feels, more than he actually sees, Sam wheel on him. The air in the bunker’s kitchen has fallen at least three degrees in the time it takes Sam to turn around, somehow managing to look colder, further away, the closer he comes.
“Don’t look at me like that, Sam. You don’t have the right to look at me like that.”
The words are tossed out into the distance between them like a struck match set to gasoline. It was the wrong thing to say – probably the worst thing to say. If he’s honest, Dean knew that before he said it. He’s started doing this a lot, lately. It’s almost a reverse filter, goading Sam until the weight of abject disappointment replaces the deep lines of worry that have carved themselves onto his features. Disappointment is so much easier to live with.
Dean knows his brother the same way he knows how to write his own name, how to tie his own shoelaces, how to load and fire a pistol. Not something innate, but something learned, through necessity and his father’s looming expectations, long before his memories were anything other than fragments slotted loosely together with the haze of young childhood. To Dean, it all feels like breathing.
Of course his taunt works: Sam’s eyes start to blaze as he pulls himself up to his full height, the way he did when he was eighteen and righteous, and looking down at John with an air of sheer certainty in their father’s inferiority that Dean never could quite manage to replicate.
That same glare is focused on Dean now, Sam stepping up to him until his whole world shrinks to the image of pure contempt standing before him, “No right. I have no right? Dean, if I have anything at all I have the right to look at you like that.” The noise he makes – a laugh? A scoff? – would sound cold if he didn’t currently look like every inch of him was burning from the inside out.
“Because since you met the kid, you’ve been looking at Jack an awful lot like dad spent over twenty years looking at me. You’re treating him worse . And for the life of me, Dean, I don’t know why .”
“You know why . Cas –”
“No.” Sam cuts him off, staring him down like he’d gone through this argument in his head a million times already, and like fuck was he going to let Dean put him through it in real life too, “Don’t you dare put what you’re doing to Jack on Cas. He was my friend, and I won’t let you do that to him. I will not let you disrespect him like that, not to me.
“Because you know what, Dean? You are so full of shit. Because I do, actually, know you. And the last time someone you loved died trying to save their cursed kid from someone, what did you do?”
There’s a siren ringing somewhere, a steadily building wail in his ears that bounces around his skull, scrambling his senses.
Don’t look now .
He blinks, hard.
Stop listening.
It’s loud enough that Dean wonders how Sam is still standing in front of him, unflinching.
“Don’t.” He starts, voice barely above a whisper. Dean can’t hear himself at all, God, that fucking siren , “Sammy, please. Trust me. You don’t wanna do this, man.”
Hearing the nickname does nothing at all except to spur Sam on. “ You protected me, Dean!”
His words are sharp in a way reserved only for broken things. Watching him, Dean is suddenly entirely certain that his brother’s powers never left, because right now he’d swear to every higher being he never believed in that the ground beneath their feet shakes with every syllable that Sam spits in his direction.
“ YOU cared for me when Dad could barely stand to look at me. You were my parent when he couldn’t - wouldn’t - be one. You held me, and you fed me, and you told me none of it was ever my fault. What happened to you, man? Now you’re in his shoes, you figure Dad was right all along?”
The understanding that belies Sam’s final barb barely registers in Dean’s mind, despite the fact it would normally have him flinching away, spluttering for a rebuke between a loaded “ what do you mean by that?”
There isn’t really much use in denying anything now. A dig from his brother in the middle of an argument is likely the nearest he’ll get to anyone ever saying that Castiel was anywhere close to being Dean’s . So he lets it go. Honey mixed with venom is still sweet.
Dean’s been staring at a cracked tile on the kitchen wall somewhere past Sam’s left shoulder, in pointed silence, for about ten seconds when Sam shoves him hard.
The stumbling step backwards he takes serves only to make him look up, force him to look Sam in the eye again, “Look at me, Dean. Look me in the eye and tell me Mom died because of me . Tell me that was my fault, too.”
Instead, Dean lets his eyes close entirely, trying his best to focus on his own breathing, on ignoring the sirens and slowing his heart. “I can’t do that, Sammy. I won’t do that. Not to you.”
Sam scoffs now, really scoffs, in a way that Dean thought had died with their father. He winces away from the weight of it. He’s never heard him sound so - so disgusted, “Then you’re either a liar or a hypocrite, Dean. Cas would be fucking ashamed of you.”
Sam almost looks surprised, like he hadn’t quite expected himself to actually take a blow that low, but there are no apologies that follow it. Instead, he sets his jaw, locking in the truth of his words, and turns to leave. Dean almost lets him go.
It’d be easier to just watch him walk away, to let Sam believe that Dean is nothing more than a shitty fake copy of his own shitty dead dad. He did, after all, spend a couple decades trying to practice exactly that act. He always was a fucking terrible actor.
Dean knows his own faults by heart, but he never could quite make John’s fit him right. They never stuck, and as he watches his rolling storm of a brother stalk out the kitchen of the only home they’ve ever really had, Dean is pretty sure he’ll be no better at emulating them now.
“I can’t do it, Sam”
Almost reluctantly, Sam pauses in the doorway. He keeps his back to Dean, either unwilling or unable to fully commit to hearing him out, holding the door frame like the chipped paint beneath his white-knuckled hand is the last thing keeping him sane and standing. For all Dean knows, it might be.
“I can’t look at him – I can’t look at Jack because when I do, I don’t just see Cas. I see her .”
Sam looks a couple inches closer to walking out. Like a fog has cleared and the weight of expectation has been lifted off his shoulders. Like he’s given up.
His voice is as light as it is sharp, “A girl , Dean? You’re actually going to try and make this about a girl?”
The siren that’s been blaring throughout their whole conversation abruptly quiets, and Dean is drowning. Shame fills his lungs until his ears ring and he chokes on the weight of the words clawing their way up his throat. He’s going under, attempting to hold back a tsunami with a bucket while his little brother watches with an indifference more painful than his derision.
When he speaks, Dean pitches his voice low in an attempt to disguise the raw edge it has taken on, as if the name had been physically torn from him, entirely unbidden.
“Emma.”
The name feels almost foreign on his tongue, years of turning over each syllable in the privacy of his mind – again and again - leaving it a stranger to sound. There’s a shining, glittering, second where the world seems a little lighter on Dean’s shoulders. The air surrounding him fills his lungs easier, as if in thanks for this small act of remembrance, speaking her name aloud into it again.
“ Who ?” The confusion in Sam's voice turns into something more incredulous as he finally turns around fully, recognition sparking behind his eyes, “The Amazon ?”
“The kid , Sam!” Something about the disbelief in Sam’s tone has Dean's own turning hard edged and clipped, a simmering anger chasing away that which was choking him before, “the three-day-old girl! My kid ! That’s who , Sam!
“Because if Jack- if he can spring up full grown like a fucking replicant – just like her — with actual, real life Satan for a father, and he’s still worth saving? Because he’s just as much of Kelly as he ever could be of Lucifer, and she was human, and she was good , and she was kind . If that’s all true, Sammy, then why wasn’t I enough to save Emma? Riddle me that!”
“Dean, what ?” To his credit, Sam looks genuinely taken aback. In any other situation, any normal conversation, Dean would be congratulating himself. Maybe he can still hide things from his little brother. For now, the thought is as bitter as it is lonely.
“Where’s this even coming from?” Sam continues, oblivious, “I know you, and you haven’t thought about the amazon thing in years.”
He even looks like he believes what he’s saying.
It hurts more than it has any business hurting, and for once Dean allows himself to curse their father. He would raise Sam a hundred times over if it meant that he could protect him again from even a fraction of their childhoods, but in leaving that to him, John had robbed Dean of a brother. Robbed him of a true confidant, clothed every interaction he and Sam had with layers upon layers of duty and responsibility, until there was never any hope of Sam being able to see the person that Dean was beneath it all. Only a little boy draped into the shape of a mother, a brother in a father’s clothes.
You can never truly know your parents, and Sam always could see straight through John.
Dean refocuses his eyes onto the fluorescent lights above them, staring until he knows it will leave dark spots in his vision when he looks away. Turning his gaze to Sam, afterimage smudges darkening Dean’s view of his face, he’s hit by the thought of whether this is something like how his brother sees him . A familiar mosaic of the known and the censored.
“I think about her every time I go to Jody’s.” Dean’s voice holds the cadence of a razor, cold and biting, “Why do you think I always try to meet the girls at a diner? Christ, Sam, why do you think I go all the way to Sioux Falls every month to see Claire just to sleep at a motel, when Jody’s couch is right there ?”
“I just thought —” Dean cuts him off with a laugh that comes out much more like a bark. There’s a near manic glint to his eyes as he shrugs on the façade he’s worn as armor for years, squaring his shoulders back, and pasting on a smile so almost there that Sam looks visibly unnerved.
“What? You thought I was too picky to sleep on a couch?” His voice grates higher into a self-mockery, “yeah, ‘I’m absolutely sure I’d rather play Russian roulette on my chances with bedbugs at the cheapest motel within ten miles than sleep on your sofa that’s the size of a twin size bed, Jody!’ They’re smarter than that, Sam. Honestly, I thought you were too. They’re all just too polite to say it to my face”
Dean raises his eyes to Sam and allows his brother to actually see him, for the first time in what feels like years. Maybe it has been. “I can’t be there, Sammy. Not like that, not like I’m part of their family.”
He stares down at the concrete floor like he’ll find salvation in the cracks. The ringing in his ears is a too-loud reminder that his salvation is dead and burned.
“The time before last that I was there, Claire, she, uh, she said my name weird. Left the ‘d’ in it hanging too long when she was saying goodbye, like she was gonna call me da- like she was gonna call me something else.” The shame rushes in again, his words swimming and stuttering between his teeth, “I felt like I was dying, Sam. I almost didn’t call her when I got home, because of it. I don’t deserve that, not from her. And she wouldn’t even think to say it, not if she knew .”
Dean steps back again until he hits the cool tile, squeezing his eyes shut hard until green and purple swallow the dark, trying desperately to ground himself as he sinks to the floor. He can feel Sam’s gaze like it’s a physical thing, still underpinned with reluctance and confusion, but softer now at the edges. Harder to face.
“The worst part is that I didn’t kill her.”
“ What ?”
He can imagine Sam’s face, all scrunched brows and twisted mouth, without bothering to look up. Instead, he presses his fingertips to the concrete, hard enough that his nails start to buckle under the pressure. Eventually, he touches upon a dent in the concrete – a tangible indentation of the night Dean had drunkenly pulled out his poker cards and challenged Cas to a game at the kitchen table. Cas had been so happy when he finally bested Dean that he’d momentarily forgotten his own strength, pushing his chair back with enough force to leave two little valleys carved into the concrete in his wake. Dean wonders idly at how long he could go between mentioning these little reminders until Sam would be convinced that, like Emma, he’d simply forgotten about Castiel altogether.
“I never looked at her and knew for sure I couldn’t save her. Not once, not even back then. All I saw in her was me.” Dean’s barely audible, all the fight in the world drained right out of him, “She had my tells , Sammy. God, did you really think I was stupid enough not to know she was lying to me? Do you? I knew because she chewed her lip and played with the hem of her shirt the same fucking way that I did when I was fourteen and trying to lie my way into keeping you fed.
“They told her she was only made in their image, as their weapon. But she— she was mine , Sam. And I let her die. Emma was my kid, I was her dad , and I didn’t save her. ”
He’s struck, for a moment, by the fact Emma’s whole life was lived in a world where Dean thought Castiel dead. Struck again, by the fact he never told him about her. Not even in purgatory. He thinks Cas should’ve known, now, and the weight of that settles unyieldingly in the pit of his stomach.
It takes everything in Dean to lift his head, to say his next words to anyone except the ground. He can’t look at Sam, not yet. Not when he knows he’ll be able to read every emotion on his face, every judgement.
He keeps his eyes shut, but his words are laced with something akin to conviction, “I can’t make myself think Jack’s different, Sam, that he can be saved when Emma couldn’t. Because what would that say about me ?” Dean sends a half formed prayer to anything at all that his voice won’t crack, “Was I not good enough, not human enough, even back then? It’s not like her mother was Satan , Sam. Am I so fucked that me being her dad wasn’t enough for her to be worth saving? And- ”
Prayers unheard, he stumbles on his words. Voice skating, breaking, over them, terrified of them even as they fall out of his mouth so quickly that it’s as if Dean is trying to give them a head start, to put as much distance between himself and his words as he possibly can,
“And if they’re not different. If Cas was right , if Jack is worth saving, if he can be saved, and they’re still not different? Sammy, I don’t know if I could live with that.”
Dean opens his eyes, desperate beyond reason to know how he’s been judged. To read the weight of his sins on Sam’s face, and know he’s damned in a way that God has no power over.
Instead, he finds himself almost rushing to his feet.
The reflexes of a parent are near impossible to break, and Sam has suddenly taken on the outward appearance of a man that’s been shot. The blazing fury that consumed him minutes ago – a lifetime ago — has left only the shell behind. He is crumbling, opening his mouth to speak again and again without finding his words. Eventually, silently, he crosses the room to sink down next to Dean. Leaning up against his side like he did when they were little kids living out of a motel room, with no one else in the world to lean on. Sam’s been taller than Dean since his growth spurt at seventeen, but he doesn’t think he’s ever quite felt this small next to him before.
After what is either several seconds or several hours, Sam speaks, and he’s the twelve year old boy in Dean’s memories again, full of grief and pain,
“I’m sorry, Dean. God, I am so fucking sorry. ”
Dean looks up properly then, and he knows his total confusion is written plainly across his features. Sam almost flinches from it, guilt lining his face.
“You’re right. They’re not different. They’re the same, and she was worth saving, too.”
The ground beneath Dean falls away, failure gnawing at his ribs and clawing through him from the inside out, as Sam turns to face him, “But Dean - Dean you’ve got to listen to me here. Look at me . It’s not your fault. I made that call, and I was wrong . We had just lost Cas, and - and I was so fucking worried about you. You had been making decisions that weren’t like you at all, and I thought when you didn’t just kill her, God , Dean, I thought you were just being reckless because you didn’t care anymore.”
Dean won’t meet his eyes as he speaks, and he can feel Sam deflate beside him. For the most part, he often was doing that back then, and he’s been doing it again since —
“I was so scared that I was gonna lose you too. And I made the wrong fucking call . I was wrong, Dean. I know you like to think the best of me, but Christ, did that never cross your mind? That it was me? I was wrong because she was worth saving. She was just a kid taught a fucked up way to live. And I know that even after all that, she could’ve been okay, and I know that because you were her dad. Not in spite of it. There is no part of you that made her less worthy of saving, Dean.”
“It’s not on you, Sammy. You pulled the trigger, but I — I should have stopped you. Your aim is good. I taught you, your aim is perfect. But I was supposed to be her Dad , and God, even John Winchester managed to die for his kid, and he hated me . I should’ve been faster.”
There’s a strange grief on the tip of his tongue, mourning a good death. A worthy cause. Going out in a way he knows all too well that the ones he loves, that Cas, could’ve been proud of. It blends with trust, “She would’ve been okay. You would’ve been okay. It’d have bought you the time to realise, to see her. I know you, Sammy, and I know you wouldn’t have hurt her if you’d seen her.”
It was meant to lessen the weight that has piled onto Sam’s shoulders, pushing him down onto the kitchen floor until his shoulders are level with Dean’s own, but he shrinks away from the way out he’s been offered. It’s a long moment before Sam speaks again at all, and when he does it is soft and unsteady.
“Don’t - don’t make the same mistake I did. Not with Jack. Please , Dean. Because you might not realise straight away, God, it might be fucking years.” He chokes out a bitter laugh at that, like something foreign lodged in his throat. “But it’ll catch up to you. it’ll catch up and you’ll know you were wrong. and there will be nothing at all you can do about it. Dean, there’s nothing I can do about this but be sorry . But for you - Cas won’t be there to hear your apologies, Dean. Jack might not be, either. you won’t be able to ask for their forgiveness. And you won’t forgive yourself.”
“I know. I know he —” Dean’s voice gives out under the weight of it all, the guilt of how he’s treated Jack, the desire to somehow make it up to him. The understanding ache that he will never have the chance to do the same for Emma. “I know he’s a good kid. He’s so much like Cas, it’d be impossible for him to be anything else. It’s just hard to look at him sometimes. He looks so much like him , and I keep seeing her . It hurts.”
“I know. Just, just don’t leave it too long, Dean. Jack can’t wait for you forever.”
Dean wants nothing more than to promise Sam he’ll have changed by morning, to shrug off the shame that has blinded him, and wrap his promises in something, anything , that will assuage the guilt rolling off of his brother in waves. It takes almost everything in Dean to even make a promise in his own head that he’ll let himself try to love Jack, to look at him with anything other than guilt clouding his vision. He tries to form the promise into something coherent, to wrap it up in longing and something like a prayer, and hope to God that wherever Cas is he can hear him. Can help keep him right. He comes up short in words meant for Sam, and something different entirely begins to force its way out of Dean, a grief made manifest with the promise that someone is listening,
“I looked for her- ” His words halt, brain catching up with his mouth and tripping over the cracks in the syllables, “In purgatory. Whenever I saw anything in the shape of a blonde girl I’d be convinced it was her, and sometimes when I’d interrogate anything that moved about Cas, I’d give them her description too. At night, all I could hear were monsters tearing each other apart. Some nights I even tried to convince myself that maybe amazons are human enough to be let in upstairs, y’know? That maybe I hadn’t sentenced her to die more than once.”
Sam is a silent weight beside him, and the threat of it has Dean searching for words to fill it with, to smother Sam’s guilt with his own, “It’s funny, I spent so long in there thinking I could see her everywhere, describing her, and now there’s times I can’t see her face at all. I want- I need something of her to hold onto, but I’m so scared of trying to draw her, Sammy. I’m terrified that I don’t even know her face enough to do it, that it won’t look like anyone at all.”
“Tell me.” Sam is equal parts earnest and strangled, “tell me what she looked like.”
“Why? You met her when I did, Sammy-”
“Tell me anyway.”
So Dean does, tracing his fingertips over the floor in the shape of the features he’s describing. Allowing himself to remember the color of her eyes, the fall of her hair – how it was the same shade as Jack’s when it caught in the light, the way he could see himself so obviously in the set of her jaw. It’s almost like putting on a pair of glasses that are nearly just right. Her image becomes clearer in Dean’s head as he speaks, the haze leant by time fading, but never totally going away.
They sit a while longer, side by side, two leaning silent planks just barely holding each other up. It’s comforting in its familiarity.
“I forgive you, Sammy.”
“You shouldn’t.”
“I forgive you anyway.”