Chapter Text
The bunker smelled like old coffee and gun oil, and Dean Winchester decided, not for the first time, that it was the closest thing to a good smell he'd ever trust. Forty-three years old, with engine grease on his knuckles and, for the first time in his life, something genuinely worth coming home to.
He was still getting used to that last part.
He was elbow deep in the Impala's open hood when Sam came jogging down the stairs two at a time, laptop tucked under one arm like a football he was trying not to fumble.
"Dean. You need to see this."
"Kinda busy here, Sammy." Dean didn't look up. He was retorquing a bolt that didn't need retorquing, mostly because his hands liked having something to do while his head was somewhere else, somewhere in a room with a rumpled bed and an angel who'd left twenty minutes ago to "observe the bees in the garden," which was Cas speak for ‘I want five minutes alone with my thoughts and also the bees are very calming.’
"It's about the Lockhart case," Sam said. "The thing in Ohio. I think I figured out what it is."
That got Dean's attention. He wiped his hands on a rag and straightened up. "Yeah?"
"It's a banishment ward. Like, an old one. Pre-Men of Letters old. I found a reference to it in dad's journal, there’s like—there's a whole page about a hunt he and Bobby worked back in '98, some thing that was eating through a town in Indiana, and the cure was this complicated sigil that needed a blood sacrifice and a specific incantation, and dad never wrote down the incantation because—"
"Because he wrote it on a separate piece of paper that got lost or burned or whatever, because that's just how Dad rolled," Dean said, dragging a hand down his face. "No shit.”
"Right. So I've been calling around. Nobody who hunted with him in the nineties remembers. Bobby's gone. The guy who taught Dad the ritual is dead. I checked Garth, I checked the few people from the old network still kicking — nothing."
Dean leaned back against the car, arms crossed. "So we're stuck."
"Maybe not." Sam's mouth did the thing it did when he had an idea he knew Dean wasn't going to like. "I called Rowena."
"Oh, for the love of—Sam."
"She's the only one who might actually be able to pull this off. Dean, there's a thing in Ohio that killed four people in nine days and it's not slowing down. We don't have the incantation, we don't have time to find another way to kill it, and Rowena says she can do a temporary summoning. Pull a soul back, ask it a question, send it home. She's done it before."
Dean's stomach did something he chose to ignore. "You're talking about bringing somebody back from the dead."
"Not back back. Temporary. An hour, tops, just enough to get the words out of him and put him back where he belongs." Sam hesitated, and that hesitation told Dean everything he needed to know about what was coming next. "Dean, the only person who'd actually know the ritual is Dad."
The garage went very quiet. Somewhere above them, a door opened and closed, and Dean knew without looking that it was Cas coming back in, and some old animal instinct made him want to put himself between this conversation and the sound of those footsteps, like he could keep two separate worlds from touching if he just moved fast enough.
He didn't move fast enough. He never did, where Cas was concerned, not anymore. A year of practice undoing fourteen years of guardedness, and somehow he still flinched, even now, even alone with his brother in a garage that was about to become a battlefield in a war Dean hadn't realised he was still fighting.
"Sam," Dean said slowly. "Bringing Dad back. Even for an hour. You know what that's gonna be like."
"I know."
"Do you, though? Because last time we saw Dad he was a ghost trying to kill us so we could all be together in the afterlife. The time before that he sold his soul and died choking on his own blood in a hospital room. Every single time the universe has let that man back into our lives it's gone bad, Sammy."
"This is different. Rowena's controlling the summoning. He's not coming back to stay, he's not gonna have a body, he's a — a temporary apparition, basically, here to answer one question and then he's gone. Four people are dead, Dean. There's a family in Ohio with two kids who are gonna lose their mom if this thing isn't stopped by Thursday. I checked every other angle. This is it."
Dean closed his eyes. Behind his eyelids he could see his father's face, not the warm, broken open version from those rare nights with a beer and a low voice telling old stories, but the version that mattered more, the version etched into Dean's bones since he was four years old. Watch out for Sammy. Don't ask questions. Don't be weak.
Don't be anything Dad doesn't already know how to be proud of.
"Fine," Dean said, and his voice came out tighter than he meant it to. "Call Rowena."
++++++++++
Castiel found him an hour later, still in the garage, sitting on the workbench with a beer he hadn't touched.
"Sam told me," Cas said, without preamble, the way he always did. He crossed the garage and stood in front of Dean, close enough that their knees almost touched, and Dean felt the familiar loosening in his chest that happened whenever Cas was near, like some tight fist around his lungs finally letting go. "About your father."
"Yeah." Dean took a pull of the beer, finally, mostly so he'd have something to do with his mouth besides talk. "Rowena's coming by tomorrow. Gonna do her thing."
"How are you feeling?"
Dean huffed out something that wasn't quite a laugh. "Like somebody's about to drive a truck through my life.”
Cas didn't say anything to that. He just reached out and put his hand over Dean's, where it sat curled around the beer bottle, and Dean turned his hand over so their palms pressed together, fingers lacing, and for a second, just a second, the cold dread in his stomach eased.
"He's not really coming back," Cas said. "Not in any way that matters. It will be an hour, and then it will be over, and your father will return to wherever he rests, and we'll have what we need to save those people."
"I know how it works, Cas."
"I know you know. I'm not explaining it for your benefit. I'm explaining it for mine." Cas' eyes were steady on his, the way they always were, like Dean was the only thing in the room worth looking at, the only thing in any room, ever. "I find I'm anxious about it as well."
That surprised a real laugh out of Dean. "You? Anxious about meeting my dad?"
"I've met your father before. Briefly." Cas tilted his head, the old familiar gesture, equal parts confused and matter-of-fact. "I don't anticipate this visit being substantially friendly, all things considered."
Dean's stomach dropped again, a different kind of cold this time. He’d genuinely forgotten that. He pushed it down somewhere with all the other things he didn’t want to look at. John Winchester, half-mad with grief and fear, looking at the angel wearing a man's meat suit and seeing nothing but a threat, a thing to be put down before it could hurt his boys.
"That's — Cas, that was years ago. He didn't know you. He didn't know what you'd —" Dean stopped. Tried again. "He's gonna be here for an hour, give us the words, and then he's gone. He doesn't even have to see you. I'll keep you two in different rooms if I have to."
Something in Cas's expression shifted, very slightly, a small contraction around the eyes that Dean had learned to read over a decade of knowing this stubborn, but kind of awesome man. "You want to keep us separated."
"I want to keep this simple," Dean said, and even as the words left his mouth he could hear how they sounded, how they landed wrong, like a punch he hadn't meant to throw. "I just mean…there's no reason for you guys to even cross paths. He's here for the ritual. That's it."
"Of course." Cas' hand was still in his, but something in the grip had changed, gone a little looser, a little more careful, like Cas was holding something he wasn't sure he was still allowed to hold. "Whatever you think is best, Dean.”
"Cas—"
"It's fine." And the terrible thing was that Cas meant it, or was trying to mean it, Dean could hear him trying, and that was almost worse than if he'd been angry. "I understand the impulse to protect the people you love from each other. I won't make it difficult for you."
Dean wanted to say something else, wanted to fix whatever small crack had just opened up between them, but Sam's voice came echoing down the hall. "Dean! Rowena's on the phone, she wants to talk logistics.” The moment closed over like water, and Dean told himself there'd be time to smooth it out later.
He told himself a lot of things, over the next few days, that turned out to be absolute bullshit.
++++++++++
Rowena arrived at six the next evening in a cloud of expensive perfume and barely contained irritation, dropping a leather bag full of candles and herbs onto the map table like she was setting down a grocery delivery.
"I want it noted," she announced, "that resurrecting deadbeat fathers is not generally how I prefer to spend my Tuesdays, boys.”
"He's not being resurrected," Sam said. "It's temporary."
"Aye, I know how my own spell works, Samuel, thank you." She was already unpacking, arranging candles in a precise circle with the efficiency of someone who had done this exact thing a hundred times before, in a hundred different rooms, for a hundred different desperate families. "An hour, give or take. He'll be tethered to this room. Can't wander off, can't possess anybody, can't do anything but stand there and answer your wee questions like a good little corpse."
Dean stood in the doorway with his arms crossed, watching her work, feeling like every cell in his body had been replaced with static. Cas stood a few feet away, near the bookshelves, very deliberately not looking at Dean, which was somehow louder than if he'd been staring.
"You alright there, Dean?" Rowena asked, not looking up from her chalk circle. "You've got the look of a man about to be sick on my nice rug."
"It's not your rug. And I'm fine."
"Mm." She lit the first candle. "You don't look fine. You look like a man who's spent a lifetime trying to make his father proud and is about to be handed one more chance to fail at it."
"Jesus, Rowena."
"I'm a witch, dear, not a therapist, but the two professions have more overlap than you'd think." She straightened up, surveying her work. "Right. I need silence once I begin the incantation. Samuel, you'll ask the questions. Your father will only have patience for a Winchester voice, I'd wager, and even then not much. Castiel — " she glanced over at him, sharp and assessing in the way only Rowena could manage, "—I'd suggest you make yourself scarce. John Winchester and angels do not, historically, mix well, and we don't have time for that particular reunion tonight."
"I was already planning to," Cas said, quiet, and Dean felt that quietness land somewhere in his chest like a stone dropping into still water.
"Cas—" Dean started.
"It's fine, Dean." Cas was already moving toward the door. "I'll be in the library."
He left. Dean watched him go and felt something in his chest twist hard enough to hurt, and he told himself, again, that there'd be time later. That this was just logistics. That none of this meant anything.
He was wrong about that too.