Chapter Text
The whole drive up to the cabin, Dean thought of every possible horrible thing that could happen. He prided himself on being able to catastrophize more thoroughly than most folks, considering he was privy to more types of threats than even other hunters were aware of. He thought about what might happen if Lucifer beat them there, or the other angels. He thought about what might happen if the baby had already been born, had already begun its reign of terror. He thought about Cas brainwashed and rabid like a dog, he thought about Cas fighting them off to protect this monster, he thought of Cas allowing himself to be possessed by it.
Only now, kneeling beside Castiel’s lifeless body, does he understand that even his most pessimistic projections come with a built-in blind spot. He doesn’t allow his obsessive preparation to touch the possibility that Castiel could die. Sure, he’s considered it, but only the way he has in the past. It’s always been an unpleasant bump in the road, something to break the suspension, something to make your stomach flip as you catch a little too much air. But in the past, there’s always been that moment where the wheels come back down to meet the road, maybe skidding, maybe bending the axle a bit, but the car keeps rolling. Cas has died, more than once, and it has always been a temporary condition, a dramatic inconvenience, a sabbatical, a lonely interlude.
This feels like forever. Maybe it’s just the cold wet earth pressing against his shins through his jeans, maybe it’s the charred mangled impression of Castiel’s wings splayed out beside him, maybe it’s the hollow ache behind Dean’s ribs that cannot reconcile the visual input of Castiel’s vessel with the visceral certainty that his self, his spirit, is gone. He can’t feel the hum of potential energy in the air around them, the thrumming tension of his consciousness lingering under the surface of his skin.
It is this realization, more than anything else, that spurs him into movement, because he cannot spend another second living in the reality of Castiel’s death. If he turns away, if he deals with the problem he came here to solve, then he won’t have to deal with this one. For awhile, anyway. So he gets to his feet, knees trembling and jerking underneath him with every step. He follows the muffled sound of Sam’s footsteps up to the second floor of the cabin, which he hadn’t even seen yet, in all the commotion that brought him careening to this moment.
He finds Sam in a room with dingy old wallpaper, hunched over a big bed. He’s performing CPR on Kelly, and Dean knows it isn’t going to do jack shit for her, but he also knows that Sam needs to do it, to soothe some core piece of him, the bit that can’t let people die on his watch. All Dean can think about, with sudden and unexpected intensity, is the baby. The baby is the root of all of this bloodshed. The baby is the reason that Cas is –
The baby needs to be dealt with, before anyone else gets hurt.
It doesn’t take long to find him. He’s still tangled in the afterbirth, quiet and cold and covered in a host of fluids, between Kelly’s motionless knees. Dean scoops him up, like he might pick up a normal baby, because old habits die hard – for Dean, they never really die at all. And he’s so small, in Dean’s arms. He held Sam every day for years, but when Sam was a newborn, Mom was still alive, Dad was still a father.
The day they brought Sam home from the hospital, he held him for the very first time, and all he could think about then was how it seemed impossible that something so tiny and pink and strange could be the same kind of animal as him. Dean had become Sam’s mother and father, when their mom died. But when he held Sam for the first time, that had been the real moment that he became Sam’s protector, because for the first time in his life he was aware of something precious, something new to the world. He wanted to show Sam all the things that made the world wonderful, like matchbox cars and sandwiches with the crusts cut off, like afternoon sunlight coming through the kitchen windows and dandelions in the grass on their lawn. He wanted to keep Sam from knowing about the things that made the world a difficult place to live, like nightmares and parents shouting and doors slamming.
Holding this baby, getting placenta and blood and amniotic fluid all over his chest and arms, feels a lot like that. What had he been thinking, exactly, while he burned up the highway getting here? He knew he’d come up with plenty of plans, but all of them seemed to end with this creature dead or metaphysically cauterized, cut off from his power in some way. Had he thought he’d just ram an angel blade through the damn thing? Shoot it? Every possible method of execution seemed beyond monstrous, and that was probably because there wasn’t really a non-monstrous way to murder an infant.
His feet seem to move of their own volition. He is dimly aware that Sam is still performing CPR on Kelly, nearly oblivious to Dean’s entry, fully oblivious to his exit. Dean finds himself in the bathroom, running the water in the sink until it’s warm. A washcloth reveals itself to him – he wasn’t looking for it, but when his eyes fall on it, he picks it up without a second thought. He starts cupping water in his hand and drizzling it over the baby’s skin, using the cloth to wipe off the more stubborn bits of goo.
The baby is more or less clean, after a few minutes of this, and Dean realizes that the umbilical cord is still in place, mostly tucked beneath him in the sink, tethered to a fragment of the placenta. Swallowing down a feeling he cannot identify in words, but which feels a lot like being unworthy of something, he draws his pocketknife out of his jacket and flicks it open. He keeps it sharp, and he’s glad he does. He slices the cord about two inches from the base, leaving a bit of excess so that it will heal properly, remembering vaguely when Sam was a tiny baby, how gross he thought the stump was, especially after it fell off, even though his mom assured him it was normal, that he’d had one too, when he was a baby like Sam. It hadn’t made it any less gross.
Drying the baby with a towel he doesn’t remember picking up, he shucks his own soiled shirts, finds himself standing in front of a mirror, cradling a baby to his naked chest, and when he looks at his reflection, he cannot recognize himself. Not the normal way that he can’t recognize himself in the mirror, because he always looks too normal, too human, to be the person Dean understands himself to be inside. This time, he doesn’t recognize himself because he’s pretty sure he’s still outside, beside Cas’s corpse, pretty sure he’s dead on the ground next to him, pretty sure whoever he’s looking at is some kind of ghost.
The baby, who’s been silent and pliable so far, stirs against him, seeking his warmth, curled fists pressing against him in search of his first meal. He needs to find a first aid kit, to seal his stump with some gauze. He needs to find some formula, to feed him. He needs to find a blanket or something to wrap him in – maybe one of his old shirts will work? The list of tasks that need doing is comforting, because it distracts him from Castiel’s dead body, and all of the things it means.
He wanders into the other room upstairs, looking for formula, and he stops in the threshold like an invisible barrier is keeping him out. The wall is painted with a mural, a rainbow that proudly professes the alphabet, arcing over an apple tree whose fruit spells ‘Jack’ in big white letters. There’s a crib. There’s other nursery furniture, waiting to be assembled. There’s a few cases of diapers stacked in one corner. There’s a chair, a laptop. A half-unpacked box of baby clothes.
Dean’s throat catches when his eyes slide back over to the crib. For weeks, the only people in this house were Castiel and Kelly. A heavily pregnant woman cannot build a crib. His face is wet, and for a second, the sound he hears makes him think the baby in his arms is crying, so he rocks back and forth to soothe him, but it isn’t working, and he realizes that he’s the one making that high-pitched little moan, not the baby.
He doesn’t go in the room, not yet. Tells himself it’s because he needs to find the first aid stuff before he can dress the baby anyway, so grabbing clothes at this juncture doesn't make sense. Descending the stairs, he holds the baby with one arm, tiny head tucked under his chin, holding the railing with one hand, like Dean’s ever been the kind of guy to hold onto a railing on the damn stairs. The baby is still asleep when he makes it out to the car, and he’s irrationally glad that he parked on this side of the house, because it means he doesn’t have to look at Castiel’s body yet.
The first aid kit is right where it always is, in the top layer of the trunk, tucked behind the wheel well. He pulls it out and lays out a shirt from his duffle, places the baby down gently on top of it. He dresses the umbilical wound without fanfare, secures the gauze. Thinks about just lifting the baby back into his arms as he is, decides instead to loosely wrap him in the shirt he’s laying on. Once he’s holding him again, the baby snuffles against his neck, breath hot and feeble against his skin, which is still cool from the night air.
Dean finds himself back in the house, in the kitchen, opening every cabinet in search of formula, and some frantic desperate part of him keeps thinking ‘If he bought diapers, then he bought formula’, over and over and over again. He finally finds it in the cabinets to the left of the stove, three big flats of cannisters. It’s the powder kind, the same type they used for Sam after Mom was gone. He tears the place apart looking for a bottle, and finds some in a skinny cabinet by the fridge. He set about preparing a bottle, like this was just another day in his normal life, like he mixed formula every single day for the last thirty years.
When the bottle is ready, he isn’t sure how to offer it to the baby, because despite everything, he’s still sound asleep. He rubs his sternum with his index finger, and the baby curls his limbs more tightly to his torso, but he doesn’t rouse. He runs his thumb over the baby’s puckered lips a few times, and that seems to do the trick, that suction instinct taking over, so he replaces his thumb with the bottle nipple and tilts the baby slightly so his head is resting in the crook of Dean’s arm, elevated enough that he won’t choke. It’s been years, lifetimes, since he did this for Sam, but something about seeing baby Sam in that weird dreamscape with his mom, not even forty eight hours ago, makes it all feel so fresh.
Dean hears himself murmuring things to the baby as he eats, mindless comforts, perhaps as much to calm and reassure himself as they are to soothe the infant. When the bottle is empty, he switches easily to a one-armed carry, resting the baby’s head over his shoulder, rubbing his back to encourage him to burp.
What the fuck am I doing? Dean’s brain seems to finally catch up to the present moment, to fully process that he just bathed and swaddled and fed the fucking anti-Christ, that he’s bouncing him and burping him and thinking about what kind of baby clothes would be best suited to the temperature in here. Just as the thought stops him cold, one shoe on the bottom stair as his feet are about to carry him up to the nursery, the baby wakes up. Their cheeks are pressed together, the baby facing over his shoulder, but he feels that restless aimless waking shudder roll through him, hears the puffing crowing test cry come crackling through the child’s vocal chords.
A thought, which is not Dean’s thought, comes sliding into his mind, like a note passed beneath a desk in grade school. Are you Castiel?
“No,” Dean sputters, voice feeling too loud for the hush of the cabin, which has become a sort of crypt in his own mind.
Another thought, unfurling in his mind, a letter drawn from a crinkled up envelope. I need to find Castiel. Dean swallows, leans against the wall at the base of the stairs with his free arm.
“Why?” He whispers, his mouth almost too dry to speak.
The delay is longer this time, and the baby is more still against him, and he wonders if he fell back asleep before he could muster an answer. After a moment, it comes to him, bolder and warmer than the last two messages, and it’s like stumbling across an old engraving in the bark of a tree, initials carved inside a heart, worn smooth by time. Castiel is my father, he’s going to protect me.
There isn’t a single thing that Dean can think to say in response to that, because it feels like someone has sliced him in half at the hips, like he doesn’t have legs anymore. He finds himself sitting on the bottom stair, baby still tucked safely against his chest. It might be seconds later, it might be hours. Dean eventually returns to himself, because there isn’t another option.
“Castiel is your father?” His words feel like rough hunks of sandstone, heavy in his belly, and each one hurts on its way out, scraping him raw.
No message, no foreign words, pop into his mind. His thoughts are his own, cold and sharp. He goes back to cradling the child, holding him with both arms, so he can look down at him, really look at him. He looks like every single newborn baby, membranous and pink like a hatchling bird.
The baby’s eyes drift open, and they are not like the eyes of any other baby he’s ever seen. They’re sunshine yellow, golden and glowing, and the instant their eyes meet, Dean’s mind is flooded with images, jumbled out of order, rushing by too fast to inspect with any degree of detail. Some are of Castiel speaking to Kelly, some are of Cas on his own, some are of Cas with some teenage boy, and many of these feature Dean himself – if not visually, then by his presence, like an aura hovering around the edges of a scene. The cavalcade of information tapers off, and Dean can hear himself gasping and coughing as his vision clears and the cabin reappears in front of him.
“I’m so sorry, Jack. Castiel can’t…he won’t…none of that can…he’s dead. I’m sorry.” Dean uses the baby’s name for the first time, because he isn’t the baby, not anymore. He’s Castiel’s baby. He’s Castiel’s son. And Cas had given his son a name.
Jack cries. Not the way babies cry, really, because he’s quiet, his tears slicking the skin of Dean’s chest where his face is pressed against it. Dean cries, too, the way babies do, sobs shredding out of him, like hellhound claws dragging against the inside of his ribcage. He cries because there were thousands of ways this could have gone differently – he should know, he spent the better part of the drive over trying to enumerate the bad ones, the ways it could go awry. He never even thought to consider the ways it could go well, the possibilities where something beautiful happens, where a baby is born, and by his very existence, turns a friendship into a family.
It took Cas dying for Dean to realize he hadn’t bothered to picture a future for himself where Cas wasn’t right beside him the whole way. Holding Cas’s son in his arms, while Cas lays dead in the dirt outside, that failure of imagination takes on a new dimension, his grief centuplicates into innumerable shards of lives he will not live, cannot live, prismatic iridescent kaleidoscopes of dreams he never even got the chance to push away, never got to enjoy in secret, before they were ripped away. Dean is a widow, skipping right over the wedding, careening past the vows, the kiss, landing square in the middle of mourning.
Dean gets back to his feet, switches Jack to a one-armed carry so he can hold on to the stair rail. He carries him to the nursery, and he lays him in the crib that Castiel built for his son. The box of baby clothes is disorganized, like someone was interrupted while they were sorting through it, and he wonders if it was Kelly or Castiel who last touched these soft pieces of cloth. He wonders if he would be able to tell, if he held on to them long enough, just by the lingering energy, wonders if Jack would be able to tell. He finds a newborn sleepsack, one of the ones with sleeves and buttons on top and a closed sort of skirt at the bottom. Sam liked those, maybe Jack will, too.
He pulls a newborn diaper up his tiny legs, securing it snugly, but not too tight, around his tiny hips, then guides his tiny arms into the sleeves of the sleepsack and pulls the bottom of it up to where it fastens across his tiny chest. There is not a single atom in Dean’s body that does not ache as he does this.
Jack is asleep before Dean is even done dressing him. He can’t stop staring at him, watching his chest rise and fall and rise and fall and rise and fall. Sometimes, right after Mom died, Dean would work himself into a panic about Sam, especially if he was left alone with him for hours on end, as he often was. So he would lay next to him on the bed in whatever apartment or motel they found themselves in, all the pillows and sheets stripped off except the tight fitted sheet so that Sam wouldn’t suffocate. He would lay curled around him, a crescent moon body, not touching him, afraid to wake him, just making himself a barrier between Sam and the door. And he would stare, and watch him breathe, and remember that breathing was all Sam needed to be doing.
Dean isn’t sure when he ended up in the chair beside the crib, but that’s where Sam finds him when he finally shuffles out of Kelly’s room, hang dog expression evidence enough that Kelly is well and truly dead.
“Did you…” Sam winces as he imagines the myriad ways that Dean may have committed infanticide.
“No.” Dean doesn’t need to hear the end of whatever sentence Sam was building.
“Good, I guess.” Sam isn’t really sure what Dean’s plan is, if he’s still planning to kill the child, just waiting for some reason, some condition to be met, some circumstance to present itself.
“I think I gotta…” Dean trails off, scraps of what Jack had shown him fluttering around in his mind like tickertape cascading down on a parade from skyscraper windows. “Sam, I think I gotta see this through.”
“See it…through?” Sam swallows the lump in his throat, because it sounds an awful lot like Dean still plans to kill this kid. And he isn’t sure Dean is wrong, but he isn’t sure he’s right, either.
“Jack is…Cas was…” Dean looks down at his hands like he’s seeing them for the very first time. “He was Cas’s son. So, he’s mine now, I think.”
His words wash over Sam in unaccountable eddies, sediment dragging lazily along, until the tide yawns back out again, and he can see the picture Dean has drawn, half-faded in the sand, one strong wave away from disappearing altogether.
“He’s Cas’s son?” Sam can’t think of any other questions, besides the ones he isn’t allowed to ask.
“S’what he told me. He asked if I was Cas…asked where he was…and I…” Dean looks back up at Sam, and his eyes are desolate. Sam has seen Dean at his lowest, over and over, can play the instances like a slideshow in his brain. He’s never seen him like this. “I asked why he wanted to know. He said Cas was his dad, that Cas would protect him. And I had to tell him he was dead.” Dean almost eats the last word, so it comes out like a cough, or some strangled inhale.
“He can talk?” Sam won’t touch the rest of that stuff with a ten foot pole, but this he can push against.
“Nah,” Dean’s mouth quirks up on one side, like he just thought of a tasteless joke, but the smile looks mangled, and it doesn’t reach his eyes. He taps his temple with his pointer finger a few times. “He calls direct.”
“How long’s it been since you slept, Dean?”
“Since…shit, since before I busted the wall with that grenade launcher, I guess.”
“Why don’t you sleep, I’ll uh…I’ll keep watch.” He hands Dean an angel blade that he fetched from the trunk, patting the one in his own jacket pocket to show he's armed as well. Dean takes the blade and balances it on his thighs.
“Okay, yeah.” He makes no move to get up. Sam shifts from foot to foot, waiting for him to go off and try to nap.
“You gonna…?” Sam gestures at the door behind him, but Dean just shakes his head.
“I’ll sleep here, thanks.” His eyes slide over to the crib, where Jack is sleeping. Sam nods.
“Then I’m gonna, um. I’m gonna bring Cas inside, alright? I’ll keep watch downstairs.” At the mention of Cas’s body, Dean shudders. The world loses its sharpness, and it takes Dean an embarrassingly long time to realize that it isn’t some strange supernatural phenomenon or physiological deficit that’s clogging up his perception all of a sudden, it’s just tears, blurring things into desaturated blobs and smears.
“Yeah, alright.” Sam waits for him to say something else, but he doesn’t. So Sam stalks downstairs, Dean listens to him go. He shivers – his chest is still bare, he hadn’t thought to grab a shirt when he was down by the car, but the shirt he’d used to swaddle Jack is still draped over one of the unopened IKEA boxes. Wearing it is better than nothing, but it smells like Jack, his warm salty baby smell. It also smells like something else, someone else, and it takes him almost fifteen minutes to place the scent. It finally hits him, when he hears the backdoor open downstairs, hears Sam shuffle in, encumbered by a weight he doesn’t want to envision.
Jack smells kind of like Cas, that rainy electric clean smell. And it makes sense, really. Jack is Cas’s son, after all.