A/N: And here it is. The final installment of Vessel of Blood...drumroll...ok, maybe you're not that excited, but I sure am! :)

Dean found himself in a different place-in a different state. He put his hands on his chest. He could feel his body. It felt like his body. The place he was in…was just that, a place. It didn't seem to have walls, yet as he turned around he couldn't see beyond 20 feet in any direction. It just faded into grey. When he turned back, John and Mary Winchester stood before him.

"Mom? Dad?" Dean couldn't believe it. He couldn't move it felt so unreal.

"Yes, Dean. We're here." Mary's voice and soft touch soothed so much of the confusion and anguish bottled up inside of him. He let out a breath held for years. He touched her hand as it caressed his face like she used to when he was a boy, and looked up into her eyes filled with love. Dean loved his brother, his father and Bobby immensely in his own way, but his mother was the only person he had ever been able to receive love from.

"Dean." His father's strong voice. Son met his father's gaze and saw in it all the strength, pride and affirmation he needed.

"Dad." No further words were needed. All confusion, conflict and bitterness disappeared.

"You can't stay, son." Always his father was the commander. Dean straightened. He was prepared to soldier on. He would do whatever his father asked of him.

"What am I supposed to do? I saved Sammy, Dad. I did what you told me."

"Yes you did, Son." John smiled with tender approval. "But it's not over. Your whole life has been in preparation for this. Everything. The people in your life, the events that shaped you. You had to be a fighter, Dean. You are special, but you are truly human. You fight for free will. "

"That doesn't sound much like free will to me, Dad."

"Just remember, Son, that freedom is an opting in, not an opting out….it is a participation in being itself."

At the befuddled look on Dean's face, Mary continued,

"Yet if there is free will in the world, then there will also be evil and pain because men do not always choose the good. But what would it mean if you had no choice but to obey your father? To love me? To protect Sammy?"

"How couldn't I, Mom?" Dean asked, confused. Mary smiled. Put that way, Dean understood.

"Well, that's how it should be, Dean. Unfortunately people go against their natures."

"Like the demons." John added knowingly. "It's up to you, Dean. You choose what you do. You saved Sammy. Will you now save the world? Will you save every man's son? Every man's brother? "

"I want I don't understand how I can do that. What can I do?"

"When the time comes, you will know."

"There's uh, just one little problem."

"What that, Dean?"

"I'm kinda dead."

Dean heard a sound he thought he would never hear again, and one he hadn't heard for what seemed a lifetime: His father's laugh.

"These are the end times, jumpstarted by the rebels." John looked up. "We don't have much longer. Everything is set in motion before its time. Beware the one who claims to be what he is not. Be not deceived by his apparent goodness, for he is a liar."

"What does that mean?" Why was his father being so cryptic? Where were his father's plain, straightforward commands?

"There is so much more I wish I had time to tell you, Dean, but I don't."

Dean started in surprise when he saw words being written on the wall behind his parents, burnt in a scrawling text:

"Even my familiar friend in whom I trusted has lifted up his heel against me."

After he read the mysterious and foreboding script, everything flashed and then faded around him, and he found himself on a deserted road. It was dusk—the beginning of darkness.

A/N: Okay you wonderful readers who have made it all the way to the end! Bless you! Now. Please tell me what you thought, and if you want this to continue. It is after all only the beginning. I have an Apocalypticfic in the works….