Work Text:
******
The first of the sun’s rays find their way around the edges of the window blinds to invade the room when Dean decides to give up on sleep as a lost cause, throws off the sheets and blanket, sits on the edge of the bed and runs a hand down his face. He’s been tossing and turning, replaying the moment over and over in his head, and he still can’t believe it happened, still can’t believe it’s real.
She said yes.
The smartest, funniest, most amazing, beautiful woman he’s ever met agreed to marry him last night, and his brain has been working overtime picturing various permutations of their future together ever since. The custom car business he and Dad are running has been doing so well they’re thinking of expanding, and Natalie’s almost done with her residency. It won’t be long before they’ll have enough for a down payment on a house, a real house with a yard to mow and a swing in a tree for their two – no, three – kids to play on. There’ll be holidays spent with Mom and Dad, backyard barbecues, presents piled high under Christmas trees, family vacations, graduations, and grandchildren. They’ll retire to somewhere warm with a sandy beach—or maybe a cottage by a lake—and they’ll spoil their grandchildren rotten when they come to visit and they’ll spend every evening in rocking chairs on the porch watching the sun set over the ocean.
He turns to look at the long brunette hair belonging to the sleeping lump under the covers next to him and realizes that he’s going to get to wake up next to her every morning for the rest of his life, and he can’t imagine anything in the world that could possibly be better. Well, maybe that plus coffee; there’s not much that a fresh cup of coffee can’t make even better. As Dean stands to make his way towards the kitchen to start a pot brewing, a soft, contented sigh emanates from under the covers.
“Good morning, future Mr. Natalie’s husband.”
“Good morning, future Mrs. Dean’s wife.”
Her laugh is an ethereal, shimmering melody that warms him down to his soul.
******
Castiel had felt the change coming an instant before the shock wave washed over him, threatening to pull him under and along with it. That moment was all the warning he got to anchor himself against the expanding cosmic Tsunami in a desperate attempt to hang onto reality—at least, the one he’s familiar with—as a new version threatened to replace everything he knows. The effort to fight it is exhausting, and he burned through a fair amount of his grace holding fast against the initial surge as it hit and moved past. Although he’s managed to keep his memory and knowledge of what should be intact for now, he knows he’s on borrowed time. If he uses much more of his grace, he’ll give out entirely and be swept along in the wake.
It’s not too difficult to locate the physical point of origin by triangulating against the direction of the force. He glides along a path that takes him around and around in a constricting spiral until he eventually discovers a place of stillness which can only be the epicenter. It’s easier to keep the altered past at bay here at the source, and the revision threatening to eclipse the original recedes to nothing more than a vague impression.
He’s unsurprised to find himself in a seedy motel room of the sort that Sam and Dean tend to frequent while on the road, because who else did he expect to be involved with an event of this magnitude? He looks around the shabby room at the peeling wallpaper, the water stains on the ceiling, the suspicious discolorations in the carpet, and then he catches a glint of something in the vanity sink outside the bathroom. There’s a tarnished coin, ancient by human standards, resting at the bottom of the cracked porcelain, and Castiel can feel power emanating from it. But that power isn’t pure; there’s something twisted and corrupt in its origin, and whatever purpose it was put to must inevitably end in disaster for the user. Castiel reaches for it, but even his angelic strength can’t budge it from its place. It must certainly be the nexus of the upheaval that has taken place, but Castiel has no idea how to negate its effect, or at least not without potentially making everything worse.
He risks a sliver more of his grace to peer backwards, just a few minutes, hoping to catch a glimpse of the last moments before the event. An ephemeral afterimage of the perpetrator flickers for just an instant, a fading remnant of the last seconds of the previous reality, but it’s all Castiel needs to know with certainty who’s caused this. The knowledge draws a mournful sigh from him.
“Oh, Sam. What have you done?”
******
John’s already at their auto shop when Dean gets there; the man never did adjust to normal civilian hours even years after leaving the military.
“Early morning or late night?” John asks from behind the hood of the car he’s working on, over the sound of a ratchet wrench.
“Dad… she said yes.”
The ratcheting stops, and John’s grinning face peeks out from behind the hood. “Late night, then. Congratulations, son.”
A sudden fear bubbles up from somewhere deep down, bringing an intrusive heaviness that pulls at Dean’s otherwise buoyant mood that carried him through the early morning.
“Dad. What if… what if I screw this up?”
John’s head disappears back behind the hood for a moment, then he steps fully into view, wiping his hands off on a rag before tossing it onto a work bench. He approaches Dean and holds him in a steady gaze. “Son, the fact that you’re asking yourself that is a good sign.”
“Uh… thanks?”
“It means that you’ll never stop trying to be a better man for her. It means you’re already off to a better start than me.”
It catches Dean by surprise, because he can’t imagine a happier couple than John and Mary Winchester. “What are you talking about? You and Mom are perfect together.”
John looks down and he chuckles, then looks back up, still smiling. “Let me tell you a secret, sport. Marriage isn’t a cakewalk; there’s gonna be rough spots no matter how much you love each other. You have to keep working at it, every single day.”
The smile fades somewhat to a more wistful expression and John puts a hand on Dean’s shoulder. “The best thing you can do is set aside your ego and listen. Winning an argument might feel good in the moment, but it’ll be cold comfort to you when you’re sleeping alone in a lumpy motel bed. Marriage isn’t about right or being perfect. Marriage is about helping each other get through the hard times.”
The memory is dim, and Dean had all but forgotten about the week Dad had left. He doesn’t know what they were fighting about or why, just that when he came back the only words out of John’s mouth were an apology. He can’t remember another day when Mom and Dad ever fought after that.
“Happy wife, happy life?”
John laughs. “You got that right, son. You’ll do just fine.”
******
The first difference Castiel becomes aware of is that he’s able to locate Dean without any difficulty, indicating the absence of warding Castiel had carved into his ribs. Yet Sam’s must still be intact because the younger Winchester remains hidden from him. He decides that the most reasonable course of action is to start with the brother he is able to sense and try to piece together what happened from there.
He lands inside a commercial garage somewhere near Lawrence, Kansas, keeping himself hidden from mortal eyes while he assesses the situation, whereupon he discovers the second difference: John Winchester is very much alive and, per the ensuing conversation, so is Mary. Looking at Dean, Castiel is puzzled that he looks younger than he should, his face smoother, without some of the lines that should be etched there. He finds it odd that his friend would have the same facial features at the same ratios as before and yet seem so unfamiliar. Perhaps in this version of things Mary became impregnated with him at a later time and Dean is simply younger.
The third difference, and perhaps the most significant, is the complete absence of any chatter on celestial wavelengths about the Righteous Man or the Boy with the Demon Blood or Lucifer having been freed. Indeed, there is no other angelic presence he can sense on Earth, no sign of a looming Apocalypse. The pieces begin to fit into place: with Mary still alive and all indications pointing to the family having led a normal domestic life, Mary must have avoided her fatal encounter with Azazel. It stands to reason that John and his sons never became hunters, Dean never went to Hell where he broke the first seal, and Sam never killed Lilith to break the final one. Dean’s altered appearance makes sense, and Castiel understands now why it seems so strange to him.
He’s never seen Dean truly happy before.
The thought pulls Castiel up short and leaves him suddenly in doubt as to whether the world would truly be better off with the way things were before. What he does know is that he needs more information before he takes any action—or decides to take no action. The key to understanding what’s happened revolves around Sam Winchester, and he’ll need Dean’s help to find answers.
When Dean heads out of the shop to ostensibly retrieve something from his car, Castiel follows to take advantage of the opportunity to speak with him alone. As Dean flips through his keys searching for the correct one for the Impala, Castiel steps close and reveals his presence.
“Dean.”
Keys go flying and Dean lets out a yelp as Castiel belatedly remembers that suddenly appearing around humans tends to engender a fight-or-flight reaction in them. Pressing himself against the driver’s side door of the car, breath huffing in and out in a staccato pant, Dean stares at him with wide eyes of a mammal under imminent threat.
“Who the fuck are you and what do you want?”
It stands to reason that in this timeline Dean has never met him, and it hadn’t been Castiel’s intention to startle the man, but he doesn’t have the luxury of time for a gentle introduction.
“You likely don’t remember, but I’m an Angel of the Lord and your friend. I don’t have time to explain, but I need to find Sam urgently. Do you know where he is?”
Dean looks at him with an expression that Castiel interprets as concern, exactly as expected at the mention of his younger brother. Alternate reality or not, there are some constants in the universe, and Castiel is willing to bet that Dean’s instinctive protectiveness where Sam is concerned is one of them. Surely it will help him gain the elder Winchester’s cooperation in an expedited manner.
A moment passes before Dean responds.
“Who the hell is Sam?”
******
A look of profound sadness dulls the piercing blue eyes of the stranger that had appeared seemingly out of nowhere, and Dean revises his assessment of the man from dangerous threat to lost and confused dementia patient. His inner def-con downgrades accordingly from fear to pity. It’s weird that he knows his name, but clearly the guy’s got him mixed up with someone else, and he seems to be genuinely worried about this Sam person.
Trying to convey sympathy, Dean softens his tone, “Hey, look, I don’t know who you’re talking about, but you can use my phone to call him if you know his number.”
“No, that won’t be necessary,” the man says, sounding defeated. “I’m sorry Dean, but I don’t know how to proceed, and I don’t have the strength to fight this for both of us. I only have enough grace left to send one of us back. You’re his brother; if anyone will know what to do, it’s you.”
Without warning, the man’s hand shoots out to touch Dean’s forehead. The stranger’s eyes glow with a brilliant light and there’s a dizzying, lurching sensation along with a single word echoing in Dean’s mind:
Remember.
The cacophony of conflicting memories batters him, overwhelming his senses with the impossibilities of overlapping realities bringing him to his knees, clawing at his sanity.
Family meals around the dinner table/greasy fast food in the car.
Opening a present and finding a Gameboy/finding a pearl handled gun.
Dad hugging him after his high school graduation/clapping him on his shoulder after his first kill.
Mom lighting candles on his birthday cake/burning to death on the ceiling.
Dad dancing with Mom on their anniversary/lying dead in a hospital bed.
Two years of head-over-heels bliss with Natalie, who always brought out the best in him/forty years of torture and agony with Alistaire, who turned him into the thing he hates most.
Hazel eyes lit up with joy, reflecting bursts of color back at him.
That’s the thing that finally grounds him, allows him to grab hold of the maelstrom of two different lives colliding in his brain and wrest them under control, sorting them out into distinct buckets. When he regains his equilibrium, he finds himself in the parking lot of a motel he recognizes as the last place he remembers being with being with his brother—a brother he had in only one of those lives—before those memories stop abruptly. And those memories aren’t good.
The clothes Dean is wearing are different than what he had on before the angel touched his forehead and set his brain on puree, and it had been fully light out then whereas now it’s pitch dark save for the garish neon light of the motel’s sign. He fishes around in his pocket and finds a key attached to a tag with a number on it that matches one of the doors, and he slides it into the lock and turns it. The door opens, and Dean finds familiar hazel eyes regarding him from across a lit room.
Sam’s eyes. Eyes that used to look up at him like he was a superhero who could do anything. Eyes that now drop to dully stare at a coin he’s idly turning in his hands while he sits on the edge of a bed.
“I thought you were at a bar,” Sam says flatly as Dean closes the door behind him. “Decided to call it an early night?”
He was at a bar… last night. Or rather, he’s still at a bar according to the digital alarm clock on the night table which reads 10:47pm in glaring red numbers. He remembers leaving the motel—frustrated, angry, hopeless—for the express purpose of drinking himself into oblivion. Or floating on a cloud after the best night of his life, depending on which bucket he focuses on.
In a better life, he’d gone back to his apartment to make passionate love to his fiancée and watch her drift off to sleep while envisioning their future together. In the other, he’d staggered back to the motel room at the ass-crack of dawn, crushed under the weight of imminent doom to watch Sam do… something. Something involving the coin that Sam is now holding. Something that changed the entire world and gave him a life that he could only dream about. Something that also snuffed Sam out of existence.
Now somehow he’s back, back to before whatever Sam did to cause the rewrite.
“Sam,” he says, “whatever you’re thinking about doing, just… hold on. I need to sort some things out.”
“What?” Sam’s face scrunches in confusion.
Dean’s head is still fuzzy, trying to access his final memories of that horrific other life.
“Just… give me a minute. Look, this is gonna sound nuts, but I got two completely different me’s duking it out in my head right now. There was a guy with blue—” a name is supplied to him from one of the buckets. “Cas. Castiel. He sent me back here, in my past… one of them, I mean... to before you—” a glob of emotion gets caught in his throat and makes him choke on the next words.
“Before I what?”
“Changed things. Sam… whatever you did—are going to do… I don’t remember you from one of those lives. I think… I think you were never born.”
“Huh.” Sam looks merely thoughtful as he leans forward. “Not exactly what I was going for.” He shrugs and looks back up at Dean. “Did it work?”
It’s disturbing, the way Sam is so nonchalant about wiping out his own existence. “What do you mean, ‘work’?”
“What’s it like… without me? Is it better?”
He’s going to marry the woman of his dreams, Mom and Dad are still alive and more in love than ever, the business Dad and he are running is booming and the money’s starting to roll in. He’s never gotten blackout drunk, he’s never even heard of a monster or a demon, there’s no angelic dicks screwing around with his life, there’s not even a hint of an Apocalypse going on, and he’s never been tortured in Hell.
Yeah, you could say it’s better.
Sam must read the answer on his face, because a slight smile graces his lips, he nods to himself, and he lets a breath out in what seems like relief.
“Good,” he says, then looks up at Dean with eyes brimming with regret. “Dean, you were right, what you said before. I screwed everything up, and it’s all my fault that Lucifer’s out. But at least now I know I can fix it, and everyone will be better off.”
Sam walks over to the sink, plugs it, turns on the water, and Dean remembers what the coin is for, what Sam’s wish will be. And why he made it.
You’re his brother; if anyone will know what to do, it’s you.
Castiel meant for Dean to figure out whether he should stop Sam or make sure he succeeds and fuck that angel for letting himself off the hook and putting this choice on him instead. Either he does nothing and accepts his brother’s gift of a world better than he could ever have imagined, a world where he wouldn’t even know he had a brother to miss, or he stops Sam and condemns millions of people to die in the coming Apocalypse and is cursed with a life of nothing but pain and death and grief.
There’s no contest.
Sam holds the coin over the water-filled sink, closes his eyes and lets go, the words of the world’s salvation on his lips. “I wish—"
“Sammy, wait.” Dean says, and his brother pauses and opens his eyes to find his own. “Thank you. Thank you for giving me that other life.”
The faint smile on Sam’s face widens, his hazel eyes bright with the conviction that everything’s going to be okay. He opens his mouth to answer, but Dean cuts him off.
“But I’d rather watch the world burn and spend another forty years in Hell than lose you. I wish you’d melted that fucking coin the day we got it.”