A/N: I've had the idea of bringing back Dean's pendant for years, and finally had an excuse to work it into a fic. I don't often write tags, but as I can't seem to find one that does exactly what I need to get past this season, what else could I do but write a new ending myself.

Tag/Coda to 7.23 "Survival of the Fittest" finale. Missing scene before they go after Dick, and added scene after the fade to black. Doesn't have to be but could be taken as pre-slash, especially as I've been reading alot of DeanxCas porn lately and may need to write a sequel to this where that happens. :-)

Enjoy.

This Cherished Part of You

"Do you know what I think you should do if you don't like a story? If you don't like the ending or you think a couple of your favorite characters got the shaft? Rewrite it."

– from Harder to Swallow Than Most, a wonderful but very odd Supernatural/Angel crossover you can find in my favorites by SilverKitsune1.

Dean was going over lists in his head. Things they needed to bring. Things they needed to do. Things they needed to avoid once they got there. Ways they could all end up dead.

He hated making lists.

Since Sam and…Meg—of all people to have watching their backs—were busy preparing for the raid against Dick, and Dean felt like he was doing little more than twiddling his thumbs, he decided to head outside for some quality time with his baby before he sent her off to get smashed up. Again.

He should have expected to find Cas outside, since the off-his-rocker angel had a tendency of showing up exactly when and where Dean didn't want him to be, and never when and where he really needed him. He wasn't too thrilled to find Cas sitting on the hood of the Impala, though, even if she was about to get a little banged up. But at least Cas was wearing clothes this time instead of bees.

"Dude, what are you doing?" Dean asked sharply, not about to allow Cas to deter him from his goal of quality car time. "Does that look like a chair?"

Castiel looked down at the car beneath him. "Not particularly," he said. "Should it?" His attention then quickly returned to whatever he had been preoccupied with before Dean's arrival, which seemed to be something small and glittering between the angel's fingers.

Dean squinted to try and see what it was, hoping it wasn't anything he would regret getting a look at later. Then he stopped in his tracks, a few feet yet from the Impala, as what Cas was actually holding was revealed to him. He didn't trust his eyes at first. Of all the things Cas could possibly have had in his fingers at that moment, what he actually did have was next to impossible.

It was Dean's pendant. Gold-colored with its strange little horned head and a black cord. The pendant Dean had thrown away years ago.

"Where did you get that?" Dean demanded, perhaps a little more possessive than he had any right to sound, since he had willingly given the necklace up.

"My pocket."

Dean felt his fists clench at his sides. "Before you took it out of your pocket."

"Sam gave it to me."

Now Dean was really getting angry. "Sam? Why? When?"

"The day he went to say 'yes' to Lucifer. He asked me to look after it for him. I thought it a silly thing at the time, and asked didn't he want me to look after you? And he said…'That's what I mean'. Are you in here somewhere, Dean?" Castiel asked the question without looking away from the pendant, just holding the tiny golden head between his fingers and rubbing his thumbs over the surface as if it was a genie's lamp.

Dean felt his anger ebb away. Of course Sam plucked the damn thing out of the trash that day. Of course he did. But had it been in Cas's trench coat pocket all this time? Dean hadn't thought to check the pockets when he gathered the drowned garment from the water and folded it into the trunk of the Impala. He had just let it sit there, drying with caked on Leviathan goo, in a neglected heap.

Well…not neglected. He had carefully removed it from every trunk, every vehicle they used, and placed it in the newest one so it was always with them, always waiting for Cas's impossible return.

Dean was still waiting.

"Why do you have it now?" Dean asked, finally moving forward to come up next to the Impala and look more carefully at the pendant in the angel's hands. "What's the point of hanging onto it?"

"In case you ever needed it."

"I didn't think you cared about finding God anymore."

"I don't mean in case you needed it for that. This was never a representation of the Father to you, Dean. It represented Sam. And family. And...you. Sam feared those were the things you were really throwing away that day when you dropped this in the trash."

"I never...meant to throw away Sam."

"No. Only yourself."

Dean stiffened, but even if the words were spoken by a broken angel, he knew he couldn't deny them.

"Would you like it back now, Dean? I can hold onto it. This cherished part of you. If you like." Castiel looked at Dean for the first time, blue eyes shimmering unnaturally.

As with everything Cas said these days, Dean suspected a deeper, twisted meaning behind those words, but he didn't want to think about it right now. "Whatever you want, Cas."

Castiel tilted his head at Dean, like he used to back in the beginning, so long ago now, as if those words were truly fascinating and puzzling to him. What he wanted. He smiled then, wide and silly, and pocketed the pendant. "Thank you, Dean."

"Uh…sure."

"Did I upset you with the bees earlier? I was just—"

"I don't need to know!" Dean interrupted, really wishing he could forget that, and that Cas hadn't ADD-ed right to that particular recent memory. "Just…don't do it again. Or anything naked involving my baby. Fully clothed at all times, inside and out of her." He gestured to Cas still sitting on the Impala's hood.

Castiel frowned. "You don't follow your own rules, Dean."

Before Dean could counter that—and, really, he didn't have a counter considering some of the things he had done in the back of that car—Sam and Meg came out of the house.

Well. At least they were about to head out on yet another suicide run. Dean had lost count of how many of those he'd had in his life, but he knew it had to be a record. Maybe with this one it would hold true, and he wouldn't make it. Maybe none of them would make it.

He could only be so lucky.

It had been a good plan. Barrel toward the building in the Impala and, at the last second, have Cas bamf Sam and Dean inside, leaving Meg to crash the car and handle the distraction outside. Then Sam was off to find Kevin and Dean and Cas went searching for Dick. Everyone found what they were looking for. The plan went off without a hitch.

Until Dean blinked awake on a dark forest floor.

The only weapon Dean had was a knife, one small knife against a pack of red eyes that could belong to any number of monstrous creatures. Dean hadn't brought a gun. Not to fend off Leviathan. He had only had the fake bone, the real one, and a knife.

And Cas had just vanished without a trace.

Dean braced himself, gripping his knife tightly in a ready position. If he was going out then he was going out fighting.

"Dean."

Dean gasped at the familiar voice and a hand on his shoulder. "Shit, Cas. Where'd you go?"

"I found us a place to hide. We need to go now."

"Ya think?" Dean spat angrily, but as he turned around, still with Cas's hand on his shoulder, he found himself already transported away from the forest. They were in a cave now, with only the faintest light coming in from the mouth and Cas's blue eyes glowing brightly in the darkness.

"We will not be safe long," Castiel said, stepping past Dean to glance outside, before returning, his dimly lit expression firm and serious. Like it used to be.

Like he used to be.

"Cas?"

"We cannot hide forever, Dean. If we are to find a way home, it must be now."

"But…how can we get out? It took that crazy spell you did to even open a doorway, and killing Dick to bring us here. There isn't supposed to be a way for Leviathan to get out easily."

"There isn't. But we are not Leviathan. We are not dead monsters or demons."

Dean squinted, wishing he could see Cas—see anything—more clearly, but it did not surprise him to find that Purgatory was an endless night. "So…there are ways for people who don't belong here to get out?"

Castiel looked unsure. "Balthazar would know," he said quietly. "It was his specialty, such travels. That is why I asked him to send you and Sam to that other world."

"The one with all the fake actor versions of us?"

Castiel nodded. "Balthazar would know," he said again, "…if I hadn't killed him."

In another situation, Dean would have been pleased to see actual remorse on Cas's face again instead of that damn blissful ignorance he had been wearing lately. But not now. They couldn't deal with this now. "Do you know anything? Anything that could help us? We can't wait and hope for Sam, even if he could find a way to get us out."

"There may be ways, but we'll need clues. We'll need to find the right path," Castiel said. "We need to move and keep moving. In time, I will lose my connection to Heaven. I will not be able to move us swiftly from one location to the next. We will be stranded on foot, even if surrounded."

Dean sighed, though he wasn't surprised to learn this. After all, Purgatory was as far from Heaven as they could get, even farther than Hell. "Okay. Then we move."

But Cas didn't move. Not immediately. He remained standing in front of Dean with the mouth of the cave at his back, haloing him in a strange bluish glow, which only seemed to make his blue eyes brighter.

After a moment, Castiel reached into his coat pocket and produced Dean's pendant. Dean wasn't sure what to say when the angel placed it over his head to rest where it once had consistently for most of Dean's life.

"Cas…?"

"In this place, you need as much of yourself as you can get. Maybe there's…a little more of me here, too." Castiel's right hand was resting over the necklace, over Dean's heart, as he said this.

He looked haunted, normal, like he finally realized that ignorance wasn't really bliss, and never would be.

Together they turned to leave the cave and seek whatever end was in store for them, whether there was a way home somewhere out there, or only the inevitability of death.

And yet, Dean thought, even in Purgatory, with no idea what to do next or what the next turn of the bend might bring them, having that small cherished part of him returned...and his best friend at his side, made him feel more like himself than he had in a long time.

THE END (though I could be persuaded to write a porn epilogue)

I think the Show can be saved now that we're rid of Gamble. Here's hoping!

~Crimson