Rewritten

Chapter 2

Jumping however many years back has left him without his clothes, without his phone and contact list, and worst of all, without Baby because they certainly hadn’t driven her to the Bunker yet. Dean doesn’t really know what numbers and cell phones he and Sam had in this time. And hell, even if he did, he’s not sure he can remember every possible number from a year in particular. He’ll have to wing i—

His eyes widen as he fastens the pants he’s borrowing from a long-gone Man of Letters. Wing. “Cas!” he yells out, imbuing it with every sense of prayer and longing and whatever else works to get angels’ attention. There’s a good chance he’s not in the right time: this could be the time Cas stayed off Earth and Dean stayed with Lisa, or the time Cas was dead before returning with amnesia. This could even be so far in the past that Cas doesn’t know Dean yet, and now if he is listening, he’s wondering who this half-naked jackass is praying to him.

But no, when he picks up the blue long-sleeved shirt in front of him, there’s a very appreciated fluttering of wings behind him. Dean spins, and there’s Cas, frowning. “Hey! Good to see you.”

Cas is standing way too straight and stiff. “What are you doing her–” He pauses, and his narrowed eyes open a little wider. “You’re not from here.”

Dean nods. “No shit. What year is it?”

“2009,” Cas says. Dean reels. That would be around the time that the Apocalypse was being staved off. The first one, anyway.

“I’m from February 2015,” Dean tells him, still clutching the shirt. “I don’t—Don’t have an excuse for this, but I read an incantation without really knowing what it did.”

Cas shakes his head. “No. Even you can’t be that stupid.” Dean’s probably imagining things when Cas glancing down. He’s not pausing his gaze on Dean’s chest on the way to the floor.

“Yeah, well, I…” Dean rolls his eyes. “Wasn’t really paying close attention to what I was doing at the time, sorry. Point is, can you zap me back home so I don’t screw things up yet?”

“Fine, Dean.” Cas reaches out and holds two fingers to Dean’s forehead.

Nothing.

Dean glances around. “Unless I’ve done some rearranging here since the last time I was in my own bedroom, I’d say that didn’t work.”

Cas frowns. “I don’t understand, it… Should have…” He presses his fingertips harder, focused and intense.

“How ’bout I go find the book it was in?” Dean suggests before Cas ends up leaving bruises. He catches Cas’s hand and pulls it away, ignoring the feeling in his stomach that this small motion does to him. “And to answer your earlier question, Sam and I live here now, in the future. It’s the Bunker.” He straightens out the blue shirt still in his other hand and pulls his head through. “The Men of Letters lived here for years, and we found it two years ago. Well, three years in the future, for you, I guess.”

“Did you recognize the language?” Cas asks, following him to the darkened library.

Dean flicks the switch on. “Nope. Which makes me even dumber, I know, so don’t rub it in.”

Most of the books in the library, Sam and Dean hadn’t had to unpack. They’d already been on the shelves and only needed dusting. But the box he’s looking for now is nowhere to be found. After a good two hours of searching the library, various rooms, closets, Dean is ready to admit defeat. In this time, after all, Bobby is still alive. There’s a decent chance he might know something.

He hauls another box back into the closet they’ve just futilely emptied. “I’m wondering, Cas,” he begins. “Where are Sam and I? I mean, Past Me? I mean, I guess, this-time me? Right now?”

“Bobby’s,” Cas tells him, still paging through one last book. “Wait, is this it?”

Dean stretches one arm straight out and across his chest, pulling the elbow in. Too many boxes. He hovers over Cas’s shoulder and skims. “Yep,” he confirms. “That was it.”

Cas sighs, the book falling forward in his grip as he lifts his gaze skyward. “Dammit, Dean.”

“What? What’d I do?”

“This spell has a three day time limitation,” Cas tells him. “There is no undoing it. You’ll be stuck here until it wears off.”

Well, that’s certainly annoying. “Shit,” Dean mutters, looking at the unfamiliar words. It’s not Latin or any language he recognizes. “I mean… shit.” He turns to Cas. “So what do we do?”

“I’m not sure,” Cas says, closing the book and staring down at it. “I’ll hold onto this book in case we find anything in it later. But I won’t be able to send you back to your own time until the spell is over. You probably would be brought back on your own anyway.”

Dean crosses his arms and leans against a wall, staring at the dust on the floor. “So the whole time I’m gone from 2015, will Sam and your future self know I’m gone?”

Cas shakes his head again. “I can let them know, if you’d like me to,” he offers. “That way they won’t worry.”

“Thanks, man,” Dean says without glancing up. He hears Cas fly off, and then he gets back to work putting the boxes back into closets and unused rooms.

A few minutes later Cas returns out of nowhere in front of Dean. Dean’s in the middle of carrying a box to what will be Sam’s room in their time, and he has no time to stop, his momentum carrying him forward into Cas’s torso. The box, and Dean’s fingers on it, bump him pretty good. “Shit! Sorry, Cas.”

Cas doesn’t seem at all affected, and Dean remembers then that this isn’t too long after he’d tried to punch him in the green room. And if that hadn’t phased him, all the power Dean had behind his fist, then this isn’t going to do anything.

He backs away awkwardly. “So?”

“Sam said okay, that he’s glad you’re safe,” Cas says, slipping his hands into his pockets and turning as Dean walks around him. “He also said something about a bond? He seemed to think he was making a joke.”

Dean sets the box against a wall in Sam’s future bedroom. He is not blushing. Maybe it’s annoyance, or maybe the room’s warmer than the hallway. Something. “Sam’s an idiot,” he shoots back. “He’s talking about money stuff. You know. Stocks, bonds… That’s not a bad idea, actually,” he realizes, standing up and turning to face Cas. “I could buy a bunch of bitcoins.”

Judging from his trademark confused squint, Cas clearly has no idea what he’s talking about. Dean rolls his eyes. “Forget it. Anyway. Thanks for letting them know.” He starts to stride past Cas, but halts a few steps out of the room. He frowns and turns back. “Hey. You all right?”

Slowly, Cas looks back up to him. “My future self,” he says uncertainly. “He’s… different. Weaker.”

Dean nods again. “Yeah, I don’t wanna… tell you too much about the future, but… yeah. He’s sort of half-human now.” Angel with non-rechargeable batteries counts as half, right?

“He’s… He seems to be in a lot of pain,” Cas goes on, still frowning. “It was very strange to see him—me—like that.”

Something stabs at Dean inside. It would be strange to see Cas from late 2009 and current Cas side by side. After all that Cas has been through, what he’s been put through by both himself and by Dean… “I bet,” Dean says uselessly, clasping a hand on Cas’s shoulder. Cas glances at his hand but doesn’t step away. “Not gonna say things worked out for the best, but… they are the way they are. It’s okay. You’ll be okay.”

“Thank you, Dean,” Cas says. He lifts the side of his lip and looks up at Dean. “Well, at any rate, I can take you to Sam and Bobby, if you wish.”

“That would be awesome, Cas, thanks,” Dean says quickly. “’Preciate it.”