Song Remains the Same

Chapter 111: Missing Persons

"She is the sunlight... and the sun is gone."
- Trading Yesterday

Rain poured loudly outside the motel room where three men stood. Two stared at the third in speechless, horrified shock. Sam and Dean had just been told news that they couldn't even begin to understand.

Dean found his voice first, but just barely so. "What do you mean dead?" he asked, his trembling tone indicating that he didn't—couldn't—wouldn't believe it. Like the thought of that being anything less than a sick joke or a misunderstanding would make him throw up. There was no reply and Dean asked again, a little firmer and steadier this time. "What do you mean our sister is dead?" When Cas said nothing and his face only continued to show utter heartwrenching pain that confirmed the worst, Dean's voice cracked and he leapt headfirst into the first stage of grief: denial. "She can't die, you made it where she can't die!" he protested.

Quiet and guilty and appearing shell-shocked himself, Cas didn't look at his friend. "I know that," he said faintly, and the mildest confusion showed on his face. "And... I can't explain it." He looked at Dean finally, his blue eyes grim and filled with emotional agony. "But she's dead, Dean." His voice wavered and caught, sounded like it might give out completely from the difficulty in speaking those words aloud. "S-she died in Purgatory." It all seemed too much for the angel: he began to turn around to hide his face again.

Abrupt angry panic flared at Cas's resigned words. "Well bring her back!" Dean shouted, but his fury was tempered by deeply abiding and panicked fear. In fact, that fear drove him to grab the angel by the front of his filthy trench coat with both hands and shake hard, preventing him from turning his back on the brothers. "Bring her back Cas!"

"Dean I can't!" The angel shouted his reply with a jarring loss of composure, shocking both brothers with the desperation and alarm that made the angel look so haggard and nearly unrecognizable. "She's gone!"

That word—gone—was a word neither Sam or Dean knew how to take. And maybe Cas didn't either. The angel stood there pathetically as Dean hung onto the lapels and stared at him in total horror. Cas was breathing hard like he was having trouble doing so at all; so hard that his shoulders shuddered—and his face had an expression on it like he was near tears. It was terrifying to see him so emotional. Terrifying and convincing that he was telling the truth.

The angel's face twisted up and crumpled all at once; he began to speak in a voice thick with tears as the brothers listened on, aghast. "And she's not just dead but... I can't sense her soul anymore, it's—it's like before when I accidentally—" he let out a noisy sobbing sound and looked around in dismayed confusion. He looked similar to a shock victim, one who was questioning his own sanity and who was having problems with functioning at any level at all. "It's... it's all garbled, I can't remember parts—" he murmured through a tight voice, then shook his head and raised his teary eyes to look at Dean, who'd let go and was standing there with a body that didn't remember how to breathe. "She's gone. Completely and irrevocably gone." The silence was utterly painful as it stretched onward, and Castiel feebly tried to fill it with explanations. "S-she came back to Purgatory for me but... something was wrong and I knew it right away. She was sick. Very sick." Sick? Dean hung on to Cas's every word in a horrified trance and he imagined his baby sister who had pretty much always been healthy as a horse and strong and a fighter... he imagined her sick like the time after she'd been possessed by Lucifer and it broke his fucking heart. Cas looked similar to how Dean felt as he finished telling a story that really told nothing at all. "And I tried to get us out but she just... faded away in front of me." His voice was as hollow as his eyes were.