Song Remains the Same

Chapter 45: Ashes to Ashes

"I am free... and that is why I am lost."
- Franz Kafka

Dean Winchester was the only man left alive in the world. That's how he felt as he cradled his sister's lifeless body in disbelief. He'd dragged himself over to her, fighting his painfully broken leg the whole way. Now he held her and wept.

Bobby lay dead nearby and Cas's body was on the other side of the Impala. The silence was gut-wrenching. Just wind whistling over the grass, just the occasional call of crows... just the sounds of Dean's own wretched hiccupping sobs as he thought of all he had lost in not even five full minutes.

His whole world was destroyed. Just a few feet away, the horsemen's rings laid on the ground where his brother had thrown them, his final act here on earth. Sam was gone. He wasn't coming back. Dean hadn't been able to save him. And he hadn't been able to save her, either. Alex's broken, diseased body was growing cold in his arms.

Whispering over and over again how sorry he was, Dean rocked his little sister as overwhelming grief suffocated him. He hadn't come this far to lose them in the same damn day! Yet here he was. The twins had been born a minute and forty-seven seconds apart. Maybe they were supposed to die close together, too. His heart broke in half at the thought. He would have traded himself for them without hesitation... but he couldn't.

The thought of gathering the bodies—Alex, Bobby, Cas—the thought of salting and burning them on the very ground that Sam had fallen into Hell through was too much. Dean imagined going on without the only people in the world he really loved, knew, trusted... and despaired at being the only one left standing after all these years.

He thought of his gun tucked into the glove compartment of his car.

Just let it be over. Just let me be done. I can't take this.

Castiel remembered when Alex had been forced to kill him.

The look in her eyes when it happened was all he could see in his mind's eye. He remembered the physical pain when the blade stabbed into the cavity of his chest, he remembered hearing himself scream in pain as he had died. He'd been afraid, but not of death—he was afraid to leave her. He remembered holding her hand for as long as he could, trying to comfort her as it had happened—the only thing he could do in that terrible moment. He remembered how she screamed and cried and fought valiantly, trying to save him. He'd known he was dead from the second Lucifer had looked at him with those cruel eyes. But all he'd been able to think about was her. How he hadn't wanted to die before she did. He'd wanted to be there with her when she took her last breath because she shouldn't have to be alone. And Satan had taken that from them.

Now he was over, now he was done, he was dead. Except... he wasn't. There was no sense of time passing, but he was suddenly cognizant of the fact that he was alive and whole again. His eyes snapped open and he gasped in a deep breath of cold, sharp air. Above there was an overcast, unremarkable sky and Cas blinked rapidly, stunned and breathing hard. How? He felt it immediately... the power and clarity of Grace running through his veins once again, singing in his blood and vibrating fiercely through every atom. Life returned like a tidal wave to the body he was fused with and had died in; he was fully restored, as powerful as he had been before he had been demoted three years ago. Castiel was awed—and then afraid.

Who had done this? Why had he been resurrected? And as a higher-order angel again? A sinking feeling came over him as he remembered what he had done: "I promise, I swear to you, I will do anything if you heal her, give her another chance. Father, please."

That had been his plea to God yesterday as he held a dying Alex in his arms. A desperate promise made by a desperate man. The sinking feeling continued. Castiel had sworn to do anything and now God—it must have been God—had resurrected him, giving him the ability to save her. God had heard him, his Father had granted him an answer... just not how Castiel had expected. What payment would God require of him now? A question that disturbed Cas to his deepest parts.