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For the first hour, Dean doesn’t move from Cas's side.
He kneels in the dirt, trying to make sense of the horrible image before him. The still chest, which had been moving with his breaths just moments before. The baby-blue eyes, now closed. The bloodless lips, the limp fingers.
The shadows of wings burned into the earth.
Eventually, Sam comes up behind him and puts a hand on his shoulder. “Dean,” he says quietly, gently, as though not to wake the angel who looks like he could just be sleeping. “We can’t leave him here.”
No, they can’t.
But Dean can’t bring himself to move.
oO0Oo
They lay Cas down on the kitchen table. He’s deadweight in Dean’s arms, but still he gently cradles Cas's head as he eases him down, unable to stand the thought of hearing it clunk against the wood.
“I’ll… I’ll go check on the baby,” Sam says quietly. His brother squeezes his arm in comfort, but Dean can only stare at the body of his best friend.
Some part of Dean knows his brother is worried, knows Sam is waiting for him to explode and put his fist through the wall, but Dean can’t summon any rage to mask his pain.
There’s a yawning void in his chest, a gaping hole in his heart where Cas is supposed to be.
And yet he feels no pain. He feels nothing at all.
oO0Oo
He’s been building funeral pyres since he was four years old and his world went up in flames.
This, somehow, is worse.
He tucks Jack against his chest and makes sure he’s facing away. The kid doesn’t need to see this.
Sam had offered to hold him, but Dean refused. “How many times have you held a baby, Sammy?” he’d asked with a weak attempt at his usual snark. “You’ll drop him on his head.”
So instead Sam lays the shrouded bodies of Cas and Kelly on the pyre and pours salt and gasoline over the wood. He offers the lighter to Dean, but Dean shakes his head. He won’t be the one to light the pyre this time. He won’t be the one to banish Cas from the world forever.
The pyre flares to life, and Dean’s world burns down with it.
oO0Oo
It’s two in the morning and Jack won’t stop crying.
Dean stares at the baby in the crib. He’s been fed and changed, then laid back down in the crib Kelly had assembled in her last days. A mural of flowers and bees decorates the wall behind it.
He knows Cas painted it himself. Just knows it.
His chest is hollow and aches something fierce. A bottle of whiskey hangs limply in his hand. He’s drunk half of it already, but it’s not enough to numb the pain.
Sam’s still asleep in the living room, his giant body squashed on the couch because the mattress couldn’t be salvaged from Kelly’s blood. He doesn’t have the instincts that wake him at the slightest sound, not the way parents do. Not the way Dean does.
Carefully, he sets the whiskey bottle down on the changing table and pulls his shirt off. Jack is only a few hours old and skin to skin contact is best.
Both Sammy and Bobby John had been bigger than this when Dean had taken care of them, both old enough to hold their own heads up and take in the world around them, but he finds that it’s not so different when he eases Jack into his arms and cradles him against his chest.
He brushes a thumb over the downy hair on the baby’s head, so light it’s barely there, and sways softly until the cries taper out the soft whimpers. Jack watches him with big, tearful blue eyes, his cheek resting against the Devil’s trap tattoo.
He’s Lucifer’s son, with the genes of the President and his secretary, but his eyes…
Dean looks into the blue, blue eyes of the nephilim who shouldn't look so much like Cas but does, and wonders if he’s doing the right thing.
The nursery is dark, which makes the flash of gold in Jack’s eyes all the more startling. The shadow of wings drape over Dean’s chest and arms.
He swallows a sob and cradles the baby closer, a broken melody rising from his chest.
“Hey Jude, don’t make it bad…”
oO0Oo
They drive back to the Bunker in silence. At least, they don’t talk.
Instead, Dean plays the tape he’d given Cas, the one that had fallen out of his trench coat pocket when Dean had taken it off the body. He hadn’t realized Cas had kept it.
Dean’s Top 13 Zepp Traxx.
He hadn’t even thought when he made it, hadn’t had any concern beyond teaching Cas what real music was.
It hadn’t even occurred to him later what it meant to make Cas a mixtape, what it meant to give his best friend a cassette of Led Zeppelin songs when the band was all but sacred to his family.
Jack sleeps on in the back, oblivious to Dean’s white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel. Sam had only glanced at the tape once before returning his attention to the passing fields.
So Dean lets the sound of Led Zeppelin wash over him.
He lets himself pretend he’s blinking hard because the sun is in his eyes.
oO0Oo
They set Jack up in Cas's old room.
The day after they return to the Bunker, Sam drives into town with a carefully-curated list of baby things—though they don’t need diapers—while Dean sets about putting away anything Jack might get into in a few months. The blades are carefully locked away, the guns put up out of reach, the sharp corners padded and any unsecured furniture bolted into the walls or the floor.
Dean pours all the alcohol down the sink. After that first night, when he’d soothed himself to sleep in a drunken stupor, he hasn’t touched a drop. He refuses to turn into John.
When his hand shakes over the sink, unable to tip the bottle down the drain, the warm weight of Jack swaddled against his chest makes the decision easy.
He fights through the withdrawal and ignores the promises of oblivion that the bottles of rubbing alcohol in the first-aid kit tempt him with, and throws himself into turning the Bunker into a home for Jack. He and Sam paint over the cream walls of Cas's room with a pale yellow that reminds him of sunshine and stick on decals of honeycombs and smiling bees, and it looks, Dean thinks, like something Cas would’ve chosen.
They step back when it is at last finished and take in their handiwork. Dean has Jack strapped to his chest in one of those ridiculous new-age papousses advertised to hippy parents, and he sways slightly on the spot, one hand resting lightly on the back of Jack’s little head.
“Almost finished,” Sam says, and reaches into a little plastic bag that Dean hadn’t noticed until now.
He produces a framed picture and places it on the shelf above the crib. Cas and Kelly smile down at them from within the photograph, and Dean momentarily forgets how to breathe.
“I found the picture on Cas's phone,” Sam explains. “I got it developed when I was in town. I think they would’ve wanted Jack to have a reminder of them.”
Dean swallows hard. He thinks of the worn trench coat tucked away in his own room, of that last remnant of Cas he clings to. He thinks of how they have nothing of Kelly’s, that they know hardly anything about her. They will be able to tell Jack stories of Cas, but what about his mother? When Jack asks about his parents, will a picture be all they are able to show him?
“We won’t forget them,” Sam says, as if sensing where his thoughts have gone. “We’ll keep their memory alive for him.”
Dean just thinks about growing up with an absent father and a mother he could hardly remember, and doesn’t say anything in response.
oO0Oo
Dean watches from the hallway as Sam stumbles into Cas's old room— Jack’s room—and glances around, bleary-eyed and confused, until he realizes the sounds that had woken him up came from the baby fussing in the crib.
“Hey, uh, shush.” Sam tries to sound soothing as he crosses the room, but his voice is rough with sleep and Dean knows he’s never spent much time around kids this young. He clearly has no idea what he’s doing.
So Dean steps forward with a chuckle, stopping in the doorway. He leans against the post, a spit towel thrown over his shoulder and a bottle in hand.
“He’s hungry,” he explains when Sam’s head whips to the noise. “You were just the same. Cried every two hours, like clockwork.”
Despite the bags that hang under his eyes and the exhaustion dragging at his bones, there’s something about this that makes him feel settled in his own body. Caring for a baby is familiar ground, after all. He’s been doing it since he was a kid himself.
He joins his brother at the crib and lifts Jack up, carefully cradling his head. “D’you want to feed him?”
Sam shakes his head. “I think you should do it.”
Dean shrugs, already easing the nephilim into the cradle of his arm in a well-practiced move almost as old as Sam. They watch in silence as Jack suckles at the bottle, emitting tiny puffs of air as he drinks. His blue eyes stay fixed on Dean the whole time.
When he’s finally finished, Dean burps him and turns to Sam. “He might take a while to settle back down.”
Sam hesitates but his exhaustion wins out and he disappears from the room with a mumbled goodnight.
Dean returns his attention to Jack, who is watching him with an unfocused gaze. It will be a while before he can see more than smudges of colour, Dean knows. He remembers watching Mary with Sammy so long ago, remembers learning at her knee, following her around like a duckling, not wanting to waste a minute with his little brother. He remembers Mary had called him mommy’s little helper. He remembers John had ruffled his hair and said he was the best big brother a boy could ask for.
He remembers those were simpler times. He remembers long ago when the world was kind.
“I couldn’t save him,” he whispers in the silent nursery. “I’m sorry. I’m so damn sorry.”
Jack coos softly, his tiny fist clenched in the blanket. He nuzzles into Dean’s chest, and Dean wonders if he remembers Cas, smells Cas on the trench coat Dean’s worn to bed every night for the past week. He’s always tucked it back in the wardrobe before breakfast each morning, but Sam hadn’t said anything when Dean had appeared wearing it in the middle of the night, hadn’t even acted surprised, and Dean wonders if his brother had already known. If he’d always known what Dean was too much of a coward to admit until it was too late.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t save him,” he breathes onto Jack’s downy head. He smells like warm milk and baby powder and the stardust of a thousand galaxies, and Dean finds tears welling.
Jack stares up at him, each blink slower than the last as he fights against sleep. But he needs sleep, and so does Dean, so he sits down in the rocking chair in the corner of the nursery and begins to sing the songs that had been his lullabies so long ago.
“Oh, let the sun beat down upon my face, and stars fill my dream. I’m a traveller of both time and space, to be where I have been…”
oO0Oo
On the nights Dean can’t sleep, he drives the Impala for miles, up and down back roads with no destination in mind.
On those nights, he pops Cas's mixtape into the cassette track and lets the chords of “Travelling Riverside Blues” and “Ramble On” fill the old car. He skips “Stairway to Heaven” every time.
Most nights he’s alone, trusting Sam to watch over Jack for a few hours. Sometimes Jack comes with him, and Dean turns the stereo down low and lets the hum of the engines rock him to sleep.
He supposes it shouldn’t be a surprise that Jack always sleeps better in the car. As much as he’s a nephilim, as much as he’s the anti-Christ, the son of the President and his secretary and a fallen angel with the best of intentions, Dean supposes he’s now also sort of a Winchester, and Winchesters have never liked being cooped up.
Their home is the open road and the four doors of a black ‘67 Chevy Impala, and just like Dean and Sam before him, Jack falls asleep listening to the low croon of Robert Plant and the rumble of the car, a blanket of stars overhead and miles of open road before him.
oO0Oo
Dean doesn’t sleep much any more. Some of that is the baby—Jack’s up every few hours to be fed or changed or cuddled—but part of that is just him.
Without a bottle of whiskey to ease him into oblivion, the dreams come full-force. Sometimes they’re nice—him and Cas on that park bench, just listening to the happy sounds of families around them; him and Sammy setting off fireworks on the Fourth of July; gathering up the courage to hold Cas's hand and just tell him—
But sometimes the nightmares appear without warning. He dreams less of Hell, now, and perhaps that’s because nothing they did to him in the pit could ever compare with the torture he’s experienced on Earth. Holding friends in his arms as they bleed out, watching his life and faith crumble down around him over and over again, knowing that no matter what he does, his hands are always going to be stained red, that there is no absolution for a man like him.
Watching Cas's body flare with light as the angel blade protrudes out his chest and burns away his grace.
The worst dreams are the ones where he gets to be with Cas, where he gets to touch him and kiss him and build a life with him.
Because then he wakes up and remembers.
oO0Oo
In the end, it’s Sam who calls Claire, because Dean is too much of a coward.
The call’s on speaker phone, and Dean buries his face in Jack’s downy hair as Claire’s sobs break over the line. He breathes in the smell of stardust and baby powder, and desperately forces the tears back, because if he cries now, Claire will hear — Sam will hear — and then they’ll know—
“You promised!” her voice cries through the tinny speakers. “You promised you’d look after him!”
And Dean can’t help the broken noise that escapes his tightly-pressed lips, muffled only slightly by the sleeping form of the baby in his arms.
“I’m coming down there.”
“Claire…” Sam tries, “It’s a long trip and—”
“And nothing, dumbass. You seriously told me I lost my dad — again — over the phone?! You owe me more than that. I’m coming down and that’s final.”
Sam clears his throat, but clearly thinks better of trying to change her mind again. “It’s just— there’s something you should know…”
“Is it Dean?! Oh God—”
“It’s not Dean,” Sam rushes to reassure her. “It’s… it’s about what Cas was doing before he, uh…”
Dean squeezes his eyes shut and shifts closer so the phone can pick up his words. “You have a baby brother,” he says, and his voice is scratchy from disuse. He can’t remember when he last spoke. “A nephilim.” There’s a stunned silence over the line, and Dean hurries to clarify. “He’s… well, it’s complicated. But Cas was helping his mother and he was… he was going to be the kid’s dad. Sort of.”
It’s a pathetic explanation, but really, how is Dean supposed to sum up the cluster-fuck their lives have become?
“... What’s his name?” Claire’s voice sounds at last.
“Jack,” Dean whispers. “His name is Jack.”
Another long stretch of silence, where accusations and condemnations and absolutions hang heavy between them.
“I’ll be there tomorrow morning.”
oO0Oo
Claire falls into Dean’s arms and sobs into his chest. He might’ve cried with her, except he feels deliciously numb.
There’s a Castiel-shaped hole in his heart, and he’s not sure it’ll ever be healed.
“I hate him,” Claire sobs. “I hate him for leaving.”
Dean squeezes her tighter in answer.
Some days, he hates Cas too.
oO0Oo
“Where is he?” Claire asks when she finally pulls away, eyes red-rimmed and nose dripping. Sam, who had been standing awkwardly in the corner, hands her a box of tissues.
“He should be waking up soon. Sammy, you want to—”
“Uh, yeah,” Sam says. “Yeah, I’ll go get him. Be right back.”
Dean watches his brother leave the room and turns back to Claire. “Does Jody know you’re here?”
“Yeah,” she bites back. “Unlike some people, I don’t leave without warning.” She blinks rapidly, as though forcing back more tears. “I just… he promised he’d look after me, after… He promised he wouldn’t leave me like Mom and Dad did, and now he’s…”
Before Dean can figure out what to say, how to ease the ache inside Claire when he’s certain the same pain will never leave him, Sam returns, a bundle of green blankets in his arms.
“Claire, this is Jack.” Sammy carefully hands the baby over. “His father is, uh, Lucifer, I guess, but it was Cas who took care of him and his mom until…”
“How did it… how did he die?”
Sam looks to Dean for help, and though he doesn’t want to think about it, doesn’t want to remember it, the image of Cas's body burning with heavenly light is forever seared in his mind. “It was Lucifer. He stabbed Cas in the back.” There’s no use explaining about omens and alternate dimensions and world-hopping portals. “He held Lucifer back long enough for us to… to escape and get to Jack. The kid promised him paradise on Earth and he believed it. He believed in Jack.”
“But he’s just a baby,” Claire whispers.
“He’s a nephilim,” Sam corrects gently. “And that means he has tremendous power. The kind of power that could level worlds if he chose.”
“But Cas thought he could be good?”
“I guess,” Dean says gruffly. And it got him killed. But he doesn’t say that, doesn’t want to become John, blaming a child for the death of their parent, so instead he says, “We’re going to try to raise him that way, at least. For Cas's sake.”
Claire swallows tightly and cradles Jack a little closer. The baby yawns, his whole face scrunching up, and blinks owlishly at Claire, and something like devastation and forgiveness paints her expression.
“He has my eyes,” Claire whispers, and a tear slips down her cheek.
He has Cas's eyes.
“Yeah,” Dean says with equal quiet. “He does.”
oO0Oo
Grief is a funny thing. Some days it’s so overwhelming, so crushing that Dean can’t help but give into the endless darkness. On those days, he sleeps until past noon and leaves Sammy to watch after Jack and doesn’t have the wherewithal to feel guilty. It’s on those days that his fingers itch to curl around a bottle or a gun and it’s only the memories of dingy motel rooms and trying to stretch a dime into a dollar that stop him from turning into John.
And yet there are days where he wakes up… content, if not happy, and cooks breakfast for Sam and reads stories to Jack and tunes up Baby — until hours have passed and he realizes he hasn’t thought of Cas once.
Except, no, that’s a lie. He’s always thinking of Cas; he sees Cas in the decals in Jack’s room, remembers Cas's adventures discovering cheesy bingeable television when he cues up Netflix and sees the recommended list, hears Cas's halting baritone every time he picks up his phone and wills the screen to light up with a contact that will never call him again. But some days those are all he remembers, some days his sleep is dreamless and he’s not tormented by the memory of angelic light and burned wings, and it doesn’t hurt to think about Cas so much.
Those days are few and far between, but coming more often as the weeks pass. A month and a half after they bring Jack back to the Bunker, Dean has three good days in a row and wonders if this is what it is like to begin to heal, to let go of the pain and begin to live again.
He wonders why that feels so much like a betrayal.
oO0Oo
“What a handsome young man!” the lady behind them in the check out coos, reaching over to boop Jack on his little nose. “And such beautiful blue eyes!”
“They’re, uh,” Dean clears his throat. “He has his dad’s eyes.”
The old woman gives him a knowing look. “Well, I’m sure with looks like that, he’ll be a heartbreaker one day.”
“Yeah,” Dean chokes out. “A heartbreaker.”
Truer words have never been spoken.
oO0Oo
At least once a week, Dean drives out to the little meadow where he’d scattered Cas's ashes and spends the afternoon with Jack, just the two of them and a blanket spread beneath the shade of a willow tree. He brings Jack’s favourite stuffed animal — a unicorn ironically given the in-factory name of Clarence — and a few other toys to keep him entertained, and he eats a burger from White Castle in silence while the baby watches the dappled light through the branches with wide eyes.
He remembers their encounter with Famine what seems like a lifetime ago. Cas had devoured his own weight in hamburgers and Sam had torn the throats out of several demons, but Dean himself hadn’t been affected, not really. He’d spent his childhood denying himself the things he so desperately needed to grow, making sure Sammy ate even if it meant forgoing his own meals, stretching what meager funds John would leave them with even if it mean padding his pockets in ways that still caused shame to curl in his gut twenty-five years later. He’s made up for that in adulthood, he supposes, gorging himself on food and sleeping his way through small-town America with little care other than a quick fuck and a desperation to erase the ghosts of finger-shaped bruises on his hips, but there’s still some part of him that’s hollow. Some part that might always be hollow.
Famine had clocked it. You just keep fighting. Just… keep going through the motions. You’re not hungry, Dean, because inside you’re already… dead.
He remembers what Cas had said to him that day. So… you’re saying you’re just well-adjusted?
God, no. Just well-fed.
Except that’s a lie. He’s been hungering all his life, desperate for everything he could never have.
He remembers how his eyes had constantly strayed to Cas that day, how he’d had to clench his fingers in his jeans to stop himself from reaching out and tracing the outline of Cas's lips with his thumb, how his heart had fluttered like Cas's wings when he’d appeared in the hospital basement.
He’s not well-fed, just good at denying himself what he wants.
oO0Oo
On the way back to the Bunker from the meadow, Dean always listens to Cas's mixtape. If Jack’s asleep, he keeps the volume low, but if the nephilim's awake he spends the drive singing along and telling Jack about the meaning behind each song.
“Did you ever really need somebody, and really need ‘em bad? Did you ever really want somebody, the best love you ever had? Do you ever remember me, baby, did it feel so good? ‘Cause it was just the first time, and you knew you would…”
He lets the familiar riffs and chords of Led Zeppelin fill the car. Every time it runs out, Dean listens for the click of the tape being ejected from the stereo and jams it back in the cassette slot, letting the repeating playlist wash over him.
Click. Rewind. Repeat.
oO0Oo
Nearly three months after… after, Sam finds them a hunt.
Dean’s in the middle of changing Jack’s diaper when Sam clears his throat and says, “I talked to Garth, and he says there’s something going after coma victims in a town outside Topeka. He thinks it’s a Djinn…”
Sam trails off, the end of his sentence left open for Dean to continue, but Dean, in the middle of wrestling Jack back into his onesie, only hums absentmindedly. “Uh-huh.”
Sam tries again. “He was hoping we could join him, provide back up…”
“You go,” Dean says, finally managing to get the footie pajamas over Jack’s left leg. “I’ll stay here with the Destroyer of Worlds. … Should’ve called him the Destroyer of Diapers,” he mutters, succeeding in getting the pajamas over the nephilim's other leg. “Dude, that’s the fourth blowout this week. You gotta lay off the hot sauce.”
Jack just burbles up at him, giving him a gummy smile.
“You, uh, you sure?” Sam eyes the nephilim with trepidation.
“Yeah, I’m sure.” Dean lifts Jack off the changing table and bounces him lightly. “Take Claire with you; Jody says she’s chomping at the bit to get hunting but she’d feel better if Claire wasn’t alone. Show her the ropes or whatever.”
Sam shifts uneasily. “You… don’t want to go? Because I’ll stay here if…”
“Nah, Sammy,” Dean glances at his brother. “We’re good here.”
And he realizes he means it. For the first time since Cas's death, he feels as though he’s walking on solid ground.
oO0Oo
The Impala rumbles to a stop next to a wide single-story building tucked on the outskirts of Lebanon, a short drive from the Bunker. Dean’s not sure what prompted him to call the owners and set up a meeting, but he’d seen the ad in the paper and felt a strange longing in his chest that he doesn’t quite know how to describe. The building itself is nothing special—just an old run-down diner that’s past its prime and starting to fall apart—but Dean remembers the Roadhouse, remembers how it had been nothing special except for all the ways it was, how it was exactly what hunters needed.
That’s what they’ve been missing. A centralized hub, somewhere to kick back and shoot the breeze, to exchange stories and tricks of the trade — a sanctuary for those who lived a life most could never even dream of. Since Ellen and Jo, since Bobby, there hasn’t been anything like that, hasn’t been someone at the end of the line lying his ass off and pretending to be the FBI or CIA or Homeland Security to get reckless hunters out of trouble.
Dean knows he’ll never be able to completely leave the life — it’s a part of him, all he’s ever known — but he’s getting older. He has a kid now, and he won’t be John, won’t drag Jack across the country in pursuit of things that go bump in the night. Jack will need stability to grow up, need someone to be there for him, and Dean… he’s feeling like it’s time to start settling down.
The car door creaks as he gets out and shuts it. Sam’s back at the Bunker with Jack, having brought Claire back from Topeka with him and set her up for the weekend in one of their spare rooms. When Dean had left, they’d been sprawled out on the floor in the library, watching Jack valiantly attempt to roll over. If all goes well, he might pick up pizza on the way home to celebrate.
There’s an old man seated on a bench outside the diner. He looks up when Dean approaches and squints against the sun’s glare. His voice, when he speaks, is hoarse and raspy, like he’s spent a lifetime smoking. “You Robert Harvelle?”
“Yeah,” Dean says, stuffing his hands in his jacket pockets. He pulls out a wad of cash. “The askin’ price still good?”
The old man smiles and stands on shaking legs. “I’ll give you the tour, and if y’still want it, you’ve got yourself a deal.”
oO0Oo
An hour later Dean’s back in Baby, his pockets significantly lighter but there’s two large pies on the passenger seat and he can’t stop himself from grinning.
It still hurts to think of Cas, and there’s a hole in his chest that might never go away, but he’s trying to make Cas proud, trying to live for him instead of killing himself slowly in his grief.
“Though the winds of change may blow around you, but that will always be so. When love is pain it can devour you, if you are never alone. I would share your load, I would share your load…”
Most days, he thinks he’s succeeding.
oO0Oo
Sam’s newest obsession is photography—and not with their phones’ shitty, scratched lens. No, he comes home one day with one of those real cameras, the kind that have a lens cap and need a special trip into town to develop the film that costs twenty five bucks a roll.
“It’s better for photo albums,” Sam explains when Dean rolls his eyes. “I want to remember these moments, Dean.”
And Dean gets that. His childhood albums had all been destroyed in the fire, and precious few pictures had survived the blaze. John hadn’t often taken their pictures on the road—too easy for them to accidentally dismantle a false identity—but Bobby had taken a few, and now they sit in a little metal box in Dean’s room, those handful of photos among his most prized possessions.
“Alright, Ansel Adams,” Dean says sarcastically, but lifts Jack up for the camera anyway. “Say cheese, little dude.”
The first picture taken by their new camera should have been something nice, with fixed smiles that showed too many teeth to be entirely natural, but as the flash goes off, Jack throws up all down the front of Dean’s shirt and, well, he supposes that’s reality.
oO0Oo
“Little drops of rain whisper of the pain, tears of loves lost in the days gone by. My love is strong, you with there is no wrong, together we shall go until we die.”
Click. Rewind. Repeat.
oO0Oo
The weeks pass. Summer comes and goes and soon they’re on the cusp of fall. The last vestiges of summer heat give way to a brisk September breeze that promises the leaves will soon begin falling. Sam’s found a farmer’s market in town and he drags Dean out with him.
“Jack’s five months already, he’ll be eating solid food soon. You can get fresh produce to make your own baby food,” Sam says, then adds, as if to cinch the deal, “We can get stuff to make a pie, too.”
And that’s how Dean finds himself spending his morning surrounded by plastic tables and booths selling everything from farm-fresh carrots to homemade soaps and candles. Sam’s gone off somewhere, likely buying whatever rabbit food has caught his attention this week, but Dean and Jack meander through the stalls without looking for anything in particular. Jack, who is strapped to a baby carrier against Dean’s chest, is facing out towards the market and takes in all the sights and sounds and smells with wide eyes. Every now and again, he burbles and reaches for something at one of the stalls, and Dean stops to buy it.
So far, the basket at his side holds a pint of strawberries, a large purple eggplant, a candle that’s supposed to smell like misty mornings in the woods, a jar of homemade rhubarb jam, a bundle of carrots, and a baby basil plant he supposes he can re-pot and keep in the Bunker’s kitchen.
Jack gums on a sugar cookie Dean had bought for him. Without teeth, he can do little more than turn it to soggy mush, but he seems to enjoy it nonetheless.
Or at least, he was before— “Gah!” Jack throws the cookie to the ground and squeals, reaching for a nearby stall selling honey.
Something in Dean’s chest twists in on itself. He glances at the stall, then back to Jack. “You know you can’t have honey until you’re older, right? It can make you sick.”
But Jack’s having none of it. He shrieks again, drawing the attention of a few nearby shoppers, straining against the straps of the baby carrier to reach the little mason jars of honey. With a heavy sigh, Dean approaches the stall and the teenager manning it. The kid’s preoccupied by the phone in his hands, tongue stuck out slightly as he jams his fingers against the screen in an indiscernible pattern, but when Jack babbles in delight and kicks his little legs in the air, he looks up—
And Dean can’t breathe.
The kid, no older than thirteen or fourteen, and wearing oversized flannel and ripped jeans, stands to greet them. “Welcome to Honey Heaven! Can I, like, get you anything?”
His eyes are a brilliant blue, his hair dark and tousled, with a liberal smattering of freckles across his nose.
He looks, Dean thinks, like Jimmy Novak might have as a kid. Like Cas might have.
“Hey, Mister? You gonna buy anything?”
“Oh, er, yeah,” Dean tries to get a hold of himself. “Uh, one jar of honey please.”
The kid just about stops himself from rolling his eyes. “What kind? We feed our bees on different flowers and stuff, giving the honey different flavours. We’ve got raspberry, clover, dandelion, bluebell—”
“Bluebell,” Dean blurts, voice cracking. “I’ll take a jar of bluebell.”
“Oh…kay?” The kid looks at him with a weird expression, but Dean can’t really blame him. He’s nearly in tears over honey. “That’ll be twelve dollars.”
Deans forks over the cash and puts the jar in his basket, and beats a hasty retreat. He wants to find Sam and get out of here.
He’s done for the day.
oO0Oo
Grief is not a linear thing.
It’s some of that bullshit Sam’s always sprouting alongside mushy crap like it’s okay to ask for help and trauma affects everyone differently, but Dean doesn’t really understand it until September 18th rolls around and he can’t get out of bed.
It’s been nine years since Castiel came into his life. It’s been five months since he left it.
Sam knocks at his door. Jack cries faintly in the kitchen. And Dean can’t muster up the energy to do more than stumble over to his stereo and pop Cas’s mixtape into the slot. He returns to the bed and bundles himself up under the covers and Led Zeppelin begins to play.
“Little drops of rain whisper of the pain, tears of loves lost in the days gone by. My love is strong, with you there is no wrong, together we shall go until we die…”
He burrows further beneath the blankets, and decides that today… today he’s not getting out of bed.
oO0Oo
The weather warms once again, a last burst of summer sunshine before the frosts hit, and Dean clears a plot of land outside the Bunker’s entrance. Ripping up the grass is surprisingly cathartic and he loses himself in the methodical thud thud thud of the shovel hitting the ground.
He’s dug so many graves in his life. It’s strange to be digging for something else instead.
“We dig one of these every six inches,” he tells Jack, who really can’t understand him but watches him with bright eyes all the same.
He takes Jack’s hand and carefully pokes a hole in the dirt with one of his tiny fingers. Jack squeals with delight and waves his slobbery free hand in the air.
“Now we drop the seed in,” Dean says, “and then cover it up.”
He helps Jack push the dirt back over the holes, his big, scarred hands guiding the baby’s. He lets Jack pat the mounds down, something in his chest clenching at the boy’s innocent joy as he sends clouds of dirt flying.
John would’ve blown up at him if he’d gotten this filthy, he reflects as Jack fists his tiny hands in the soil and watches it stain his overalls.
But Dean is not his father, has tried his whole life to be better than John was, and just watches Jack babble and coo in a language only he understands.
“Your dad would’ve loved this, y’know,” Dean tells him, stretching out on the ground, his chin propped up on his fist. “He always wanted a garden — something about bees, I think.”
The bulbs and seeds they’ve planted will spend the winter burrowing their roots deep into the earth and then come spring, the gently sloping hill outside the Bunker will bloom with colour, a riot of hyacinths and dicentra and gaillardia. There will be bees and butterflies and birds, a bit of paradise in a small corner of Kansas.
He knows shit-all about plants, but Jack had enjoyed their trip to the plant nursery in Lebanon, and on their way out he’d shrieked and grabbed for a scraggly little apple tree in a pot.
So now the Bunker has an orchard.
… Can it be considered an orchard if there’s only one tree? Dean’s not sure.
But the lady at the nursery had said it was a Winesap apple tree, perfect for pies and cider, and well, that had been that. So Dean and Sam had cursed and sworn as they struggled to get the sapling into the Impala, the top of the tree resting outside the window and the leaves swaying in the wind. Dean had nearly cried at the dirt covering Baby’s floor, but Jack had been absolutely mesmerized by the branches rustling just out of sight of his carseat.
Dean wonders what it means that the Righteous Man, the one who broke the seal that let the Devil into the world and has his hands dripping with blood, has planted an apple tree in his garden, his own little slice of Eden.
When Jack reaches up and presses a dirty handprint to Dean’s cheek, it feels like an absolution.
oO0Oo
“Days went by when you and I bathed in eternal summer’s glow, as far away and distant our mutual child did grow…”
Click. Rewind. Repeat.
oO0Oo
By seven months, Jack’s babbling has become increasingly coherent, almost as though he’s trying to speak but can’t yet. Sam, who has taken it upon himself to read every parenting book in the county library, tells Dean that it’s normal.
“He’s practicing different sounds, but most books agree he won’t say things and actually mean them for a little while yet.”
“But he’s a nephilim,” Dean points out. “We don’t know how that will affect his development.”
Sam nods. “We’ll have to wait and see, I guess.” He pauses, then, “Maybe he’s trying to communicate in Enochian. Is it possible for him to even know the language if no angel taught him?”
Dean just shrugs. He has no idea.
But they needn’t have worried. Two weeks later, Dean walks into the war room and Jack shrieks and makes grabby hands from his playmate on the floor.
And just like Sam before him, Jack’s first word is “Dee.”
oO0Oo
Jack’s first Christmas is nothing short of memorable. After a life of living in motel rooms without a tree or presents or any traditions to call their own, really, both Sam and Dean silently agree that this marks a new beginning.
They bake cookies—real ones, not the kind from tubes, a dozen different types and flavours they’ve never had before, until every surface is covered in trays and the entire kitchen smells like vanilla and cinnamon and brown sugar. Generic knitted stockings hang on the end of a book shelf because they don’t really have a fireplace, and they hide Jack’s presents in the hall closet, then in one of the spare bedrooms when they run out of space. They get a tree, a towering seven-foot monster that they decorate with ornaments Sam found at an artisan’s fair in town and strings of twinkling lights that Jack’s obsessed with.
Dean raises the nephilim over his head and tosses him lightly, grinning as Jack giggles and shrieks. “Should we put you on top of the tree?” He brings Jack close to his face and pretends to gnaw on his nose, eliciting more giggles.
Sam chuckles and gets a little box out of the bag of decorations. “I actually,” he clears his throat. “I actually had this made.”
Dean adjusts Jack against his chest and peers into the box. His heart stumbles a beat.
The little angel figurine looks like Cas, trench coat and all. He holds an angel blade and his black wings are out and flared, like he’s protecting them. Like he’s watching over them.
“Do you want to put it on?”
Dean shakes his head. There’s a lump in his throat, but the grief that wells up is easier to wade through than it had been months before. “You do it. I don’t trust that step ladder.”
So Sam places the figurine of Cas on the top of the tree, and they stand back to take in the glow of their first real Christmas tree, their first real Christmas.
“Jody and the girls will be here soon,” Sam says at last, breaking the silence. “We should make sure the turkey’s cooked.”
“Yeah,” Dean hoists Jack up on his hip and grins. It’s only a little forced. “C’mon kiddo, I’ll show you how to make the greatest mashed potatoes known to mankind.”
oO0Oo
Dean’s thirty-ninth birthday is a quiet affair. He wakes up to Sam’s attempt at a healthy version of cinnamon buns, and Jack’s sticky hands from ‘helping’ with the icing. He checks in on the renovations at the new Harvelle’s Roadhouse, then returns to the Bunker for a quiet afternoon of introducing Jack to his favourite movies.
(Hey, it’s never too early to make sure the kid grows up with good taste!)
Tonight it’s just the three of them. Jody and Claire had originally planned to come up, but a last minute vamp nest had rerouted them, but that’s fine with Dean. More cake for him.
The cake, as it turns out, is a lop-sided chocolate mess with icing that’s a bit too runny and covered in sprinkles.
“We tried our best?” Sam offers sheepishly.
Dean just shakes his head with a little smile. “It looks great, Sammy. I guess Jack picked out the sprinkles?” They’re pink and silver and gold, and look more like something for a kid’s princess party than a middle-aged dude’s cake.
Sam snorts. “What gave it away?” He claps his hands. “Alright, make a wish!”
“Dee!”
Dean cuts a glance at the nephilim in the highchair beside him. “Yeah, yeah, I’ll hurry up. Gimme a moment to think.”
“Dee!”
Jack grabs for the candles, but Dean carefully pushes his little hand out of the way. “I can’t tell you my wish, kiddo. It won’t come true otherwise.”
Jack tilts his head curiously, but otherwise settles back down in his seat without a word.
Sam rolls his eyes. “Blow out the dam— dang candles before the wax melts all over the cake.”
Dean screws his eyes up and thinks about the last nine months, about the joys of raising Jack amidst bone-crushing loss, the absence of Cas, the hole in his heart that will never heal.
I wish you were here, Cas.
Dean leans over and blows out the candles.
A flash of gold in blue eyes. A flutter of wings.
“Hello Dean.”