Chapter Text
***Ember POV***
Fall
The seasons turned quickly from summer to fall.
Krissy broke up with her boyfriend near the beginning of August. After that she devoted herself full-time to hunting until she went back to college in September.
There were several hunting trips completed as a family. On one memorable hunt, Cas lost a hand to a rugaru and needed a full week to heal. On another, Krissy made use of the gun with Devil’s trap bullets that one of the Apocalypse World survivors had perfected to kill four demons in a row.
In early September, one of the survivors, Arlo, was killed on a routine werewolf hunt. Castiel arrived on the scene a moment too late – Arlo had barely managed to get out half a prayer before his heart was ripped out. It was one of Michael’s werewolves. Castiel felt guilty for a few days, but not as much as Jack (who blamed himself due to his lack of powers) or Dean (who blamed himself for everything).
As September turned into October, reports of Michael’s werewolves and vampires multiplied exponentially, though there was no news of Michael himself. Ember knew that Sam and the survivors were running themselves ragged fighting the things, and she helped as much as she could.
***Sam POV***
Fall
Sam and Dean stayed busy as much as possible. Dean refused to discuss his break-up with Jo, but after he’d returned from his trip to find the spear he hadn’t left his room for a week straight. He had eventually gone out on various other hunts, but even this didn’t seem to cheer him much.
It was Halloween before Sam finally felt as though he had his brother back. Dean had gone up against a life-sized replica of “The Hatchet Man”, one of his favorite monsters from old horror films. It had been possessed by a ghost, and the brothers had narrowly been able to burn the set of keys to which the ghost had attached itself before Dean was strangled by the giant replica.
The fight had been a close one, but Sam hadn’t seen Dean as proud of a victory since he had killed Hitler. Afterward, Dean slowed down on his hunting trips and began to make friends with a few of the survivors also living in the bunker.
It was a good thing, because Sam needed as much cooperative help as he could get. At least half of the Apocalypse World survivors were sent out on a hunt at any given time, usually in pairs but not always. He had gotten good at scavenging, sharing, and assigning gear, weapons, and food. Ember typically helped out by providing money that she’d gotten by using her powers of invisibility, usually from large corporations.
Still, reports of Michael’s werewolves and vampires continued, almost faster than Sam could address them. There were other monsters to hunt, too, of course, and Sam tried to rotate the hunts so that no hunter would be constantly hunting Michael’s beasts (unless they preferred it that way). On Ember’s suggestion and with Apocalypse World Charlie’s help, Sam gave each of the new hunters body cameras so that they could record their hunts to learn from each other. On Eileen’s suggestion, he created a series of hunter check-ins requiring each hunter to check-in at a regularly appointed and monitored time when they were on a hunt.
In early November after a particularly rough hunt against a djinn, Mary and Bobby moved into Donna’s cabin and took some space away from hunting. Sam also wasn’t sure how he felt about Mary and Bobby apparently being a couple. Sam had never seen the two of them kissing or even holding hands in public, but he could tell that they had grown closer. They spent an awful lot of time together, and preferred to hunt together.
“If they get married,” Ember said on one occasion as the two of them watched Mary and Bobby leave in an old black truck, “It wouldn’t make us like… step… siblings, would it?”
“No,” Sam had answered firmly. “Because it’s Apocalypse World Bobby, not your actual father.”
“Good,” said Ember, seeming relieved. “That’d be weird, especially since…” she gestured at Dean, who was grabbing a beer out of the fridge. Sam nodded in understanding.
Ember appeared to ponder the situation for a second, and added, “He reached out to me, you know? One day when I was here manning the phones. He asked me what the old Bobby was like, how he died and all that.”
Sam had wondered, though he had never pried. “I wondered if he would,” he admitted.
“He ended up telling me to call if I ever needed him,” Ember said. “I miss Dad, but…” She shook her head. “Sometimes it’s like Dad’s here with us, but then I remember that he’s a different man with different experiences.”
“It’s like that with our Mom, too,” Sam said, attempting to relate. “I never knew her growing up, you know? She knew me when I was a baby and now again in my 30’s, but… never in between.”
Ember shook her head. “Our lives are weird.”
All in all, the bunker was almost quiet again, like it had been before the Apocalypse World survivors had come to live there. By now, all but nine of them had moved into houses or apartments nearby, and most of the ones living at the bunker were out on hunting trips more often than they were home.
Even Jack and Krissy were gone quite often; Jack was on hunting trips most of the time, and Krissy had moved back to Conway Springs for college during the school year. Sam couldn’t help noticing the smallest of changes in Krissy and Jack’s behavior toward each other as well. He was aware that Krissy had broken up with her boyfriend recently, and he noticed that the girl seemed once again more inclined to spend time with Jack if the two of them happened to be in the bunker together. Jack, too, seemed to have lost the fear with which he had avoided Krissy the previous year. Sam was far too busy with the survivors to watch the situation as closely as he would’ve liked, however. Besides, Sam reasoned, Jack spent most of his time on hunts and Krissy at school, and Jack no longer had the option to simply fly to visit her at his whim. So, Sam resolved to not think about it.
***Jack POV***
Fall
Since he’d lost his powers, Jack felt useless most of the time. It was like he’d told Dean one fall day when the two of them were talking. “I could have killed Michael. Here, when I was strong enough, I could have. But there was so much going on and then everything else happened because I was distracted and stupid and-…”
“Hey!” Dean exclaimed, cutting him off. “You didn't do anything wrong.”
Somehow, though, the reassurances of his entire family didn’t make no longer having powers any easier. If he’d been stronger, sharper, more powerful, he could’ve killed Michael before he had taken over Dean. He could’ve killed Lucifer, too.
But it was too late for that.
The month of Dean’s absence had been the worst. Jack tried his best to learn to fight and shoot like a normal human, mortified and guilty about his failure with Michael and Lucifer.
Things had become easier after Dean returned, and more recently when he started having success on hunts. Castiel, Ember, and occasionally Sam usually did the majority of the heavy lifting and fighting, but Jack had by now thrown several well-aimed punches and knew his way around a machete. He’d killed his way through more than two handfuls of Michael’s grace-powered vampires and werewolves, and though he wasn’t what he would consider a “good hunter”, Sam had said that he “showed a lot of promise”. He’d also showed a good aptitude for research and information gathering, which had afforded him a small bit of pride.
Then, about a month ago, the coughing had started. When he thought about it, he’d been coughing off and on since he’d lost his powers, and he always felt tired. But the blood hadn’t started until sometime in October.
He knew that coughing up blood wasn’t a good sign, but he also refused to give his parents and the Winchesters another excuse to quarantine him to the bunker. He was finally beginning to feel happy again! So he hid the bloody Kleenexes and learned tricks to suppress the cough.
Krissy had been a large part of this new happiness. They were talking either online or on the phone nearly every night now. After hunts, they would often seek each other out to discuss their hunting trips.
Their time together face-to-face was limited, because Jack spent quite a bit of time at the bunker and on hunts and Krissy was still in school in Conway Springs, except for when she herself was hunting. When they would see each other, however, Krissy would often sit shoulder-to-shoulder with him, or with her feet on his lap.
He knew for a fact that Sam and Dean knew nothing about this, though Ember and Castiel were well aware.
“How do you feel about her?” asked Ember one day in mid-October. Castiel was at the bunker discussing the Michael situation with the brothers, and Krissy was at school. It was a rare opportunity for the two of them to speak uninterrupted over dinner at a fast food restaurant.
Jack thought about his answer. “I don’t know,” he said. “I have strong feelings for her, like before. But with everything that’s going on…” He sighed. “I think it’s nice to have a… friend. A friend who is not an adult, that I can talk with.”
Ember smiled. “I thought as much.”
“You don’t mind?” Jack asked.
“No,” said Ember. “I would’ve understood if you’d gotten together, as long as everyone was being safe about things.” By now Jack understood that Ember was referring to using condoms. “You have no blood relation, and can barely even call yourselves siblings. My only concern was and is Krissy’s safety and your own. You’re human now, but protection is no less important, with Krissy or with anyone else.” By now Jack understood this to mean “Even if you don’t have to worry about having a half-angel baby, you’re still too young to be having children.”
“Oh,” Jack said, digesting this.
“It’s Dean that will be the issue,” Ember reminded him.
“Oh,” Jack said again.
***Jack POV***
November 17
FOUR MONTHS LATER
It was mid-November before Jack went on a hunt with Dean as a hunting partner. Part of this was because Dean, according to Sam, “needed time to figure out his own issues”, and part of it was pure happenstance: Ember and Castiel had gone to Europe for Ember’s birthday, and Sam had gone with Charlie on a hunt in Tennessee. It had turned out to be a more eventful hunt than the recent ones that had ended in the demolishing of one of Michael’s grace-powered creatures.
When Jack returned to the bunker, he was excited to find that Krissy had just arrived for the weekend. He waited until Dean had gone to his room to take a shower before dragging a wooden chair next to Krissy’s large blue overstuffed chair in the bunker library.
“Jack!” she exclaimed when she caught sight of him. “How was your hunt?”
So he proceeded to tell her.
“…So then Dean thought up a plan for how to get information from Harper, the librarian,” Jack was saying 5 minutes later. “He went in first and flashed his FBI badge, and he told me to come in after him and ask about a book on the area’s history. And then I was supposed to act like I didn’t know Dean and be really rude to him and tell him to back off from talking to her. He said it would ‘make me look like a bad-ass’ and then Harper would talk to me. And it worked!”
Krissy looked up sharply from her laptop. “That crap only works on sluts and crazy girls,” she said, frowning.
“Well, she was certainly crazy,” Jack agreed. A cough overtook him then. It had been happening a lot more lately.
“Jack, aren’t you over that cold yet?” she asked.
He waited until the coughs subsided, swallowing down the blood he knew had come up. “It’s gotten worse since the hunt,” he admitted. “I probably just need to lie down. I’ll be fine tomorrow.”
“Okay,” Krissy said, though she seemed skeptical.
“So anyway,” Jack continued, “Harper invited me over to her house to pick up a book to loan me. And when we got there, I did all of the normal stuff, you know, dropping a quarter to test if she was allergic to silver-…”
Krissy’s eyes widened. “She invited you to her house?” Krissy exclaimed.
“Yeah, I thought that was really weird, too,” said Jack. “And then she asked me if I believed in love at first sight. And I thought she was going to have sex with me, until her zombie boyfriend-…”
“So some crazy librarian floozy gets to have sex with you, but I don’t?” Krissy said sarcastically.
Jack felt suddenly as though he’d fallen off a steep cliff.
“I… you… what?” he asked.
Krissy looked embarrassed but indignant. “C’mon, Jack. After we – after last year, you’d run out of the room as soon as I came into it. It wasn’t until you – until recently that we started being friendly again. But I thought, since you’re, you know, human now…”
“I-…”
“Jack!” Dean called from the kitchen. “Beer? C’mon, let’s celebrate! You survived your first zombie!”
“I-…” he looked from the kitchen to Krissy again. He was pretty sure Dean wouldn’t approve of their conversation, but he could also sense that this wasn’t a good time to leave said conversation.
“Go ahead,” Krissy said, rolling her eyes. “I’ll catch you later.”
“Okay,” he said, standing up. Then he turned back to her, a thought striking him. He whispered, “I’d love to have sex with you!”
She let out a long laugh, and he disappeared into the kitchen, his heart still pumping with adrenaline.
Halfway there, another coughing fit overtook him.
Then everything went black.
***Ember POV***
November 17
A vacation, at last.
Ember couldn’t remember taking an honest-to-goodness vacation since Castiel had taken her to Miami when they were first dating.
It hadn’t been a normal vacation, though. They’d started in Bora Bora for two days, then gone to downtown London for two days, and finished up in Paris. Ember had had to fend for herself in Paris for a few hours while Castiel attended to a prayer, but all had gone well and Castiel had returned with all good news. It had been a relaxing vacation for both of them, complete with sight-seeing and a lot of sex.
Castiel had used Ember’s birthday as the occasion for the vacation, but Ember had a strong feeling that he was planning on proposing. Therefore it didn’t surprise her in the least when he explained that they’d be spending the last few hours of their vacation “someplace special.”
Ember and Castiel arrived in what was obviously a cave, but Ember had never seen a cave like it. The cave would’ve been almost completely dark were it not for a thousand twinkling magical candles floating in the air of different colors. They lit up an incredibly large cavern, closed except for a small opening in the top that let in moonlight. Castiel and Ember were standing on what looked like a very large stalagmite big enough for several people to stand on, surrounded by water on all sides. It was covered in soft grass and algae.
“Oh my… where are we?” Ember asked Castiel in surprise.
“Do you like it?” he asked. He had been constantly asking this throughout the vacation, as though the answer would ever be anything negative.
“It’s beautiful, Cas,” Ember said.
“It’s the world’s largest cave, called Hang Son Doong,” Castiel said. “But it’s inaccessible to humans this time of year due to the water level… unless you can fly into the middle of it.” He was obviously very proud of himself, and Ember agreed – he had quite outdone himself.
“Ember,” he said seriously, and he put his hands on her shoulders and looked into her eyes. “I’ve loved you for as long as I’ve known you. Maybe since the first time I went into your mind. I’ve loved you when I was an angel, and when I was a human, and I’ll love you for the rest of my life, however long that may be.”
Oh my God.
Castiel got down on one knee, gingerly placing himself on the algae. He fished into his pocket, and pulled out a ring. “Ember… will you marry me?”
“Yes!” she exclaimed, warmth and adrenaline bubbling up inside her. She hugged him, and they both tumbled over into the algae.
A minute of rearranging later and both of them were laying on a blanket Castiel had brought with him as well as his trenchcoat. Castiel was smiling unabashedly; it was the happiest she’d seen him in ages.
Castiel wordlessly took Ember’s hand and held up the ring, which Ember had by then forgotten entirely.
“Right!” she said, slipping it on her finger and taking a closer look. The ring was flat with three stones in the middle. The stones were bright white, and Ember thought they looked like diamonds encased with –
“Cas, is that angel grace?”
“Yes!” he said excitedly, his smile becoming wider and turning into a grin. “My grace, actually. It’s a failsafe… if you ever get into trouble, and for some reason you’re unconscious, my grace will call to me of its own accord. I’ll be able to find you and help. It’s not enough to call attention to you, though – there’s a spell to make it undetectable except to me.”
“Wow, Cas, this is perfect!” Ember exclaimed.
But Cas looked horrified. As if in slow motion, his eyebrows knitted and his mouth dropped into a large “oh.” He grasped Ember securely by the arms, and Ember barely registered that they were about to fly somewhere before she was whisked away from the cave of wonders and back, abruptly, to reality.
***Jack POV***.
November 24
There was white walls, and dizziness. A hospital.
Sam’s, Dean’s, Cas’, Ember’s, and Krissy’s worried faces.
Ember and Krissy were crying.
He felt weak.
The medicines they gave him for the pain and the coughing helped. If he was honest with himself, he felt better physically than he had in at least a week or two.
Then he was back home, and Rowena was there. She had bad news.
“I’m sorry, lad. No one has ever seen a creature like you. One fourth demon, one fourth human, and half angel… the mixture has never existed before. Your grace is what holds the rest in balance, and when it was taken, your being fell into chaos.”
She shook her head, and she left.
Jack looked at his mother, who was being held by his father. “Am… I dying?” he asked.
Ember sobbed harder, but Castiel gave him a resigned nod. “We’re doing everything we can, son,” he whispered.
“How… how long do I have?” he asked the room at large.
It was Sam who finally answered. “A few weeks,” he said. “But… but don’t give up hope yet.”
Sam, Dean, Castiel, Eileen, and Ember immediately put their energies into finding a way to keep him alive. Jack couldn’t remember a time when all five of them had stayed at the bunker for more than a day or two without hunting, much less weeks at a time. Still, both Ember and Castiel uprooted their lives in Conway Springs and moved into the bunker full-time with no notice.
Despite everyone being engrossed in research and busy consulting with witches and shamans from around the world, they seemed to have made an unspoken agreement that at least one person was by Jack’s side at all times. When he was awake, there was almost always someone nearby. He was encouraged to “sleep as much as he wanted” and “drink more water” and “eat more soup.” He felt crowded and fussed over.
By the third day after he fell ill, he had had enough. He was feeling a bit better (probably due to the pain meds) and wanted to get out of the bunker. Luckily, Dean was amenable to the idea. He and Dean went to get a burger and then went fishing, and Dean even let him drive the Impala!
Shortly after he returned, however, he fainted, and afterward the coughing returned in full force. He knew it had been his last sojourn away from the bunker, and he mourned the things that he wouldn’t get to do before he died, like going to a beach or taking a vacation.
There was still a long list of things that Jack wanted to do before he died that he could do inside the bunker, however, such as talking about Heaven and angels with Castiel while everyone else was asleep, thanking Sam for taking him in when nobody else believed in him, and maybe even making out with Krissy. He was fairly certain he didn’t have the energy for sex – or, at least, he didn’t have the energy to be good at it. He wondered whether it was worth risking his health to exert the energy to lose his virginity if he spent most of the act coughing up blood.
Ultimately it didn’t matter, because Jack had barely seen Krissy since he had fallen ill. A couple of hours after Jack had returned home from his initial hospital visit, Krissy had had to return to Conway Springs for school.
“I shouldn’t have said anything to you,” she said during one of the few times he had a minute alone to text her. “I didn’t know you were sick.”
“I’m glad you did,” Jack said. “I’ve been sick for awhile, I think. I didn’t want to tell anyone.”
She sent back a sad face emoji with tears. He guessed that she was probably actually crying – she had done that a lot since finding out that he only had a few weeks to live.
Krissy wanted to skip school and come spend time with Jack, but Jack didn’t want either of them to risk Dean’s anger just before he died. They compromised and agreed that she could visit on Thursday afternoon because she had only morning classes, and again on the weekend.
It was late Saturday afternoon before either of the two of them got a moment alone, however. Castiel had planned a trip back in time for the afternoon to meet up with a Native American medicine woman he’d known at the end of the 17th century. Meanwhile Dean, Sam, and Eileen had made arrangements to meet with a shady black-market dealer in South Dakota claiming to have bottled the grace of Michael. They were fairly certain that it was a trap and that they would be met with more of Michael’s grace-fueled monsters, but they wanted to turn over every leaf. Only Ember was left to manage the hunters still out on various missions, but she was called away to an emergency with one of her clients.
Krissy and Jack both listened for the small click of Ember’s bedroom door and the low hum that meant she was talking on her webcam.
Krissy immediately stood up from her post beside his bed where she had been typing on her laptop, and Jack moved over on the bed to make room for her. “Finally, we’re alone,” Jack murmured, leaning into her side as she settled herself into a sitting position. He tried to sit up next to her, but she stopped him. “Listen Jack,” she said softly. “As much as I’d like to, I… I don’t want to be responsible for making you… I don’t think we should…”
Jack’s heart turned over to see Krissy, who was normally so bold with her words and actions, about to cry. He sat up, forcing down the cough that threatened in his throat, and used his finger to dab at a tear. “It’s okay,” he said softly. “You’re probably right.”
She looked relieved. He moved closer to her until their lips were finally touching. He made no move to roll on top of her or move his hand downward or any of the things that normal teenage hormones would dictate. Instead, he moved his hand back to her face, enjoying the feel of her next to him and the slide of her tongue, and her smell of peaches. That, at least, he could still have before he died, and he wanted as much of it as he could get.