We hit the ground running, with Jack barely taking a spare second to pinch the portal back together. If I lived in a universe embroiled in a never-ending war, I'd sure as hell set up some kind of warning system when visitors dropped in, so as soon as our feet touched the blasted plains, we took off like a bunch of cats who'd heard the can opener.

We headed for the nearest cover, a shattered boulder, and when we reached it, we made for the next nearest. We kept this up for a good mile or so, and just when I was feeling extremely proud of myself – this past year of clean living had really upped my cardio game – we heard the distinct sound of a gun being cocked, and froze in place in the bombed-looking remains of what had once been a cabin of some sort.

An achingly familiar voice drawled, "Turn around, nice and slow, hands where I can see 'em."

I felt like a bucket of cold water had been dumped on me. Hands trembling a little as I raised them, I turned in a slow circle. "Hey, Bobby," I said, voice rough.

"She keeps sayin' you idjits'll come back fer her. Hell if I know why anyone'd come back here if there was any other option. Guess I should start believin' her. Are these fly-boys botherin' you?"

His tone was friendly enough, but his rifle was still very much pointed at our group as he stepped away from the piece of wall that had concealed him. His face, seamed and worn, was both a comfort and a punch in the gut.

We gave him back our grimmest faces. I had deep-seated reasons for not wanting to disappoint this man, and they were only tangentially related to avoiding being perforated by whatever he'd loaded his anti-angel rifle with. As a denizen of the realm, he had information we could use, about Lucifer, and about Mom.

At least, that was the idea. Jack was frigging beaming, and Bobby was starting to look mildly freaked out by it. "What's your deal, kid?"

Jack waved a hand at him, tried to bring his face under control, failed. "This is going to sound insane, but of all the memories I have in my head that don't belong to me, you are the person I most wanted to see with my own eyes."

Bobby stared at him, tightened his grip on his gun.

"No, please," Jack said, reining it back to a small grin that he couldn't banish completely. "I'm just so happy you're still alive."

"Makes two of us, I reckon," Bobby responded. He shifted his gaze to Gabriel and Cas, who, like Sam and me, were standing as still as possible with hands held high. "These two are with you? From the other side?"

Sam and I nodded as carefully as possible.

"So I shouldn't shoot 'em?"

"We'd very much appreciate it if you didn't," Sam said. "We just got them back from being dead two days ago. It would kind of suck to have gone through all that work for nothing."

I braced myself for Gabriel to make some sort of glib remark, but he held his tongue for once.

"And this one? He ain't no angel, but 'm not sure he's human, either."

"That's correct," Jack said. "I'm neither, and both." He seemed almost giddy.

"Bobby," I rasped, drawing his vaguely horrified gaze away from the kid. "When you said she, did you mean Mary Win- Um, that is, Campbell? Do you know where she is?"

Bobby gave us all one final scrutinizing look, then shrugged. He uncocked the rifle and shouldered it, to everyone's immediate relief. "C'mon, she'll be lookin' forward to the toldya so."

He took a few steps, and when we fell into a loose line behind him, he whirled and splashed all of us at once with water from a canteen he'd produced from nowhere. We got glowered at, daring us to protest, but we humored him and dripped holy water in silent resignation.

Satisfied, he led us out of the obliterated cabin, across more destroyed landscapes, through dusty valleys and the remains of a grove of trees. An acrid wind gusted constantly, blowing the sand and dirt into swirling devils that rasped at the skin and stung the eye.

"Don't make a lick of sense," he muttered to himself, eying us all as we trudged toward a largish hill set around with chunks of boulder. "Pretty little thing like that, claimin' you boys are her own grown sons."

Despite the tense atmosphere, I felt a hint of relief. Since Amara had brought her back, she hadn't been too interested in being Mom to us. If she was owning up to it at last, she might even be happy to come back with us, in addition to coming back with us.

"She was gone for most of our formative years, for reasons outside of her control," I answered, even though it had seemed a rhetorical statement. "Cuts down on the wear and tear."

Bobby gave a one-shouldered shrug, like I'd seen him do a hundred times, and I had to remind myself that this was not my Bobby, not the one who'd raised me and my brother when our dad couldn't be bothered. This one didn't know us at all.

I only hoped he'd give us a chance.

"Well, here we are," he said, indicating a gap between two of the larger rocks. Every surface was scrawled with warding symbols and demon traps. "Can you flyboys pass through here? Or are you gonna have to wait outside? Folks are skittish 'round your kind, this side of the universe."

Cas put a restraining grip on his brother's shoulder to forestall whatever was going to come out of his mouth. "We will behave, Bobby Singer."

The extra roughness in his voice reminded me that Cas had known our Bobby as well, had almost been raised by him, too, in his own way.

Bobby caught it, and it made him pause. "Were you-all friends, you angels and the Bobby Singer from your side?"

Cas's Adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed. "Yes," he answered at last, fitting the years of complexities we'd all experienced together, the betrayals and forgivenesses, into a single hoarse word.

"And you?" Bobby turned to Gabriel.

"He tried to kill me once," Gabe said, unnaturally serious. "It was a good plan, and very well executed. He just didn't have all of the facts."

Bobby grunted and turned away, but I had an advanced degree in Bobby Singer Monosyllables, and if there were any parallels in the Multiverse, this one sounded approving.

"Welcome to the Haven," he said, ducking between the stones. "Only no-fly zone for miles around. Not too many in residence at the moment, but people come and go. We're a roadhouse, not a prison."

The name of Ellen's bar yanked hard on my conscience. We'd lost her the first time we'd faced Lucifer, and now we were back for another shot. We needed information, and we needed it fast. If people were still moving around, then it didn't sound like Lucifer had moved in and subjugated the human race like we'd been expecting.

We emerged into a dim, round room with a large table in the center. The walls were bits of rock fitted together, with chinks left for light to filter through, and several doorways seemed to lead to more underground spaces.

"First things first," Bobby said, leaning his rifle against a wall and pulling a bottle down from a niche near the entrance. "More holy water shots for everyone, and y'all need to hold this silver coin."

When we'd passed his tests, he gestured to the benches beside the table. "Have a seat, I'll go see what Mary's up to."

He vanished downward through a doorway, and we all exchanged confused looks.

"Dude, he said roadhouse," said Sam. "Do you think-?"

"Let's not get our hopes up. Bobby alone was a huge coincidence," I told him.

Gabriel made a humming noise. "Well, when you think about it, who's most likely to survive, if angels and demons go to war? I'd think hunters are pretty well set-up with the right skills."

"Naw, man, that's regular hunters," I disagreed. "Hunters, with a capital H, would starve to death the minute they shut down the drive-thrus."

There was a sudden clattering on the stairs that Bobby had descended, and then our mother burst into the room.

"Sam! Dean!" And she threw her arms around us, squeezing hard. "I knew you'd come back! If not for me, then for that asshole Lucifer, at least!"

She stood back, grinning at us, and then her eyes caught on Cas, and her mouth dropped open. "But. But. Castiel, you…"

She trailed off, glancing between Cas and me.

"Like a little thing like death would stop a Winchester," I said, shrugging.

"Hello, Mary," Cas said, sounding almost shy.

Her face held onto its confusion for another second, then lit back up in another huge smile, and she pulled Cas in for a bone-crushing hug as well. His blue eyes went wide with astonishment.

"Damn, that makes me so happy! When I went through, the last thing I saw…" She trailed off, glanced at me, then back at Cas again. "Well. I lost my whole universe, but I knew you had lost even more than that. I'm glad you found your way back to each other. And who's this?"

She hung onto Cas's arm, I noticed. They'd had time to bond while Sam and I were stuck in secret government prison. I was glad of it, for both their sakes.

"Right. Mom, this is Gabriel," said Sam, as Gabe slid forward.

Mom's eyes went wide. Bobby, who'd been leaning against the doorway with his arms crossed, eying us all with healthy skepticism, let out a hoarse wheeze.

"Holy cow, really? How did we get an archangel on our team?"

Gabriel gave her his most charming smile and shook her still-outstretched hand. "Simple, really. Out of the three of us from our side that we aren't here to destroy, one of us is still in the Pit, where Lucifer should be, and the other hates our guts since Cassie here eviscerated him that one time. I'm the obvious choice, especially since the last time I saw my brother, he murdered me. Couldn't pass up the chance to tell him I'm still pretty sore about that."

Mom gawked at him for a second, blinked a few times, closed her mouth, and gave a decisive nod. She firmed her grip on his hand and gave it a proper shake. Gabriel looked pleased.

"I like her," he told Sam. "Maybe more than you."

She rolled her eyes, learning quickly the appropriate response to most of the things that came out of Gabe's mouth, and turned to Jack, who was beaming fit to split his face in half again.

"And this is…?"

"Hi, I'm Jack. It's nice to see you again."

"Again? Wait, Jack?"

"Yours was the first face I ever saw," he said, clasping her hand in both of his.

"One second," she told him. She left him in custody of her hand, turning over her shoulder to look at me. "Is time running wonky here? When I get back to the other universe, am I going to find that I've missed thirty more years, instead of just the one that it felt like here? Because I really don't think I could handle that again."

I grinned at her. "Just the one year. They grow up in the blink of an eye, don't they? One minute, it's the pitter-patter, sizzle-crackle of little burning feet, and then they wear a shoe size bigger 'n yours and have a girlfriend."

She turned back to Jack, who had promptly turned tomato-red.

After sizing him up, she reached her other hand up to cup his cheek. "Kelly would be proud of the man you've become," she said.

"Thank you," he replied after a beat, blinking in surprise.

"Hold on a dang minute," Bobby said, stepping forward to interrupt for the first time. "Just what manner of creature are you, kid?"

"Actually, before he answers, can I ask you a question about that?" Sam asked.

Bobby made an exaggerated go ahead gesture.

"How can you tell he isn't human? How can you tell that Cas and Gabriel are angels? People on our earth were entirely oblivious, especially since Jack is wearing an amulet that should keep anyone from sensing anything out of the ordinary about him."

"Well, Mary trusts you-all, so I might as well. My amulet trumps your amulet, I guess."

He reached under the neck of his flannel, hooked a leather string on his fingertips, and pulled out … son of a bitch. Just the sight of that little horned dude made my throat close up. Sam had given it to me when we were kids, and I'd worn it until … until Cas had made me lose faith in it.

Everyone in the room carefully avoided looking at each other.

Bobby, reading the atmosphere, waggled the protection amulet that also happened to detect the presence of God. "I take it this ain't new to you?"

"We've met," said Sam shortly.

"It reacts in the presence of angels," Bobby said. "Useful little thing, 'specially since they can turn invisible. Lit right up when you two walked past, but it got kind of confused when it hit the kid."

"I'm only half-angel," Jack told him. "My mother was a human."

We all braced ourselves; circumstances like Jack's probably weren't too common on this Earth, and there was no telling how this Bobby would react.

"Huh," he said, giving his one-shouldered shrug again. "Different strokes, I guess. So you're just along for the ride, or what? What have you got against Lucifer?"

Jack sent a panicked glance at the rest of us, but we all gave him reassuring nods, so he turned to face Bobby, squared his shoulders, and said, "Lucifer is my father."

Bobby went white under his weather-beaten tan, and Jack hastened to reassure him.

"I have never met him. He was sealed into this universe moments after my birth, mostly thanks to Mary, here, and I was raised and taught to be human by Dean and Sam. I am the only thing my father has ever loved, aside from himself above all things, and his own father, long ago. I believe I can reason with him. Will you tell us where to find him?"

Bobby recovered his composure. "Have a seat, boys. We'll bring you up to speed on everythin'. Y'all might decide you just want to take Mary and go home, without even lettin' Lucifer know you're here."

Jack shook his head. "I have to save this place. I think it's what I'm meant to do."

I glanced at Cas, who was staring at Jack with dawning understanding. He'd believed Jack would save the world, had seen it in a vision, but he was just now getting that the world Jack saved might not be ours.

Jack sat at the table and looked expectantly at Bobby and Mom. "So? Now that the whole party's here, what has my father been up to in the year he's been on your side?"

The rest of us trailed after him and seated ourselves as well, except Bobby, who stood at the head of the table like a professor in a lecture hall, and Mom, who kept pacing around the table and trailing hands over all of us in turn, Gabriel being the exception.

"So. He came through that hole out there last year, backwards, with this one's knife at his throat," Bobby started, motioning to our mother. "I drove him off with ol' Gertie here," he patted his rifle affectionately, "and he took off."

"He shouted at me from a distance," Mom put in, "but Bobby told me we had to get to cover, so we ignored him and headed here. We heard a lot of noise as we were running, like some sort of confrontation, but we didn't stick around to see who was involved."

"Turns out your portal, or maybe whatever that other fella did to seal it, attracted the attention of both armies. Lucifer hit up the head of the demon side fer an introduction to whoever was in charge."

"Is that not Lucifer, then, here?" Sam asked. "I thought our timelines diverged back when Mom and Dad were still going out, when Dad got killed here. Angels have long histories; everything else should be the same, right?"

"No, that's true," Bobby responded. "It's been the armies of Lucifer versus the armies of Michael all over this planet for the last few decades. But then, your Lucifer shows up. Word is, when he got back to Hell Headquarters, he overpowered our Lucifer somehow, sealed him back into the Pit, and took over.

"From a human perspective, nothin' much changed. Angels still warred with demons, we still caught the fallout of it. Did you know there's a thing called smiting sickness? Nasty way to go, as a bystander."

I swallowed hard. Yes, I was familiar with that affliction.

"Now, the angels, they try not to hurt humans. Somethin' about God's plan. But if we happen to be in the way, they don't hold back. They see us as lesser life forms, barely sentient at all. Like steppin' on an ant to them, hurtin' a human."

Gabriel held up a hand. "You seemed surprised to hear my name. Is the Gabriel in this universe important to the war effort? I'd long abandoned either side by the time John Winchester was born."

"Only fer the bounty on your head," Bobby responded, making Gabe's golden eyes go wide. "Both sides have an interest in your whereabouts. They know you're not dead, only hidin', and they think havin' you could sway this stalemate they've fallen into."

Gabriel buried his face in his hands. "Dammit, Lucy," he muttered. "Why do you have to spoil everything?"

Bobby nodded in understanding. "Makes sense, actually. Word that you were alive started comin' down a month or so after he got here."

"So, what do you think, Gabriel?" Sam asked. "Would the you of the past, the one that didn't get talked into picking a side, be swayed by the you of now? One of you will be a huge help, but two of you would be even better."

"I'll have a chat with me later," Gabe said, waving it off. "If I'm still in hiding, I still don't care enough to come down on one side or the other."

"So what's our play, here?" Mary asked. "Go to the angels and ask them to let us join their team? Or go in as Team Human?"

"Team Free Will strikes again," I said. "Even in the world with Winchesters, the angels weren't too interested in our help, except as meat suits. We stuffed Lucifer back into the Pit ourselves, with maximum casualties."

My throat went tight as I remembered the aftermath. Cas exploded, and both Sam and Adam trapped in the Pit with the leaders of both sides. Shit, Adam was still trapped in the Pit. One more choice I'd made.

"I can try to find myself, as well," Castiel spoke up. "The Castiel of this timeline will never have met a Winchester, and so won't have Fallen, but I can remember questioning our Father's plan, long before I ever acted on the feeling. Naomi never managed to take that from me completely."

Bobby looked thoughtful. "'S not a bad idea, actually. The demons possess whoever they want, and leave 'em behind when they're done, and they don't care that we remember everythin' we do while we're not in the driver's seat, so we've got a lot of intel on their operation. Angels, though, play fer keeps."

I pulled my collar aside, exposing my anti-possession tattoo. "Can I assume you're handin' these out like candy on Halloween to anyone passin' through?"

"Bet your ass, kid. The only way humans survive this war is by playin' the long game. If enough of the population is vaccinated, eventually the disease dies out. That's what did it fer smallpox. Your mom has a nice, steady hand, and a better bedside manner than me, so she's taken over that little chore."

I wanted to ask my mother to describe every single human she'd seen in the past year, if anyone else we'd lost was still alive and well here, but the list was too long. Charlie could have strolled in, flirted away while Mom marked her, and strolled back out arm in arm with Kevin and Jo, and Mom wouldn't even have known they were important.

"You said stalemate, earlier," Gabriel said, changing the subject back. "What's the war like, on a day-to-day basis? Is either side showing a dip in numbers? There are a lot of angels, but we're not an infinite resource. Not renewable, either. Present company excepted."

"It got harder to track, once the world wide web went down, but there definitely seem to be fewer battles now than there used to be. In the beginning, there was a battle a day, maybe more. These days, I can go a few weeks without seein' anythin' that ain't pure human, when I even manage to clap eyes on one of them."

"Any sign of a showdown between Lucifer and Michael?" asked Sam. "One decisive battle would end it for both sides, and I know that's all Michael really wanted, on our side."

"Maybe it was, once, but we're past that now," Bobby answered. "Pride's been hurt on both sides. No one wants to back down."

"Sounds to me like finding this universe's Castiel and trying to pry angel info out of him is our best first step," said Jack. "He can let the others know what we're up to. Once we know what we're facing, and what might be coming up behind us when we face it, then we can head over to Lucifer's headquarters and I can try to appeal to his better nature."

"Could we not acquire information from any other angelic soldier?" Cas asked.

"Think back to how you were before you met us," I said. "How you didn't object when Uriel called us mud monkeys, except on principle. Would you tell random humans anything, just because they asked nicely? We're not here to torture anyone. Only you have a good chance of convincing you, without resortin' to violence."

Cas mulled that over, then nodded. "You are correct, but I just…"

He trailed off, and Gabriel suddenly grinned. "I get it. You ever look back at old photos, and think, wow, really, I thought that look was a good idea? I bet Cassie has that feeling in spades, but about all of his life choices, not just the mullets and hammer-pants that a human would regret. We all think, if I could go back, and just talk to the me who thought bedazzled jean jackets were cool, I could talk him out of it. But with angels, talking them out of it is a very difficult prospect. We've had millennia to wear the ruts into our personalities."

Cas nodded, and glanced sideways at me. "When we met, before I questioned aloud, before I Fell, I was very different. I am not eager to see that me again."

"Dude, yeah, you were a total douche. Or at least, following the orders of one. You really grew on me once you stopped."

"There's another thought," Sam said, as I grabbed Cas's hand under the table and gave it a squeeze. "Should we bother looking for this universe's Chuck? He could stop all of this in a heartbeat, just by showing up."

"The fact that he hasn't, means he doesn't give a shit," I said. "I say forget him. Chuck is what God calls himself on our end of the universe," I told Bobby. "Squirrely little dude, completely apathetic."

Bobby just gaped at me.

"Anyway," I continued. "Cas? Got any ideas for a you-summoning?"

In the end, it was just Cas, Gabriel, and me who went for a long walk, to summon an angel to somewhere far away from Bobby's Haven.

Jack wanted to come along, but Cas reminded him that he might be considered an abomination, so he and Sam stayed behind to get more info out of Bobby and Mom about the demons' operation.

"If he has not become a casualty of this war, he will most likely still be partnered with Uriel," Castiel said as we walked. "Summoning him without arousing suspicion will be a challenge. I did very little on my own. There was no need."

"I'll handle him, if he shows," said Gabriel. "My secret's going to be out anyway, might as well make myself useful."

"Think this is far enough?" I asked, spreading my arms to indicate the space around me. We were standing on a strip of cracked asphalt, the remains of a highway.

Cas squinted back in the direction of the Haven, calculating. "Yes, this should be fine. The humans are out of range of my senses here, so unless this me has additional abilities, they will be safe."

"So how are we doing this? Angel Radio?"

Cas shook his head. "Angel Radio has been silent since our arrival. It would be safe to assume it has been compromised. Dean, can you pray? It is going to feel strange for him, because he will not have the memory of rebuilding you, but you have my grace inside you. It is a direct, secure line, and he will not be able to resist answering. The only variable is whether or not he tells Uriel what he is doing before he does so."

"Oh. Yeah, no problem. Well, you'll be able to hear everything I pray, so let me know if I get somethin' wrong."

I stepped away and tilted my head back, eyes closing in order to focus inward but was startled out of it by a hand fisting in my shirt and yanking me forward. My eyes popped open, meeting Cas's suddenly blazing ones, and then he was kissing me, fierce and possessive, until Gabriel cleared his throat and he let me go.

"I know what I was like when we met, Dean Winchester," Cas growled. "I know how you changed me. Please remember, this version of Castiel will not have you there to catch him if he Falls. When he Falls. Pity him if you will, but you belong to me."

I took a second to calm my pounding heart. Damn, possessive Cas was hot.

"You got it, angel. I'll be gentle with him."

I tilted my head back a second time, this time with a grin I couldn't hide. I let the weak sunlight fall on my face, showing pink through my eyelids, and I reached down inside myself to touch the part that was Cas.

Castiel, Castiel, Angel of Thursday, I pray to you. Please grace me with your presence, I need to speak with you. It is a matter of some urgency.

A strangled sound climbed out of Cas's throat. "Thank you, Dean, that was very compelling."

We waited a few seconds, ears straining and eyes searching in the blowing dust, and then we were rewarded with the flutter of wings and old-school Castiel appeared in front of me, clean-shaven, blank-faced, stiff-postured, tan trenchcoat and all, and I got hit by a steamroller.

This Castiel had never met me, never killed for me, never turned his back on his family, never sought the power of the Leviathans because he thought he had to, never been to Purgatory, never thrown a Molotov cocktail at the Morning Star and called him an ass-butt. He'd been living through about two decades of solid war, but his innocence was almost blinding, compared to the shit I'd dragged my Cas through.

How much less broken would Cas be, if I had allowed myself from the start to treat him how I had always known he deserved to be treated?

Focus. Talk now, angst later.

"Human, this is most irregular. I must inquire how you…"

His graveled voice trailed off.

"What sort of demon's trickery is this?" he asked, staring at Cas with widened eyes. Cas stared back, seemingly fascinated.

"Whoa, there, cowboy," Gabriel said, holding up both hands. "Take a closer look before you go off half-cocked."

Castiel turned to him, and his eyes opened even wider. "Gabriel," he breathed.

Gabe grinned. "Hi, little brother. Been a while."

Castiel turned back to Cas and me. "And you. You both. You contain my grace, though one of you is human. How is this possible?"

"Let's put it like this," Gabriel said, while blue eyes stayed locked with blue. "Is there any word around the angel camps that the Lucifer y'all are fighting now isn't the same Lucifer who kicked off the war? That the current Lucifer is from somewhere else?"

Castiel nodded. "Rumors, mostly. Demons lie, but why would they lie about something so absurd, unless there was a shred of truth in it?"

Cas spoke up. "More than a shred. We are also from somewhere else. We have come to assist with the problem."

Castiel cocked his head (not yours, not yours, stop thinking about him that way, I chanted to myself), then reached a hand out and prodded Cas in the chest, testing his solidity. "Then, you are me, from somewhere else? Where did our paths diverge?"

For Chuck's sake, the difference was staggering. If my Cas had been dropped into a reverse of this situation, his first reaction would have been intense suspicion, not this childlike curiosity.

"In our universe," Cas began, "the Winchester Prophecy was fulfilled, but war was averted through the brave actions of several humans. In yours, it seems that the Prophecy was forestalled. Someone made certain that it would never come to pass, and in doing so, caused the war anyway."

Castiel's eyes strayed toward me, then snapped back to Cas, then strayed again.

Cas continued. "I was honored with the assignment of retrieving the Righteous Man. I healed him, then gripped him tight and raised him from Perdition."

Fuck, Cas. That one always got me, that line delivered with Cas's peculiar intensity. Keep it to yourself, Winchester, I chastised myself as Cas shot me a warning glare and Castiel jerked as if slapped. You'll spook the natives.

Castiel abandoned any pretense of not staring at me. "And this is he? Our grace is knit through him." His eyes went soft with wonder. "His soul…"

"This is Dean Winchester," Cas said, allowing only a hint of irritation to seep into his tone. "A great hero where we come from, though he will never admit it to anyone, even to himself."

Dragging himself away from whatever it was that Castiels of any stripe found so goddamn fascinating about my soul, this universe's Castiel nodded, re-focused, and asked the million-dollar question. "Where is it that you come from? You and the Lucifer we are battling? How did you get here?"

Cas faltered for the first time, and I realized he didn't want to tell this Castiel how he'd been living his life. No judgment hurts worse than your own.

Gabriel swept in, trying to breeze past how alarming his news would sound. "Lucifer was locked away, as our Castiel said, but a little while ago he managed to escape again. While at large, he knocked up a human female."

Castiel recoiled, but I remembered Lily Sunder's tragic tale, and Isham's cruelty, and Castiel's reluctance.

"While still in the human female's womb," Cas spoke back up, "the nephilim opened a gateway from our world to this one. Lucifer was driven through, to keep him from bonding with his child. Together, their power would have been used to destroy all of our Father's creations. I tried to stop him myself, but I was insufficient."

I caught the hint of a flinch on Castiel's face when Cas mentioned their father.

"What of the other angels? Surely, without this unending war, their ranks are strong enough together to defeat Lucifer?"

Cas's wings weren't visible at the moment, but I thought I could see them droop, anyway. "There are many differences between this world and ours. Much has happened. There was a war, but not against the demons. Suffice it to say, our ranks are not what they once were. Those that remained were easily cowed by Lucifer. If not for Dean Winchester and his family, he would have succeeded, and our world would be ashes."

"Like this one, you mean to say?"

Cas looked startled at the bitterness in Castiel's tone, but then his face showed a quiet understanding. After all, he remembered being this version of himself, having questions but no one to ask, having doubts but no safe way to reassure himself about them, longing for a Father he'd never seen.

"Like this one, but worse. Here, there are still those who would stand against Lucifer. If he rose to power on our Earth, only the humans would oppose him, and though they have many unexpected strengths, they would ultimately fail."

"And so, you have come to reunite Lucifer with his son? Are you trying to unmake this world?"

In all the times I'd managed to piss Cas off in the past, I'd never seen him actually mad before. Castiel was truly impressive, storm clouds churning and lightning flashing in his eyes. Maybe there was something about Cas being here, sharing his feelings, that was opening him up in a way he would not dare show anyone else. Angels weren't supposed to have emotions, after all.

Cas was unmoved by the display. "The nephilim, whose name is Jack, was raised by Dean and his family, taught humility and the value of life. I received a vision, one I still believe in, that Jack will bring peace to the land. At the time, I believed it was of our Earth, but now I know he is meant to save yours, instead."

"Show me," Castiel demanded, holding his arms out to his sides.

Cas's eyebrows went up, but he nodded, stepped forward, and pressed two fingers to Castiel's forehead. Both sets of blue eyes slid closed.

A half-minute passed. Tears began to leak down Castiel's cheeks. When Cas stepped away, he reached a hand up, touched the moisture in wonderment. "You. You feel so much. How do you live like that?"

Then Castiel's face froze. "You Fell," he accused. "Did you not?"

Cas gave a careless shrug, and the gesture was like looking in a mirror. I was really rubbing off on the guy. "Several times, in fact. I have done worse, as well, in the eyes of our brothers, but Father approved of my deeds."

"Fa-" Castiel got one syllable out, then halted. I could see the questions crowding his throat, jamming up in their hurry to emerge first.

"Yes, he still lives, but meeting him answered none of the questions we wanted to ask," Cas said. "I am sorry to tell you this, but you have to find answers within yourself. And perhaps with a human named Anna Milton, if you can locate her on this bleak planet, and help return her to herself."

Whoa, there, Cas. Anna had nudged Cas along on his journey towards his Fall, and he was sending this version of himself straight back down that path.

"I knew your rebellious streak would come back to bite you one day, Cassie," Gabriel said cheerily.

Castiel spun to him. "So that means you … you are not my Gabriel."

"Close enough, little brother. What's a few human decades of difference, compared to the millennia we've been through together? I still remember teaching you to fly, scrawny fledgling that you were. Don't worry, I'll be having words with myself, as well. I haven't grown a conscience, I'm just that narcissistic."

"But why summon me?" Castiel broke off and turned back to me, catching me up in his gaze. "What do you think that I can do for you that you cannot do for yourselves with the assistance of your Jack?"

"Castiel," I told him, the full name unfamiliar on my tongue, "you're breakin' my heart." And it was true. Though, in a way, it was a relief to find out that his self esteem problems had begun long before my interference. I hadn't helped, true, but they weren't my fault, either.

"We are capable of a great many things," Cas told him. "Many of which you cannot even dream of at this point, and some of which you will wish you never had."

"And Jack's not omnipotent. We just need to know what we're up against, and if the angels would be willin' to offer any support. I doubt Lucifer will just let us stroll through the front door and have a tea party with him."

"You bring him his son. This Jack must be his hope for redemption, a chance to treat a child the way he wished Father would have treated him! How could he refuse you?"

"Refuse us? Easily. We've pissed that dude off way too many times for him to let it slide. And I'm not lettin' Jack go in there on his own, so us is what he'll get."

"But what is your end goal? Do you wish to destroy Lucifer? Or abandon him here? Or take him back to your Earth with you, while he pretends that he will behave?"

"That's up to Jack. Jack knows him inside and out, knows what he's capable of. If Jack is convinced that showing him mercy is the best option, I'll listen to him. I won't be happy about it, but I'll listen."

Gabriel cleared his throat again, and I blinked and took step back, putting some distance between me and those innocent blue eyes, which had been far too close. Cas was looking a bit steamed, so I offered him a sidelong grin. "See what I've been trying to tell you for a decade about why personal space is important?"

Castiel looked mildly mortified. "I apologize, I am not accustomed to interacting with humans. Did I do something wrong?"

"You have done nothing wrong," Cas bit out. "He, however, should know better by now."

"Cas, are you… are you pouting?"

I wanted to burst out laughing. This whole situation was completely absurd. He hadn't mentioned beforehand whether or not he wanted this universe's Castiel to know how involved he was with a human, so I couldn't exactly comfort him.

I refocused on the situation in time to see Castiel mouth the syllable Cas to himself in quiet wonderment. He studied me and Cas for a second, gaze bouncing off the sapphire on my ring, then opened his mouth.

"None of that has any bearing on our purpose here," Cas jumped in, forestalling him. "If I may ask, is Uriel still in our garrison?"

Thrown by the change in topic, Castiel nodded.

"Is he aware that you are missing?"

Finally, finally, a flicker of suspicion in his eyes, a slight tightening of his jaw and a tenseness in his shoulders, a flexing of the fingers of his right hand where his angel blade would appear. If we'd meant him harm, we'd have gotten away with it clean before he'd noticed a goddamn thing.

"I only mean," Cas said placatingly, "how much longer do we have to speak before he suspects something is out of the ordinary? It is not our aim to get you into trouble with that… that…"

He broke off, clenched and unclenched a fist, then stared at his hands for a minute, no doubt replaying the fight he'd had with Uriel when the other angel had revealed to him that he was working to free Lucifer. With Lucifer walking the earth here, was any of that still true?

Cas looked back up at Castiel. "I do not know if he will be driven to such desperate acts here as he was on our world, but please, for your sake and the sake of Heaven and the Host, do not trust him. He has lost his faith in our Father, and I believe it has broken him, though he hides it well."

Castiel stared at him, wide-eyed, suspicions forgotten.

"In that case," said Gabriel, clapping a hand on Castiel's shoulder, making him jump, "you'd better head back. Make a full report to Michael, will you? Contact us when you've got something to share, or even if you don't. We still need to know, ya know?"

"How…?"

Gabriel made an expansive gesture in my direction. "Figure it out. The humans have their wardings down to a science, but there are always cracks to be slipped through, when you've got a connection that runs as deep as yours. Sorry," he said, turning to Cas. "I mean, yours. Same difference, right?"

Cas practically growled at him, while Castiel opened and closed his mouth like a fish out of water.

"Go on, little brother, shoo. I've got my own double to locate."

Castiel blinked, gave each of us a last searching look, and then nodded and vanished in a flutter of tan canvas.

Gabriel glanced between me and Cas, caught the way Cas was staring determinedly off into the swirling haze, and said, "Well, this has been fun, but I have to go have a chat with the coolest dude on the planet, and I don't need you two losers cramping my style. I'll catch up with you later."

And then he, too, was gone between one blink and the next, since Castiel had proven that there weren't any anti-flying traps criss-crossing the ether here.

"Cas?" I asked. No response. "I'm sorry." Sheesh, I'd only had the guy back three days, and I was already hurting him again. Maybe he had been better off in the Lady's realm after all.

"Why are you apologizing?" he said, still not looking at me.

He didn't use the 'there's nothing to be sorry for' tone that was sometimes used for that statement. It was more like, which particular item in your extensive litany of reprehensible behaviors are you referring to?

"I let him get too close. I remember how you used to be, how we used to be, but he's not you." Memories of Cas being too close, of me recoiling in hurtful aversion because I couldn't handle what he was offering me, curdled in my mind's eye.

"You've been through so much, made so many choices that this version will never have to make. I just don't want you to think that I'd ever trade in what we've been through together, no matter how many times we've hurt each other. It's just, seeing him, he's so… so…"

I couldn't think of a word that didn't imply that my Cas was somehow less because of what he'd had to do. Because of me.

"Innocent?" Cas supplied, one corner of his mouth turning up. He still wouldn't look at me, but it was a start.

My shoulders sagged. "Chuck, yes. So innocent. I'm s-"

He spun to me then and held two fingers across my lips. "Dean Winchester, if you blame yourself one more time for my choices, Father help me, I shall smite you. Seeing this version of me, yes, it is true, he does not have to live with the things that I do, but he does remind me that so many of my choices were never really choices at all."

His hand dropped back to his side. "I was always going to Fall one day. It is the way I was created. This version will, too, it is only a matter of time. With your assistance, I managed to do so in spectacular fashion, and you gave me a purpose afterward. Many of my kind are not so blessed."

"Is that why you pointed him at Anna?"

His chapped lips turned up again. "There is no Dean Winchester in this universe, but I refuse to let him doubt alone. They can help each other. After all," he reached out and took my hand, and sweet relief spread through my veins like a drug, "I have been fortunate, and can afford to be generous."

"I'm still sorry for letting him get so close."

"Jealousy is an irrational emotion, especially between you and I, and even more so when it is concerning a third party that is me as well. How can I be jealous of myself?" His cheeks turned pink, but his gaze was steady. "I was, though. It burned in my stomach. The closer you allowed him, the hotter it burned. I wanted to grab you, pull you away, declare to him that you were mine, even though he has no concept of what that means, and would not know what to do if you were to offer it to him."

I pressed the back of his hand, still clasped in mine, to my cheek. It felt cool and soothing. "You love me," I said, giving him a goofy grin.

"Father help me, it is true," he said, grinning back. "And I wouldn't even know the true meaning of that phrase if not for you."

"I love you, too, you know," I said, the words coming easier and easier every time I said them.

"I have been aware of that for some time, but I doubt I will ever grow tired of hearing you say it out loud."

We insinuated ourselves into each other's personal space, fitting into each other like puzzle pieces, and we exchanged long, slow kisses that, had they continued perpetually, I would have decided I'd died, been forgiven, and was in my own personal Heaven.

Cas seemed to have other ideas. He let a hand roam beneath the hem of my t-shirt, calloused fingers grazing the skin at the small of my back, carefully avoiding the handle of my gun. Goosebumps spread away from his touch, and I shivered in his arms, pressing us even closer together.

My eyes had slid closed, but they popped open again when I felt the swoop in my stomach that told me we'd fast-traveled. We were standing in another devastated scene, lit by a weak sun through the swirling haze.

"Cas, where are we? Where are we going?"

There was another tug as my stomach was left behind, then caught up to me, and we were in what had once been an open field, now scored with burn marks and clouded with ashes.

"We," growled Cas, jumping us again, this time to a cracked street in a deserted city, "are going to find some place on this benighted planet," jump to a mountainside that had erupted in the recent past, brittle pumice shattering under our shoes, "that is private, soft, and horizontal," another jump, and dirty gray waves crashed on a rocky shore, "and we are going to make use of it."

One more jump, and Cas's wings took our weight as we dangled over a muddy, rushing river that stretched almost as far as the eye could see in all directions, banks barely visible in the distance. He let out a frustrated growl and jumped us again, this one feeling like it was farther than the last.

"Ah," he said, his grip slackening now that our feet were back on solid ground. "Good. I used to come here a lot in the past, to think and be alone. I hope the other me is too busy to remember it for a while."

"And where is here?"

A glance around revealed an island in the middle of the ocean. The haze was weaker here, and the sun managed to make the crystal blue sea sparkle a bit as it rushed over the flats of a coral cay. We were standing on a sandy shore, and there were some trees and scrub inland of us, through which I could see the ocean again. I estimated it wouldn't take more than a half-hour to walk around the entire place.

The trees, and the cloud of small birds that danced among them, were the first living things I'd seen of this world that were not actually Bobby Singer.

"Welcome to Oeno Island, Dean Winchester," he said, and that sneaky sonofabitch magicked my shirt right off.

We turned back up at the Haven a little over an hour later, none the worse for wear, thanks to angelic cleanup powers. Cas's hand in mine felt like everything I'd ever need for the rest of my life.

Sam took one look at my face and rolled his eyes. "Dude, we're gearing up to battle Lucifer, again, and you can't keep it in your pants for more than an hour on end?"

I shrugged, unperturbed. "What can I say, Sammy? You know I dig twins."

Sam's mouth dropped open. "You absolutely did not. Dean-"

"No, he did not. The delay was my fault, and I apologize." Cas squeezed my hand. The line of his shoulders was more relaxed than it had been since our arrival. I liked it. It made me want to bite them a few more times, but that would have to wait.

Sam looked like he wanted to argue further, but he caught sight of the bruise that my shirt collar came just short of hiding and decided that he didn't need any more information. After my slip-up with his double, Cas had seemed determined to mark me for his own. No complaints, here.

Mom was glowing at us, but she didn't comment.

"What did you find out? Where's Gabriel?" asked Jack.

"This world's Castiel is gonna make a report to Michael, and he'll let us know what their plan will be," I said. "And Gabriel said he was going to talk to himself."

Bobby peeled off the wall where he'd been leaning. "Both sides have been lookin' fer that holdout for a year now, no one's found him yet. If he's still alive, he's hidden real deep."

I shrugged. "Who knows him better? I can picture it: him strollin' in to whatever sweet man-cave this Gabe has cooked up for himself, this Gabe tellin' him he's never told anyone about this place, our Gabe saying, yes we did, we told Arabella, that nice waitress out in Portland that one time thirty years ago, and by the way, I'm you."

"Chuck help us all, two of them," Sam groaned.

"Yeah, and I'll bet ours can't wait to introduce this one to the fine and artful sport of Sam-Torture. He seems to enjoy it a little too much."

"Don't spoil it, Dean-o," Gabriel drawled, ducking under the lintel at the entryway. "It's less fun when he's aware of what I'm doing."

"So?" asked Sam. "What's the verdict on this world's version of you?"

"Cool dude," said Gabriel, shrugging and sinking onto the bench beside the table. "I tried to give him the stirring pep talk that you guys used to convince me, right before it got me killed, but he wasn't buying it. He said he'd keep an eye on the situation and jump in if it looked like he was needed, but he figured one of us would be enough, wished me luck, and invited me back to hang out when it was all over."

"Sounds about right, coming from a you that hasn't been exposed to Winchesters," I told him.

"Y'all sure do make it hard to remain a disinterested party. What's the story on the demon side of things?"

"Mom interrogated a demon a few weeks ago," Sam said. "She's been waiting for us to come back, and wanted to have up-to-date info when we did, so we've got a pretty good idea of current layout and security at Lucifer's lair. One main problem: it's not going to be easy to get in without damaging the guards. No matter who's wearing them, the bodies themselves are innocent."

"Say what you will about the British Men of Letters," Mom said, "but they did have the best toys. They had mass-exorcism hand grenades."

Jack raised a hand. "Everyone here vetoed my suggestion, but I want to know what you guys think."

I was pretty sure I already knew what he was going to suggest, and that I wasn't going to like it either, but saying absolutely not before even hearing him out was just plain bad parenting. I gave him a go-ahead nod.

"I go outside, far enough from the Haven so that I don't draw any unwanted attention here, and I take the amulet off. My father hears me, he shows up. Easy."

Yep, that's what I'd thought he was going to say.

"Him, and every angel in the regiment," said Sam, "along with whatever honor guard Lucifer brings with him. And then suddenly we're all in the middle of a celestial battlefield."

Jack opened his mouth, ready to jump back into an argument that had probably lasted for most of the time we'd been gone, but Cas jumped in first.

"Sam, your objections have merit, but Jack's idea is a good one."

Sam gaped at him, but Gabriel was nodding as Cas continued.

"We will need to wait for this world's Castiel to report back, to know how the angels will react to the revelation of Jack's existence, but if they agree to stay uninvolved, it is my belief that Lucifer will come alone. Which is not to say he will be any easier to defeat than he has been all the other times we have gone up against him, but I am sure that Jack has some ideas for that as well."

Jack gave him a grateful nod. I was horrified at the very idea, but not horrified enough to let go of Cas's hand. If anything, I squeezed harder.

Cas glanced at me. "Dean, what do you think?"

I frowned. "I don't like the idea, but Jack's supposed to bring peace and happiness to the entire planet. Us stabbin' a bunch of the New Utopians while they're possessed won't win him any points in that column."

Turning to Bobby, I said, "Big-picture it for me. You said there was a war on, angels versus demons. Who broke the seals and opened the Hellgate, and has it been closed again? No point in exorcising anyone if they're just gonna walk right back out."

"Don't rightly know who opened it, but I closed it m'self after some roughhousin' with the D-list night crew," Bobby said, a bit smugly. "Even got the key, too, so nobody's openin' it again on my watch."

"The k- You have the Colt?" Sam yelped.

"Have one on your side, too, do ya?"

"We did," I said, "up until Dagon, Prince of Hell, melted it a few days before Jack was born. Felt like losin' a member of the damn family."

Bobby gave a grave nod. "I've heard the legends, that it and its special ammo can kill anythin', but it didn't come with any bullets, so it's basically useless fer anything except re-openin' the Hellgate. I've been thinkin' of destroyin' it."

Mom looked stunned. "You've had the Colt here, this whole time, and you didn't mention it?"

"No bullets, didn't seem relevant."

"We can make more," she hissed. "The Bobby Singer from our Earth figured out the formula. I watched Sam take out the Alpha Vampire with it."

Bobby's mouth fell open in a way that told me he'd crossed paths with the Alpha Vamp before.

"Almost didn't believe that slick sumbitch could die," he muttered.

"From the look on his face when I put a bullet between his eyes, he didn't believe it either," said Sam. "Speaking of things the Colt can kill," he turned to Cas, "what makes you so sure Lucifer will come alone?"

Cas took in a breath, but it was Mom who spoke. "Children are weak points. Your pal Crowley proved that there's always someone waiting to stab the King of Hell in the back if they can just find an opening for it. Nothing says kick me like your own kid, and he wouldn't want to give any ambitious underlings such an advantage."

She took in the wounded looks Sam and I were giving her, but grinned instead of looking remorseful. "What? I didn't say I shared his opinion. Hell, I'm so proud of you boys, I've been telling your story to everyone who'll sit still long enough."

Bobby grinned crookedly, the first sign of pleasure I'd seen on his weathered face since we'd arrived. "Ain't that the truth. And since she took over handin' out the anti-possession tattoos, that's basically everyone walkin' this section of what used to be the United States."

Sam gave her a suspicious squint. "You didn't mention anything about not exactly being from this version of reality or anything like that, did you?"

Mom laughed and waved a hand. "Of course not! I'm a proud mother, not an idiot. Why paint a target on my own back?"

"Mary is correct," Castiel said, "though she did not grasp one aspect of Lucifer's personality."

"Tell a lady what she missed," said Mom, still grinning.

"Big Brother's the worst kind of racist," chimed in Gabriel from where he was slumped against Sam at the table. "He hates humans, because he thinks our Father loves you better than us, but he hates demons even more. Sure, he's in charge down there, but they're just tools to him. He doesn't think they're fit to lick a human's boots, much less his own."

Cas let go of my hand with a final squeeze and moved to stand in front of Jack. "Your surmise that he loves you as he has never loved any creature save himself is a valid one. He will not wish to sully your reunion with the presence of demons."

Turning, he faced the room at large. "There is much I never told you about the war in Heaven back in our universe, but I will admit now that there are some who agree with him. As a species, angels need order, rules to follow, something to believe in. When our Father disappeared, we kept faith in him as best we could, but when that faith waned, there were many who followed Lucifer's path.

"It was probably them, one alone or a like-minded group, who broke the seals and unlocked the Hellgate in this universe. They will present the main challenge in ending this war, not the demons. I have passed along one name that I am certain of to this world's Castiel, and I can only hope he is not too innocent to know what to do with it. I fear I have put him in grave danger."

He stood in the middle of the small room, looking a little lost as everyone took in what he'd said. Gabriel looked stunned as well; after all, he'd been dead for a while and had missed a lot. Cas pulled at me like a magnet, and I found myself by his side, lacing my fingers back into his without consciously deciding to do so. He gave me a grateful smile.

"So we wait," said Sam, slumping back onto the bench.

"Bobby Singer," said Cas suddenly, startling the man out of a bleak contemplation. "Is your Haven adequately provided with provisions for such a large party? We encountered a place well-stocked with fish during our travels earlier, and I would be happy to retrieve some, if you would like fresh meat."

Bobby's mood underwent a series of rapid shifts, first surprise around the eyes, then a stubborn set to his jaw that spoke of refusal, then a hesitancy betrayed by his shoulders, and then, finally, his tongue darted out and licked his lips.

"Damn, I haven't had a good fish fry in years. Yeah, I'll take you up on that offer, though I thought I'd be planted in this blasted earth long before I ever heard a flyboy say he'd be happy to do anythin' fer a human."

His gaze tracked down to our joined hands, then up to my face. "You, kid. Dean. You say the other me had the raisin' of you boys back on your earth?"

I straightened my back, squaring my shoulders. "Yes, sir."

"Then you'd better be able to tell a food fish from a crappy one. Yeah?"

I grinned. "Yes, sir," I repeated.

"Go with this one and tell him what to throw back. I know flyboys don't have tastebuds worth a damn. I'll get everythin' ready here, so I expect you back in two hours, tops. I'll preserve whatever we don't eat tonight, so bring back plenty."

I nodded, and we were halfway to the door when he added, "And I want them fresh, so whatever canoodling you-all are plannin', get it out of the way first."

My whole face went hot, and Cas had to drag me out, stumbling a bit, to the sound of Sam and Gabriel howling with laughter.

When we reached his private island again, Cas was surprisingly on board with the canoodling idea, once I'd explained what the word meant. I assured him that we'd canoodled plenty earlier, and that I wasn't a randy teenager any more, that I wanted him for more than just his body, and that maybe we could just watch what was shaping up to be a lovely sunset.

He assured me that statements like that weren't likely to decrease his interest in canoodling, so we canoodled to the sunset instead of watching it, the rosy light turning his eyes a fetching lilac whenever he happened to open them.

Then he cleaned us up, and I indulged in a bit of shipwreck fantasy, gathering coconuts in the waning light while he magicked silvery smelt onto a palm frond on the strand like we were the last two people in the world. I kept half an eye on him; I know, I know, incredibly powerful being, but all that power packed into a tiny human body made him very dense, and if he went under, I planned on being there in a flash to haul him back out, whether he needed to breathe or not.

Two thoughts occurred to me as I started trying to weave a crude basket out of some dried seagrass, and I couldn't seem to shake them. He was wading back up out of the water, and I had no idea how to bring up either thing without possibly causing offense.

He caught my frown as he took the half-made basket and started fixing it up with deft fingers. "What is wrong? And do not say nothing. That no longer works on me."

That surprised a chuckle out of me. "Alright, you win. I'll start with the easy one. You said the gift from your lady was empathy."

He nodded, hands pausing so that he could give me his full attention.

"Earlier, when I said I'd be happy enough just to sit beside you while we watched the sunset, and you asked for a more … physical activity. That seems like a step beyond plain empathy. Not that I'm complainin', mind you."

The haze in the sky was thin enough for the first stars to peek through, and I saw his cheeks color by their faint light.

"My lady's gift seems to be more thorough than I originally believed. It appears that I am the one who now falls into the randy teenager category. Is that … is that alright?" He gave me an almost shy look through thick lashes.

"Cas, honey, it's more than alright with me. Are you sure it's alright with you, though? Is this what you want, to be so … human?"

"Your head is big enough, Dean Winchester, without me swelling it further with praise. Suffice to say, I am not displeased with our physical interactions thus far. What is the other thing you were thinking about, that you are reluctant to discuss?"

He started to weave the basket again, but I laid a hand over his.

"I hate to even suggest this, and if you tell me it's not possible, then I swear I will believe you and never mention it again, but…"

There were stars in his eyes, tiny pinpricks of silver light reflecting in his irises as they stared at me, unblinking, his face as still as his hands.

"Do you think that you, in the absence of Team Free Will, in the absence of all hope of a better future, faced with unending war, you might have … been more … well, receptive to Uriel's offer?"

Those starry eyes got even wider.

I hastily continued, "You know I'm a suspicious bastard, it's the main reason I've lived this long. I'd think it of anyone. I know you wouldn't, you wouldn't, but what if …?"

I was afraid he'd be mad, but my angel took my paranoia with utter seriousness. He worked on the basket a few minutes, thinking it over, and then finally shook his head.

"I was made to be curious, not destructive. Everyone I have hurt, or who has been hurt on my behalf – I remember all of their faces. When my faith falters, I search for my Father, for answers, rather than glorying in nihilism and ruin. It is a lonely path, and a painful one, but Lucifer's path of destruction … it is not for me."

He looked up from the basket, meeting my eyes once more. "The things Naomi took from me return slowly, and some may never return at all, but I am certain I have made this choice many times."

I nodded in acceptance, but was startled to see a small grin turn his lips up.

"But, could you imagine Lucifer's face? He locks this world's version of himself back into the Pit, and greets his loyal angelic lieutenants, only to see my face among them?"

I snorted. "That would rattle him for sure. I bet he'd gape like a fish."

"And my poor self would be so confused!"

We were practically giggling at this point, picturing it. I'd never heard him do that before. It was a beautiful sound.

"Cas, did you just pose a hypothetical to make a joke?"

He shrugged, still trying to get himself back under control.

"Your lady continues to impress," I told him. His happy face was irresistible, and I pulled him in, tucking his face into my neck and feeling his frame shake with laughter. Maybe this was Heaven, after all.

He stilled, and I reluctantly let him pull away. There was a grave seriousness in his face that hadn't been there a second ago.

"Now you tell me what's wrong," I said, cupping a hand to his cheek.

"Dean, I do not know what to do with … all of this. Everything I am … feeling is completely new and alien to me. The only reason I am not terrified is that I know you will not abandon me to deal with it alone. So no matter what happens with Lucifer, you must not die. Do you understand?"

"Hey, hey, of course," I said, trying to be soothing. Not my forte, but I gave it my best effort. "Like you or Jack would let that happen. Like I'd let that happen. We're gettin' out of here together, and then we're all goin' to Disneyland. Does your shift toward humanity include taste buds? I hear good things about the churros there."

I stopped, suddenly concerned. "You're not losing your mojo again, are you? Should I start throwing myself between you and projectile weapons?"

He gave me a calm smile. "I have never felt better, or stronger, or happier, in my entire existence. And I think I would like to taste what Bobby Singer termed a 'fish fry.' It sounds fascinating."

Alistair laughed, the sound incongruously warm and friendly as he ripped at my flesh with various spiky implements. A tiny part of my brain was trying to tell me this is a nightmare, but it was being drowned out by the screams and the pain, the thirst and fatigue and shame and guilt.

Time stretched, just as it always had in Hell, and though the tiny sane part of my brain was now yelling Cas will get you out in just a few seconds, it still felt like decades. He ripped into me, let it heal, ripped again, and I knew I was reaching the point where I'd break and accept his terrible bargain, because tonight was one of those nightmares.

He left me alone to heal, and I lay stretched on the rack, panting, bleeding, sobbing. When he returned, I would agree, and it would shatter me all the way through.

And then Cas was there, his grip burning into my shoulder as he pulled me off the table, breaking my chains and making me whole again. Hell disappeared around us, and Oeno Island materialized.

"I assume you would prefer a change in scenery?" he rasped.

When I was sure I could take the two steps he'd left between us without keeling over, I threw myself at him, meshing my lips with his and gripping his coat with both hands.

I pulled back long enough to murmur an emphatic thank you to wide blue eyes before diving in again, letting the grace he'd used to glue together my broken pieces wake and glow, resonating.

This lasted for all of a second, and then I jerked like a dog wearing a shock collar, eyes flying open, and I stumbled backward a few feet. Shit, I probably should just go ahead and buy that shock collar right now. Apparently, I needed one.

"Fuck! Shit, I'm so sorry! I thought you were . . ."

The angel in front of me was prodding at his swollen lips with curious fingers, but he looked up with eyes like lasers when I failed to complete my sentence. "You believed I was 'your Cas'?"

Christ, he even did the finger quotes like Cas once had, the gesture made with his entire upper body, and it made my heart ache.

"Yes. I am so sorry, this never should have happened. It's just, he's usually the one that keeps the bad dreams away. I wasn't expecting- Wait." His finger quotes had encompassed the possessive as well as the nickname. "He's not my Cas, like, he doesn't belong to me or anything."

Castiel raised both eyebrows. "Does he not?" He glanced around. "He brought you here. I have never shown this place to anyone, not even Gabriel."

I shrugged, giving in. "Alright, he belongs to me. To be fair, I belong to him as well. I'm not lookin' forward to telling him about my fuck-up here. I've hurt him enough."

Castiel's mouth twitched up at the corners. "If it will save him from pain, I would be willing to forego speaking of this incident in the future."

I stared at him. He'd just offered me an 'I won't tell if you won't' out. Maybe this version was closer to Falling than any of us thought.

Shaking my head, I said, "No way. Bad shit always happens when he and I lie to each other. We're tryin' to kick the habit. But thanks for the offer, I appreciate it."

"Why does he dislike me?"

"What?" That had come outta nowhere. "He doesn't dislike you, why would he dislike himself?"

I cut that line off, since I was pretty sure there was a truckload of stuff Cas disliked about himself – though I aimed to change all that, given enough time – and tried a different tack. "I mean-"

"It is disconcerting, to look upon the face of my own vessel, and see such disapproval."

"Disapproval? No, that's not-"

"What would he have me do differently? I am only a foot soldier."

I crossed my arms across my chest, in an effort to keep from giving in to the deeply-ingrained reflex to grip him by the shoulders and shake him. "That's definitely not true, and I think you know it."

He was opening his mouth to object further, but my statement seemed to have startled him, and I took the opportunity to jump in before he could start again.

"He doesn't disapprove of you. If anything, he's … I don't know, wistful? He's been through so much shit, all the ups and downs of the world's worst roller coaster, and the life he's living now is so far from where you are, or where you parted ways, that he can't even," I waved my hands around, grasping at my limited vocabulary, "…conceive of your worldview any more.

"I don't think he regrets anything, in the long run, but even with your decades of constant battle, I think he misses how straightforward everything used to be for him."

A thoughtful look dawned on Castiel's face, and I congratulated myself for choosing straightforward rather than simple.

"Why are we even talkin' about this? You're here to tell me about Michael, right? And how we're all gonna stop the war?"

He blinked his baby blues at me, and I stamped hard on the urge to take it back, to talk to him forever about nothing. Not this one, I told myself. This one doesn't know you at all.

"Would you not do the same, if you were put in my position?" he asked. "This is a rare opportunity to see the outcome of a decision I have not yet made. I must learn all that I can from both of you, in the time I have been given."

"Speaking of time," I said, glancing around at the gently waving seagrass. "Cas always knows when I have a nightmare, and he always comes for me. Why hasn't he?"

"I slowed down time within your mind," he said. "I am aware that humans need to sleep during the night to function properly, so I did not want to take up more of your allotted hours than needed."

I grinned at him. "That's not going to fly, smart guy. You can't fool yourself for long. Talk fast."

He shot the sky an uncertain look, then said, "Michael has requested a meeting with the nephilim, at a location and time of your choosing. Set up your wards that prevent detection, and then call me as you did yesterday. I will bring him to meet you."

"Is it invitation only, or can anyone crash the party?"

He tilted his head at me. "You speak in euphemisms. Are you implying that this meeting will be enjoyable? Because I do not believe that to be true."

His earnestness was nostalgically familiar. "I just meant, he wants to meet with Jack, and I need to be there to let you know where we end up, but what about my brother? And Gabriel?"

His gaze shifted. On anyone else, it would have looked almost guilty. "I may have … neglected to include your universe's Gabriel in my report." He saw my mouth open, and hurried to forestall my comment. "I cannot guarantee his presence, so there did not seem any benefit from mentioning him."

I closed my mouth, then nodded in agreement. Gabe would do whatever the hell he wanted anyway.

"Pretty slick, kid. Cas would be proud."

He lit up, glowing faintly beneath his roughened skin, and blinded me with a sudden smile. He was opening his mouth to respond when my name rang across the tiny island like a faraway bell.

"Dean!"

"That's my cue," I said, grinning again. "I'll give you a call when we're all set up. I'm sorry again about the whole kissing thing."

"I am not."

And then there was blackness.

When my eyes opened a beat later, Cas's concerned face hovered above me, blocking the rough stone ceiling of the bunk room that Bobby had put us up in. His cool hand cupped my cheek.

"Dean! Are you alright? I felt you having a nightmare, but I couldn't reach you."

I reached up and tangled my fingers into his hair, tugging him downwards. He melted against me in that delicious way I was never going to stop enjoying, exactly the way his local counterpart had not, which is what had tipped me off earlier.

A scoff that I knew without looking was accompanied by an eye-roll brought me back down with a thud, and I remembered that Sam and Gabriel had been assigned the next bunk over. Or, more accurately, Sam and Jack and I were sharing a room, and two beings who didn't need to sleep were choosing to share our space while we fragile mortals recharged.

I pulled back with extreme reluctance, turning my head so I could see the rest of the room. "Michael wants a meeting."

Cas straightened up, to my regret, and the book Sam'd been reading while sitting up in bed dropped from suddenly nerveless fingers.

Even Gabriel put aside Sam's phone, which he'd been using to play Angry Birds, though he looked resigned instead of surprised. There was no service here, not to mention outlets, but he'd said he'd charge it himself, so Sam had shrugged and handed over what was, on this world, essentially a very expensive brick.

"Castiel reported back in," I told them, propping myself up on my elbows. "He said we could set up Jack's wards and give him a call, and he'd bring the top dog."

"Is he requesting we send Jack in alone?" Sam asked.

I shook my head. "Doesn't sound like it. I don't think he sees us as much of a threat, so he probably couldn't care less if we brought a whole army of humans, s'long as Jack's there. And our Cas, probably, for proof."

"I suppose my presence is required as well?" Gabriel said. He didn't sound terribly excited at the prospect.

"Actually, Castiel seems to have left you out of the story entirely. Sounded like he didn't want to get into hot water by promising you'd be there when he's got no way to make it actually happen."

Gabriel leapt out of his chair with a whoop of laughter, grabbing Cas up and swinging him in as big a circle as both their disparate heights and the limited space would allow. "I knew you were my favorite little brother for a reason," he said, beaming.

"Sam?" I said, noticing the weird look on his face. "What's the problem?"

Gabriel, to his credit, put his brother down immediately and focused on mine.

"What if he notices?" Sam said in a small voice.

I made a go on gesture with both hands. "Notices what, exactly?"

"That I'm an abomination. I drank demon blood. I said yes to Lucifer, for Chuck's sake!"

We all stared at him, unsure how to respond. Cas had also said yes, but that probably wasn't what Sam wanted to hear.

Luckily, the door opened and Jack stuck his head in. "Did I hear someone say abomination? Are you-all talking about me behind my back?" He was grinning, or I would've given him a stern talk about self-esteem, no matter how endearing his absorption of Bobby's colloquialisms was.

"That's right, Sam-I-Am," said Gabriel, clapping his hands. "You aren't even the wickedest creature in this room. Jack, of course, is the worst of the worst, and will definitely hog the spotlight, but Dean's grace-patched soul will be a special kind of atrocity in Michael's eyes, purist that he is, and Cassie and I must be complete disgraces by now, myself twice over."

"Even Bobby must have done enough at this point, just stayin' alive, that he's on their shit list," I told my brother. "And let's not get started on Mom, resurrected by the Darkness itself. Man, you've got nothing to worry about."

Sam's eyes held their worry for moment longer, then his face cracked into a grin.

And then we were all laughing at the absurdity of it all, Jack leaning against the door and soaking it all in, amulet glowing just the slightest bit through the worn t-shirt he used for sleeping. Most of the time it had to suck being a partial empath around us – if he'd known us a decade ago, we might have drowned him in angst – but every so often there came moments like this one.

When we'd reined ourselves back in, I levered myself off the bed. "So, I guess I should go tell Mom and Bobby about our new development?"

Jack froze, not moving from his position in front of the door. "Um," he said articulately. "They're. Um. They're busy."

I was reminded of the closing scene in The Fifth Element, though Jack left out the hand gestures, for which I was thankful.

"Oh," I said. I felt everyone's eyes on me, full of wary concern, and I wondered why. "She's a grown woman, you guys, I'm not going to storm off to defend her honor or anything. As far as I'm concerned, if you're not gettin' as much as you can, as often as possible, then you're doing Post-Apocalypse all wrong. Besides, not that it's any of my business, but whatever else this Bobby may be, he's a huge step up from that British Men of Letters psychopath."

"Hear, hear," said Sam, shuddering. "So glad she shot him in the face."

"I'm not one to judge, anyway," I said, steeling myself. I was sorry to spoil the mood, but it was time to rip off this bandaid. "Especially since I…"

To my horror, I felt my cheeks flush, and all the eyes in the room turned accusing, except Cas's which just looked resigned, which was way worse.

Sam put it into words. "What did you do, Dean?"

I glanced at the floor, wrapping a hand around the back of my burning neck. "So, you know how I was having a nightmare? To be fair, I can count on one finger the number of different people who pull me out of those."

None of the looks softened, so I forged onward. "He pulled me out, just in time, hand on the shoulder and everything, and he took me to where …" I glanced at Cas, and then at the rest of our audience. "Um, to where we got the fish for dinner. And I was just so grateful to not be in Hell any more that I … I kissed him. Like, big time."

Silence. I looked only at my angel, the rest of the room reduced to spectators in my personal crisis. "I'm really sorry," I told him, when his face remained a careful blank. "I thought he was you, and when I realized he wasn't, I backed away, cursed a bunch, apologized also a bunch, and kept several feet between us for the remainder of the conversation, I swear."

More silence, but then his mouth twitched once, twice, and I knew I was saved.

"How did he take it? I am trying to think of how I would have reacted if a random human had planted one on me, and failing."

He let his grin break through, and everyone in the room relaxed.

"He seemed more surprised than anything else. If we hadn't had other things to discuss, he might even have given me a fascinating."

"Don't flatter yourself," he returned, but his smile softened it.

"Right," Gabe spoke up, clapping his hands once. "Bedtime for the humans, we've got a big day tomorrow, and I didn't tag along just so I could get stabbed by yet another brother because someone wasn't where they were supposed to be.

"Jack, if you're not going to sleep, you can stay and have a chat with me, as long as you don't mind doing it telepathically. The wards should allow us that much, at least. Cas, you can watch over Dean, and keep away the bad dreams," he shot me a wink, "and the poachers. Lights out in five."

I wanted to ask him who'd nominated him den mother, but then Jack was settling cross-legged on the next bunk over, and Gabe was taking a seat by Sam's head, nonchalantly mirroring the position Cas had taken up on my own bunk, and somewhere in the vicinity, a man and a woman to whom life had been cruel were enjoying each other's company, and my little family felt safe and warm, so I let it go.

We had a war council over breakfast, nominating and dismissing various venues.

I suggested the bunker. History had happened the same in both universes until well past 1956, so Abbadon's massacre should have taken place here as well, and it was the most secure place I could think of. And, it should be empty.

Sam was shaking his head, though. "Same problem here as at home," he said. "It's warded and sigil-ed to the hilt, so Jack's wards would take forever to weave in. Otherwise I'd have had you both back there a long time ago."

I looked over at Mary. "Mom, have you stopped by while you were on this side? It seems like a valuable resource."

She shook her head as well. "I'm not a legacy. It didn't seem right to crack it open after all this time, and not have the right to be there."

"What's all this about?" Bobby asked.

"There's a bunker out in Kansas," Sam told him. "Very secure, very comfortable, full of old books and information. We will definitely be taking you there once all this is settled, because we all know that once the human race rebounds, so will the monsters, and the humans will need someone watching their backs. Until then, though … "

"Back to Square One. Bobby, in this universe, did you build a panic room underneath Singer's Auto Body?" I asked.

He looked confused. "What in the hell for?"

I thought back to the many and varied uses he'd put it to, and realized how many of them were our fault. "Hmm," I said. "I guess nothing brings out the paranoia like being foster father to a couple of hunters and a lost angel. Moving on."

"What do we actually need the place to have?" he asked after a sideways glance at me, apparently checking my sanity.

"Ideally, posts," said Gabriel. "Don't even need a roof, which is why the forest clearing worked for y'all when you came to our lady's realm to get us. Also, a nice flat place to smear a banishing sigil if things go sideways."

We stopped, and all eyes turned to Jack.

"Do you … do you get banished?" Sam asked him.

"I have no idea," he said, looking suddenly nervous.

"How have we not tested this before?" I asked him. "Seems like something we should know, if only as an emergency escape strategy."

"I volunteer to stand next to the kid at the showdown," Gabriel said. "If it comes to it, I'll grab ahold of him. If he banishes, we'll banish together, and I'll fly him back. If he doesn't, then no harm, no foul. Problem solved."

Sam was beaming at him.

"Just one thing," Gabriel added. "I still want to do my dramatic reveal, so try to keep everything from blowing up in our faces until I actually arrive on the scene. Okay?"

"If we can't manage that, then this entire endeavor is pointless anyway," said Jack. "I'm in."

We ended up back at the lake house. Cas and Gabriel fast-traveled us north and west, and we appeared, blinking, on the scorched remains of the gravel driveway. The woods were pathetic remnants of their former glory, the lake was steaming and muddy with volcanic discharge, and what was left of the walls were gray and scarred by the constant grit-laden wind, but Jack still lit up a bit at the sight of home.

Gabriel flew off to look for hiding places, and Sam and Cas shouldered their bags of supplies and entered the house's creaking skeleton to get the wards set up. Mom and Bobby had opted to stay at the Haven, ready to act as Rescue Squad should this go even further sideways than any of us anticipated. This left Jack and me on the driveway with not much to do.

I focused on the edge of the erstwhile clearing. "Is there a weak spot here, in this universe, too?"

Jack squinted at the spot. "Yes," he said after a beat, eyes widening. "That's unexpected. I've never opened a hole here, on this side. You'd think a doorway between Earths would open in the same place in both worlds."

"Yeah, but think of it this way. When you created the first one, all you had to go on was Cas, and his feeling that he was up against something stronger than himself, and his memory that even when he was God, Bobby Singer was a person who could help.

"So you reached out and opened a door to Bobby Singer. Not just any Bobby, but one that's had years of experience in angelic warfare. Pretty clever for someone who hasn't even drawn their first breath yet."

Sam stepped back out of the house and trudged over to us. "Cas is finishing up inside on his own," he said. "Are you guys ready?"

"As we'll ever be," I answered. "Who do you think he'll be wearing?"

I met Sam's eyes, suddenly feeling a wave of reality-disconnect so strong that Jack could sense it. He reached over to put a steadying hand on my shoulder. In another world, it might have been me, and I would've had to fight my own brother, and destroy the world the way this one had been destroyed. Only our own stubbornness had saved us.

"Shouldn't be anyone you know," Gabe said, popping up beside Sam, grounding me back in this reality, weird as it was. "If he can't wear a shiny new Winchester, I doubt he'd bother changing from whichever of your ancestors he was wearing last. Reduces his exposure to humans, you see. He doesn't share Lucy's hatred of you lot, but he's plenty disdainful. I only hope your half-brother is working your family magic on our Michael, back in our Pit."

The familiar wave of guilt that always accompanied any mention of Adam washed over me, and I let it rise and ebb. Nothing I could do about that now; I'd run out of favors to call in, and everyone I knew who might have helped was dead.

Cas poked his head out of the house and waved us in. "I apologize for dismissing you, Sam," he said as we trooped inside, floorboards creaking under our weight. "But the wards were starting to resonate with the ones set up in our universe, and humans do not possess the senses required to tune them. I needed to … um."

He ran through his supply of technical terminology, and decided to go with, "I needed to tweak them so that they worked in tandem, rather than cancelling each other out."

"I love it when you talk shop," I told him, grinning.

Sam ignored me and waved off Cas's apology. "No worries, dude. Does this mean they're stronger than they would be alone? And if something happens to these ones, will the ones at home still be okay?"

"Excellent questions, Sam," Cas told him. "Yes, they are stronger, and yes, the ones in our universe, while affected positively at the moment, would re-stabilize should these ones fail."

Sam beamed at the praise, and I resisted the urge to call him a nerd and tousle his mop of hair. He wasn't a teenager any more. And I wasn't prepared for what his magic hair might do to my hand if I messed with it.

"So, amulet on or off when they arrive?" Jack asked. "Do we want to impress them when they walk in the room, or wait for them to ask?"

"I'd say wait," Gabe replied. "Michael will see it as politeness. He likes politeness. I think it's the only aspect his personality has, aside from war leader and wannabe God. Never met a more boring dude in my life, and I've been around a long time."

"Might as well test the wards," I said, "since we don't have time or resources for a test-banishing. Jack?"

Jack nodded, and lifted the amulet off his skin by the leather cord. Power spilled into the room, filling up the space inside the wards like a warm bath.

"Feels alright to me," he said, grinning at our reactions. "Nice and solid." He dropped the cord, and the warmth drained away, leaving us all a little colder.

"I guess that's it, then. I'll go make the call."

Cas put a hand on my arm before I could step outside. "Michael will have questions about our lives. I am concerned that he will judge my actions, and take it out on this universe's Castiel, when he discovers what we are capable of. I do not want him to consider us a future threat to his authority. This version of me does not deserve that."

"Hey, you never sought power. You just stepped in when he left a vacuum behind. Make sure he knows that, and everyone will get to go on living."

Three other heads nodded in agreement when he looked around to seek their opinions. His fingers briefly tightened their grip on my arm, and then loosened and slid down. "Well, then," he said, lacing them into mine. "Let us all be judged."

Gabriel, wearing a look of gleeful anticipation, vanished with a small pop as Cas and I stepped onto the porch and moved down the driveway a little bit.

"Ready?" I asked him. At his nod, I closed my eyes, reached down deep, and prayed to the Angel of Thursday.

Castiel arrived first, accompanied by three officious-looking angels that I had never seen before. He stayed where he was, halfway across the yard, while they took off in all directions, circling the house. They managed to make nondescript middle-aged bodies look like secret agents, while Castiel met my eyes and gave me a small shrug.

The agent angels re-convened in front of the house, conferred, and nodded to each other. One of them called an all clear, sir to Castiel, and he moved across the scarred gravel to join us, giving our linked hands a curious look.

Before he could speak, one of the other angels came up. "What's in the house, sir? We can't sense it from out here, and our orders are not to walk into anything blind."

He seemed to be trying to speak to both Castiels at once, ignoring me completely. I let it go; it's not every day you get to see two of your commanding officer at once, and from what I knew of angels, they weren't keen on new experiences.

"The house contains the nephilim and a human," Cas answered, voice stiff and formal. "The walls are warded, as specified by Michael, so that the nephilim's location will remain unknown to our enemy. The nephilim himself is wearing a containing amulet. You may enter at will, no harm will come to you."

The angel paused a moment, gaze flicking between his Castiel and mine, before giving a nod that was the equivalent of a salute and marching back to his compatriots. They approached the house with obvious caution, hesitating again where the front door used to hang, and then stepped inside.

Cas watched them go, face a blank mask, and I realized that he must have known them, that he had commanded them once, before choosing humanity over angel-kind. This world's Castiel must have come to the same conclusion, eyes going wide as he looked after his men.

"You're a commander, Castiel," Cas told him, still watching the house. "They listen to you, all of them, long past the point where they should stop. It is a power I have abused in the past, though always thinking I had a good enough reason to justify the abuse. I only hope that fate offers you better choices."

Castiel studied him in silence, very different from the creature full of questions that had visited me last night. In the end, he only had one, and he asked it with incredulity that was practically indecent for an angel. "What happened to you?"

"A great many things, most of which are moot in your reality. When our Michael was locked away … well, it does not matter. Yours will not be, and you will not have to do what I did."

Cas pulled his gaze from the house and locked it onto his counterpart. "We were God, Castiel. We were the most powerful creature on this earth, with all of the hubris that comes with it. The Fall is a lot farther, from greater heights."

Castiel looked faintly terrified – just a hint of it around the eyes.

"You do not have my safety net," Cas continued. "Be very careful. Find Anna, and help each other." He paused, bit his lip in thought, then seemed to shrug to himself. "And if you ever meet an angel who calls herself Naomi, run."

Two of the agent angels came back out of the house, preventing any follow-up questions. One of them took a few steps off of the porch and vanished, and the other turned to us.

"Could you join the others inside, please? I will stand sentry out here until he returns with Michael."

Both Castiels gave him mirroring nods of approval, and we all stepped past him back into the house. He was looking at me, eyes narrowed, apparently trying to figure out what was so special about me. I just waggled the fingers of my free hand at him in a tiny wave, causing a quickly-masked affronted look to cross his face.

Sam was leaning against the only furniture in the room, a solid-looking table, with his arms crossed across his chest. Everything else that had once furnished the place seemed to have rotted away.

Jack was standing in the center of the room, facing off with the agent angel who'd remained inside. His arms were hanging loose at his sides, trying to appear non-threatening, but the angel was clearly nervous, greeting Castiel with a relieved salute when we strolled in.

Jack turned to us as well, and a large grin bloomed on his face. "Hi, you must be Castiel! It's great to meet you!"

Castiel looked a little startled, and accepted Jack's outstretched hand with all the awkwardness of someone who's never been offered a handshake before but was still willing to make the effort. I caught Sam's sympathetic grin from across the room – his first encounter with Cas had gone much the same.

"It is nice to meet you as well. At the risk of causing offense, I must say that you are not what I was expecting."

Jack's smile didn't falter. "None taken. Our Castiel has explained how … unusual I am."

Castiel glanced over at his counterpart's hand, still clasped in mine, and gave Jack an un-angelic shrug. "There seem to be more and more things about the world that do not align with what I was taught. We can only adapt and move forward. I am looking forward to working with you, to bring about the end of our conflict."

His subordinate stiffened his shoulders in shock, but Castiel ignored him. I glanced at Cas, but his only reaction was a tiny, proud smile, quickly hidden.

"And you are Sam Winchester?" Castiel asked, turning toward my brother. Sam looked like he was being struck by a similar steamroller to the one that had hit me when I'd met this version yesterday. His mouth hung open a little, and his eyes were huge.

He blinked, coughed, and managed, "Um. I mean, yes, that's me. Thank you for working with us."

"That remains to be seen," said a new voice, as another figure darkened the doorway.

I turned to meet our guest of honor, and felt all of my blood turn to ice. Only the reflexive tightening of Cas's grip on my hand kept me upright.

"I am Michael," said the angel wearing my father's young face, like he'd stolen him straight from the 70's. In fact, he probably had. His dark eyes assessed the room, taking in and dismissing the two suddenly immobile humans and the two versions of his subordinate, and settling on Jack.

"Is this the abo-"

Castiel affected a throat-clearing noise, raising his eyebrows expressively at Michael when he glanced his way.

"Ah." Michael turned back. "I mean, is this the nephilim?"

"Hello, my name is Jack." I had never been more proud of the kid than I was in that moment, at how steady his voice was, and how straight he held his shoulders. "I am the son of Lucifer and a human woman. I am here to offer my assistance in your battle against my father and all that he stands for."

Michael frowned. "So I have been informed. It is true, then, what Castiel said about all of you being from another universe? It seems so absurd, yet you are here, full-grown, and none of us sensed the moment of your creation."

"It is true. I apologize for compounding your war by sending our Lucifer here. I was very young, and did not comprehend the consequences of my actions. I would like to make up for that, now."

"What is it that you plan, nephilim? I have been waging war against my brother for some time now, in human years. What can you do that will be more effective?"

Jack took a breath, face earnest. "I know that you remember how it used to be, when your family was small, before your father created humanity, when you loved each other. There is still the potential for peace inside him. On our world, he met your father again, and received an apology from him for his cruel treatment."

Michael looked surprised. "Our father was seen? Actually seen?"

My Cas spoke up. "Yes. He is still out there, he simply no longer wishes to involve himself in our decisions. He has become more of a supporter of free will as time passes, even for those of us that were not created for it."

He received a searching look for his contribution to the conversation. "And you are the other universe's Castiel?" Our joined hands seemed to set him back a step, but Cas's grip didn't loosen. Michael voiced Castiel's earlier question, but without his underlying tone of compassion. "What happened to you?"

"I made many sacrifices in the name of the greater good. I learned some things about our version of you, with regards to this war, that caused me to choose my own path." The other Castiel gave him a sharp glance, but didn't interrupt. "I never stopped following our father's plan, but I chose to do it in my own way."

"You chose." He made it sound like a dirty word. "You sided with the humans?"

"A choice I have never regretted. It was the right thing to do; Father confirmed it."

But Michael was looking at me now, not as thoroughly distracted by the mere mention of Chuck as all his younger siblings seemed to be. "And this human, in particular?"

"These humans," Cas said, gesturing at Sam as well. "Michael, these are the Winchesters. They fulfilled the prophecy, but still prevented the war you are currently waging, back in our universe."

Michael looked from me to my brother and back, taking in our frozen faces. "They do not say much, do they?"

"That's to be expected, big brother, when you show up wearing their dad's face," said Gabriel, appearing with a flourish at Sam's side. He turned to Sam, gripping his shoulder, and glanced at me as well. "I'm so sorry, you guys. I had no idea this was even a possibility."

Michael and the guard-angel seemed just as shocked as I'd been when Michael'd walked in wearing Young John, and it made me feel a little better. Castiel wore an adorably smug smirk, and I wondered again how close he was to Falling.

Michael opened his mouth, but Gabriel held up a hand. "I'm with them, from the other universe. I'm not your Gabriel, and I do not speak for him. Yes, you're wearing John Winchester. In our universe, he married a lovely lady named Mary Campbell and had these two fine strapping boys. Boys you're currently traumatizing."

Michael thinned his lips at his younger brother, then turned back to me. He stepped closer, eyes narrowing.

"Castiel, why does this human radiate your grace?"

"The Righteous Man sustained severe damage in Hell, Michael," said my Cas, though it was unclear which of the two Castiels he had been addressing. "I was ordered to retrieve him, and it was the only way to make him whole again."

"If this is the Righteous Man of the prophecy, then this," he turned to Sam, lip now curling in a sneer, "must be the tainted brother. Lucifer's true vessel."

Sam seemed to shrink, an incredible feat for a man of his stature, but Gabriel stepped in front of him, fists on hips and eyes blazing. "None of that, now. It's not their fault that they were pushed into your ridiculous prophecy. They're innocent, both of them, and they survived, and averted the war you're still mired in, by being human. By rejecting fate and choosing their own path."

Michael studied Sam unapologetically over Gabriel's shoulder. "But he did say yes to Lucifer?"

"He did," Gabriel snapped, trying to loom larger through sheer will. "Because it was the final step of their plan to avert the Apocalypse. Once he'd let Lucifer in, he took control back and threw himself into the Pit."

Michael raised thick black brows. "And yet, they both walk the earth once more. Did someone succumb to human feelings?"

"Rescuing Sam was a team effort," I said, the need to defend my brother trumping my lingering shock. Even my father's eyes turned back on me with such contempt couldn't stop me. Angels were such dicks.

"Cas…tiel here gripped him tight and raised his body from perdition – he's got a thing for saving Winchesters who get in over their heads, I guess – and I earned a favor from Death, so he pulled Sam's soul out of the Pit for me and stuck it back where it belonged."

Dark eyes blinked at me, and he seemed to be at a temporary loss for words. "…Death?" he managed to croak after a beat.

"Yeah. You know, creepy guy, pale, carries a scythe, loves tacos?"

Michael instinctively turned back to Gabriel for help, but was met only with a wicked grin and no assistance whatsoever.

"Setting that aside for now," he said, trying to take back control of the conversation. "How did Lucifer get back out?"

"That one is on me, actually," Cas admitted, and I could tell it had cost him. I squeezed his hand as he continued, "Through a ridiculously complex series of events, the Darkness from the beginning of Time was released, and we had unfortunately run out of archangels to consult about how to battle her. Lucifer's price for his assistance was his release."

Cas gestured at us with his free hand. "The Winchesters were against it, but I knew it was the only way, so I said yes to him."

Michael's mouth hung open just a tad. "The Darkness, you say? And … and your vessel, he …?"

"Jimmy Novak was killed several years ago, but our father reconstituted my grace into this body. Several times, in fact. It is mine and mine alone."

Cas turned to Castiel, who was watching with wide eyes, one hand twitching in a way that seemed outside his control. "Jimmy, if you can hear me, you are in Heaven with your wife in our universe, and your daughter is a strong, beautiful young woman."

Castiel's hand gave a final twitch and went still once more, and he gave us a shy smile. "Amelia has been gone from this planet for a decade, but they always wanted children. He is pleased to hear they managed to do so."

"Never mind all that," growled Michael. "What do you mean, you ran out of archangels? Did Gabriel sit the war out on your side as well? And Raphael? Myself?"

"Oh, no, brother dearest," Gabriel singsonged. "I died. Lucifer friggin' stabbed me, and I died. Staring blank eyes, wings turned to ash, the whole deal."

"And as for you," Sam spoke up for the first time, and Michael whirled back to him, looking rather spooked now, "you showed up at the last minute and tried to kill me anyway. When we went into the Pit, you came with us, and Lucifer drove us all slowly mad for decades."

My brother grinned at him, and it wasn't a nice grin. I was damned proud of him, too.

"With you gone, there was a civil war in Heaven," said Cas, taking the thread back up when he was sure that Sam's expression had had the desired effect. "Raphael was in favor of re-opening the Pit, letting you both out, and starting the Apocalypse anew. I held to our father's plan: that the earth was for the humans, not a battleground for our family squabbles."

Castiel and the unnamed agent-angel were unabashedly staring at us like a freak show of horrors. The agent seemed more and more disturbed with each new bit of information, but Castiel looked fascinated.

"So you – you, Castiel – you defeated Raphael?" Michael scoffed. "An archangel?"

"I tried so hard to find any other way, but he would not be swayed. I had to struggle to apply human reasoning to the problem, but yes. I did."

Michael opened my father's mouth to say something else – probably something unflattering – in response, but we were all interrupted by a warm swirl of power that tingled along our skins.

"Ahem," said Jack, holding the thong of his amulet across his palm, letting the silver talisman dangle at arm's length. "I think we've made our point. Suffice it to say, we will be attempting to subdue Lucifer whether we have your trust – and backup – or not. We just wanted to know if we'll be fighting two archangels and their armies instead of just the one we came here for."

Michael stared at him for a full minute without speaking, while the warmth Jack projected washed over us all. Jack stared right back.

"I will consult with my generals," Michael said at last. "When we come to a decision, we will have Castiel contact you." Castiel, who somehow managed to be wearing a neutral expression when Michael glanced his way, bowed his head in acquiescence.

"One more thing, please," said Jack, slipping the thong back over his head. He tucked the amulet under his shirt once more, and the angels in the room untensed slightly as his power drained away.

When he was sure Michael wasn't about to vanish mid-sentence, he continued, "I would also like to repair this world, to make it fit for humans once more. Please feel free to contribute any ideas you might have, and I will do everything in my power," not just a figure of speech, "to see that they are implemented."

Michael gave him a curt nod, and then made what was apparently a gesture that indicated everyone on his side should follow him out. He stalked out the door, followed by the agent angel. Castiel looked like he wanted to stay behind, to ask us any of the million questions this meeting had generated, but Cas shook his head.

"We'll talk soon," Cas told him. "It will look suspicious if you linger."

Castiel's eyes widened, and he hurried after his brother, with a last glance over his shoulder at me.

I waved, and he smiled, and then he was gone and it was over. Everyone in the room breathed a sigh of relief, even the ones who didn't need to breathe.

"Well, it definitely could've gone worse," said Bobby from where he was leaning against the wall of the Haven's main room, arms crossed across his chest.

"Yeah, he could've smited us on the spot, I guess," I said, shrugging. I was more concerned about Mom, who was still sitting motionless at the table where she'd dropped when we'd reported who Michael had been wearing.

For all the experience everyone in this room had with loved ones coming back from the dead – or doing so themselves – we had no idea what to say to her. Hurray, the alternate-universe version of your dead husband has been resurrected as a mega-douche's meat suit?

"And now we're stuck waiting again," added Sam. He put a hand on Mom's shoulder and squeezed, but took it away after a few seconds, leaving her to sort out her feelings in peace. If there was one thing this family was great at, it was leaving each other along to deal with feelings.

"I have concerns about this world's Cassie," Gabriel chimed in, trying to change the subject. "I followed your progress as you fell in with the Winchesters, little brother. There's no way you would be this far along your rebellious path by now without outside assistance."

Cas looked thoughtful. "I think I am influencing him, just by being here. No, I can feel it," he said, when Gabriel pulled a skeptical face. "We have the same grace. The same. Father created grace differently than he created unique human souls. When I came through, the grace that is mine, that belongs to every Castiel in the multiverse, started assimilating. The force of my personality is stronger than his, so the end result is a lot closer to me than it is to him."

I gave him a worried once-over. "And you? Did you slide back towards him at all?"

"A little." He smiled. "I have not felt innocence this pure in some time. It is … refreshing. And hopeful."

"What about your memories?" said Jack. "I got the package deal of grace-memories from you and my father. If you share grace, does he get a share in your memories as well?"

Cas looked stunned. "Oh." A pause, and horror whitened his face. "Oh, damn." I'd never heard a curse word pronounced with more heart-felt intent. It helped that he rarely resorted to such strong language. We were all properly shocked.

"Well, hang on, maybe it's not so bad," Sam said, ever the problem solver. "Can you access his memories? It should work both ways, so if you can't, then maybe he can't either."

I saw Cas's Adam's apple bob as he swallowed. "I will try. Thank you, Sam. Outside the wards is probably best."

So we all trooped outside, including Mary, who seemed to return to herself when we started moving en masse, and gathered around as Cas seated himself on a convenient rock a little ways away from the manmade grotto Bobby called home.

I worried at my lip with my teeth, wondering how I could help.

"Dean," he murmured, without opening his eyes.

"Yeah, Cas, what is it? What can I do?"

"I need you to go farther away, please. You contain my grace as well, I seem to be getting some … interference."

"Like feedback on a bad mic? Yeah, okay. I'll be over there."

I wandered a bit, back along the road we'd used to get here from the portal – was that only yesterday? Geez. It felt like we'd been here for weeks.

Which meant I was the first person to see the two figures trudging along in the distance, heading in our direction. They seemed human, but then, both demons and angels wore humans with varying degrees of success, so there was no way to really be sure.

"Bobby?" I called.

An interrogatory grunt was carried back to me on the never-ending wind.

"We got visitors incoming. What's the protocol here?"

An expletive, some more grumbling, and then he was beside me, holding a leather satchel. "Everyone comin' in gets tested, even the ones we've met before." He squinted at the figures in the afternoon light. "And that looks like Bill and his wife. Hunters from way back before the end of the world, and old friends. They know the drill."

"How do they feel about harboring angel-kind? Or visitors from alternate realities?"

He frowned, face pulling into well-worn lines. "They've met your mom, so they've definitely heard about you and yer brother. Not sure how we'll explain the other three."

I looked back at the approaching figures. The smaller one jogged something in my memory, but I couldn't pin it down. "Just have to hope they don't have an amulet like yours, I guess."

"Ain't no amulet like mine. 'Cept yours, I guess. If everyone keeps their head, it should be fine. The Harvelles won't have a reason to suspect anythin' is out of the ordinary."

I started to respond, but the wind gave an extra-strong gust, clearing away some of the haze, at the same time that Bobby's words registered. "The Harvelles," I repeated weakly. "Bill, and his wife. Ellen."

"That, right there, that look on your face, that's the opposite of keepin' your head," Bobby said. "Did you have Harvelles on your world, too?"

"Yeah. Ellen, and her daughter Jo."

"No Bill?"

"He died in a hunting accident before I could meet him. Ellen always said it was my dad's fault, though she assured me she didn't blame him."

Bobby gave me a long look. "Did you get those ones killed, too?"

"Yeah." No use denying it. They featured prominently on my list of dead, which I'd been trying unsuccessfully to drown in booze for the past decade or so. "First time we went up against Lucifer, in fact."

"Then it was his fault, not yours."

I blinked at him. He was crossing his arms over his chest again, and I'd grown up with a Bobby whose word was final, when he crossed his arms like that. But this wasn't that Bobby. So maybe...

"But-"

"Nope. They were people who made their own choices. You can't take the blame for everyone who dies near you. You can't live like that."

"It's kind of his thing, actually," said Sam, cresting the rise we were standing on. "What brought … this … on…"

He trailed off, eyes catching on the two figures, much nearer now. "Is that …?"

"Yup."

"Dude."

"Yup. Bobby says we can't make it weird. Better let everyone else know who's coming to dinner."

Sam headed back down the hill without another word, face set, and I stood next to Bobby as the couple came into speaking distance at last, the man waving a greeting.

"Bobby! It's us again! Good to see you!"

He held out his hand, but instead of shaking it, Bobby dropped the silver coin into it. Bill stood still, apparently accustomed to this practice, until Bobby nodded, then he tipped it into Ellen's upraised palm.

Bobby was staring at her, alert for signs of discomfort that might indicate a skinwalker, so I used the opportunity to stare at her as well. If she was anything like mine, this would be the only chance I got.

And she did look a lot like mine. A bit weathered – this one had been hunting all the time that mine had been running a bar, but this one had never been widowed, or had a daughter to worry over, either – and her hair was cut short, but otherwise it was the same face that I'd last seen grief-stricken and covered in blood as she volunteered to stay behind with Jo and the detonator.

Bobby nodded again, and she traded him back the coin for the flask of holy water – Bobby and I took our swigs first, of course – so I switched my scrutiny to her husband. He was almost as tall as me, sinewy, and prematurely gray-haired. His hands looked rough and callused when he accepted the flask from her, but his face had more smile-lines than frown-lines.

Bobby handed me the coin while the Harvelles were proving they weren't possessed, and once that was all out of the way, everyone's faces broke into grins as they gripped hands and clapped shoulders.

"Great to see you guys! What brings you back this way so soon? I thought you were gonna try farther east?"

"It didn't pan out, and Ellen felt bad leaving Mary alone with your cranky ass for too long, so we headed back. Who's this?"

"Oh, Bill, Ellen, this is Dean. I know Mary told you-all about her sons? They showed up yesterday with some friends."

Ellen looked me up and down, still smiling. "Well, how about that? Wow, you're a big one, aren't you? When'd she have you, age twelve?"

Her warm-honey voice stabbed me right in the heart, but I smiled back and avoided the question. "Wait 'til you see my little brother. Makes me look like a shrimp. It's nice to meet you both."

"Come on back to the Haven, guys," said Bobby, gesturing down the hill. "The boys brought some fresh fish, so we'll have a nice meal for once."

"We caught a couple rabbits while we were on the road," said Bill as we started moving. His voice was a pleasant tenor. "Bit scrawny, but they've got some meat on 'em. Can we throw in?"

"Rare find, these days," replied Bobby, slapping Bill on the back. "We'll make 'em stretch."

Mary separated from the group at the bottom of the hill and flew up to meet us, beaming. She and Ellen threw themselves into each other's arms. "You came back!" she said. "I was pretty sure we'd never see you again!"

Ellen laughed. "You think I could just leave you here with Bobby? And, your boys came back! Did they…"

She paused to scan the rest of the group, then held one hand up and stage-whispered behind it, "Did they find who they were looking for?"

"Sure did," Mary replied. "Bill, Ellen, you've apparently met Dean, and this one is Sam, my youngest."

Sam waved, giving his best shot at a friendly smile. It looked strained to me, but then, I knew him pretty well.

"And this," Mom stepped away from Ellen and slung an arm over Cas's shoulders, "is Castiel. My boys got him back after all, and picked up his brother Gabriel and their nephew Jack along the way. Turns out, they make a pretty good team."

Cas was looking a bit uncomfortable, but gave a good-natured shrug and a wave hello. We had no idea what Mom had told the Harvelles about what we'd been attempting to rescue Cas from, exactly, so we just had to roll with it.

Ellen let her gaze switch back and forth between Cas and me. "And did everything… um. Did everything work out like you were hoping?"

Mom beamed even wider, which I hadn't thought was possible at that point, and that seemed answer enough.

I glanced over at Gabriel and Jack, who were both being uncharacteristically silent. Neither of them had met our Ellen, but I knew Jack well enough to recognize his barely suppressed joy. If Bobby had been at the top of his list of people he'd seen in our memories that he'd wanted to meet, Ellen had to be a close second.

Gabriel just looked solemn – well, solemn for him – and placed himself at Sam's side in case moral support was required.

"Can we go in now?" Bobby asked. "We can all get better acquainted over dinner."

"What were you guys doing outside, anyway?" Bill asked, ducking under the first lintel. "Bobby, you don't usually spend any more time than you have to where angels might see you."

Bobby shot a final suspicious glance at the sky before following him. "Showin' the kids a routine patrol. No point in havin' young blood around if I can't abuse my power as an elder."

"Hey, we're visitors, not slave labor," Gabriel threw in as we arranged ourselves around the table. The Harvelles looked a bit more relaxed now that we were inside the wards. Since I wasn't from this reality, it was hard for me to imagine what it must be like, traveling the countryside and being vulnerable, without Enochian runes to shield you.

Ellen cleared her throat, and I realized that she had remained standing. "Now that we're all in a safe place, will one of y'all tell us what's really going on?"

"What do you mean?" Bobby asked. It didn't sound very convincing.

Ellen rolled her eyes and didn't dignify it with a response.

"Knew they'd figure me out," Mary said, shrugging. "They're smart, and they'd both met Mary Campbell, back before the world ended."

Bobby stared at her, eyes wide. "Why didn't you tell me this might happen?"

"It didn't seem relevant. I was sure my boys would come before I ever saw them again. And, turns out I was right, for all the good it does us." She didn't seem worried, and Ellen and Bill didn't look scared, just impatient.

"I knew you weren't the real Mary Campbell, even though you look just like her, because I burned her body over a decade ago. Still, you passed Bobby's tests, so you weren't a threat, and I liked you. So what are you?" Ellen gestured at the rest of us. "And your boys?"

Bobby sighed. "This is gonna be a difficult conversation. I'm prescribin' alcohol." He got up, dug a large jug out of a cupboard, thunked it on the table, and resumed his seat.

"What's so difficult?" asked Bill. "Just answer the question. Are you ghosts?"

"Ghosts wouldn't get past the Haven's wards," Mary said, snagging the jug and taking a quick swallow. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "We're as real and alive as anyone. Several times over."

Bobby accepted the jug when she passed it to him and took a swallow for himself. "Difficult because you ain't gonna believe it. Shit, I hardly believe it myself, and I've had a year to wrap my noggin around the idea."

He wiggled the jug at Ellen. She stayed still, arms crossed, a moment longer, then sighed and sat down at the table between Bobby and her husband, hand out for it. Her swallow was larger, and she sighed again once it had gone down.

When everyone had had their turn – no one was worried about cooties, not when the contents of the jug were practically a sterilizing agent – Ellen placed both hands flat on the table and turned back to Mary. "Hit me with it. It's been eatin' at me ever since we left, and I just want to know."

We all looked at each other, unsure how to begin. Gabriel, true to form, stepped into the silence. "First things first. My brother and I are actually angels. Oh, sit down, you know we can't do anything in here. These wards really are quite extensive."

With truly impressive speed, Ellen had reached to the nape of her neck to whip a blade free from the loose collar of her plaid button-up, and Bill had leaped to his feet and pulled a gun, but when no one else in the room reacted, they stood down. I noticed, however, that even though Bill took his seat again, both he and Ellen put their weapons on the table, in easy reach.

"Now that that's out of the way-"

"She said Gabriel," Ellen interrupted. "Are you the missing archangel?"

"Not quite," he grinned. "Now we get to the part that really boils Bobby's noodle. We – all of us: Mary, too, but not Bobby – are from a different universe."

He did spooky fingers, then let his words hang over the table for a bit. Ellen's first reaction, after a solid minute had passed, was to grab the jug and take another sip, and then to turn back to Mom. "Explain."

Mom smiled. "It all hinges on Jack, here. Maybe I should let him tell it."

Jack blinked in surprise. "Oh. Um. Okay. So, like they said, I'm Gabriel and Castiel's nephew. Back in our universe, my mother was a normal human lady. She didn't even know that angels or demons existed, because on our world, this war was prevented, and regular humans got to keep living regular lives. All thanks to Sam and Dean and Castiel, by the way. And their version of Bobby."

Ellen and Bill gave us all quick searching looks, and I knew we'd have to tell them the whole story later, but for the moment, Jack had the floor.

"But a few years later, Lucifer got free. And he met my mom. And they made me."

He paused, waiting until the whites of the Harvelles' eyes weren't visible all the way around their irises.

"I'm what's called a nephilim. We're pretty rare. One of my powers is to be able to create gateways to different universes. Right before I was born, I opened one to this place, and Mary pushed our Lucifer through it, sealing him away from me so that he couldn't corrupt me and use my powers to destroy the world."

Bill spluttered a few times, and I remembered how this world's Castiel had accused us, but Ellen put a calming hand on his arm and gestured for Jack to go on.

"Sam and Dean raised me to appreciate life, and to know good from evil. When they figured I was strong enough, I re-opened the portal so that I can confront my father and try to undo the damage he has done here."

"Not that I doubt Bobby's word, or anything, but how can we be sure you're telling us the truth? This whole thing seems pretty wild," said Ellen.

Jack frowned. "Short of opening another portal, that's going to be kind of difficult. All of you are gone on our side, and vice versa, if we even existed at all. Gabriel and Castiel have doubles here, but would you trust their word?"

Bill shrugged. "Angels don't much care about humans – present company excepted, apparently – but I've never known one to lie."

"Great," I said. "The Castiel here is supposed to report back to us later, anyway. You can see him then, get his take on things."

"Report…?"

Sam rubbed the back of his neck with a large hand. "We … um. We had a sort of summit this morning with Michael. This world's Castiel is acting as our go-between."

Jack reached out with inhuman reflexes to catch the jug when Bill fumbled it. "With … Michael?"

Mary spoke back up. "Look, we understand if you-all would rather not be involved. We're not asking you to participate, or to back us up, or anything, but you did want to know."

Ellen and Bill held a conversation entirely using facial expressions, the way that only two people who've known each other a very long time can. Jack watched them with interest. He'd gotten much better at nonverbal cues in the year he'd been with us, but human interactions still fascinated him.

The conversation ended with Ellen raising one shoulder, and one corner of her mouth, and Bill turned back to the table as a whole. "We'd like to hear your plan, and your whole story, before deciding whether or not you're all insane."

I grinned. "That's going to be debatable, either way." Cas elbowed me in the side, but it was worth it.

"Wait, so you've all been dead? How many times?"

"Just how many apocalypses have you averted, anyway?"

"You called Lucifer a what?"

By the time we'd come around to "Michael was wearing who?", Mom had managed to make and serve dinner, and the Harvelles were looking a bit shell-shocked. Bobby looked only marginally better; it seemed Mom hadn't quite told him everything. We'd left out a lot, since a decade was a lot to go over in one night, but I think we'd gotten in the pertinent bits.

Jack, with his multi-memory storage, filled in the parts that our fallible human brains had skipped over. Ellen was impressed that he was only a year old. "Remind me to make you a birthday cake, sweetie, when all this is over," she said absently, patting him on the hand.

Jack just grinned at her. "I might hold you to that," he said. "Dean never makes me cake."

"Hey, pie is good enough for anyone," I said defensively.

"Dude, just admit you don't know how to make it," Sam accused. "There's no shame."

A few of Bobby's jugs had been emptied at some point between the stew and the oatmeal cookies Mom had produced for dessert, but since we were all old hunters, everyone was comfortable and slightly warm, but no one was out of control.

Except I couldn't quite shake a feeling of being watched. Not threatened, just observed.

Cas noticed, of course. Not sure how, maybe a twitch in my shoulders or something. "Dean?" He put a hand to my cheek. Everyone suddenly had somewhere else to look. For all that they were fooling anyone, they might as well have been whistling casually, but I appreciated the effort.

"Cas, I think-"

And then I figured it out. I'd have had it sooner, but Bobby distilled some strong moonshine, and I was a lightweight again.

"Ah. Everyone, I think we're about to have a visitor. Be right back."

I stood up and made my way to the door, tugging Cas along by the hand. No way was I in any shape to face anyone alone, much less my greatest temptation.

The evening was cool and breezy, and the grit seemed to have subsided a bit, so I took a minute to try to sharpen my wits before reaching out.

Castiel. Hasn't anyone told you eavesdropping is rude?

Cas squeezed my hand, and I shared a grin with him as the sound of wings arrived on the wind.

"How much of that did you hear?" I asked. "It's cheating, you know. The wards are meant to nullify angel mojo."

"They are very effective," he replied. "I could not locate you, and you were not asleep, so I did not know how to capture your attention without being invasive. I just meant to look in at regular intervals, so that I would know as soon as you were receptive, but …"

He trailed off and looked a little embarrassed.

"But you wanted to hear our story. Well, now you have. Though I have to warn you, we edited the best bits out."

His gaze snapped back up to mine, eyes wide. "There's more?"

My mouth pulled up on one side, and I turned back to the angel holding my hand. "Cas, were you successful earlier, before Bill and Ellen showed up? I never got the chance to ask."

He was trying to frown. As a full-powered angel, the alcohol hadn't affected him, but he'd been infected by the giddy mood inside, and seemed to be finding it difficult to project the required seriousness. "Unfortunately, yes. Castiel, you and I have access to all of each other's memories. I would request that you not look, for your own sake, but were I in your position, I would refuse such a request, so I cannot ask it of you."

Castiel blinked at him, plain shocked. "…What?"

"I believe it is due to our shared grace. No matter how much I have changed, how many times I have died, I am still Castiel, and so are you. I would require a dark, quiet room, and several weeks undisturbed to really grasp the implications behind how that would affect a multiverse, but I have neither of those at the moment."

"Can we access Dean's memories, since his soul is interwoven with our grace?" Castiel asked. I knew it should have made my skin crawl, the idea that someone else could rifle my brain, but I had a nice buzz going, and if there was one constant in the multiverse, it was that Castiel, Angel of the Lord, would never hurt me – Naomi's brainwashing notwithstanding – so I just turned back to Cas and waited for his answer.

Cas opened his mouth, closed it, wrinkled his brow, and frowned at me. "That is a question for another time," he decided, turning back to his counterpart. "For now, there are more humans inside who would like to meet you. Did Michael deliver a verdict, or are you here without his knowledge?"

"He sent me to ask for more time. It seems that several of his counselors are advising against working with Jack."

I exchanged glances with Cas, and he took the lead. "Castiel, it is very likely that some of them are working for Lucifer. Our hypothesis is that a group of angels broke the seals and released him in the first place."

"Yes, that makes sense." I was expecting horror or denials, but he surprised me by nodding thoughtfully instead. "This means that whatever Michael shares with them, Lucifer will know shortly." His eyes widened in sudden horror. "Then he already knows you are here!"

"Yeah, probably," I said. "Not a big deal. Jack's logic still holds. As long as they don't figure out where here is, we'll be ok. And you're not going to tell 'em, right?"

Castiel looked around, startled. "You summoned me to your place of safety?"

"Cas vouched for you. Said no matter how much you slipped, you'd never follow Lucifer's path, no matter what. So come on in! Gonna have to clip your wings a little, though."

I made an expansive, sweeping gesture back towards the Haven, throwing both Cas and myself off balance a little.

Castiel looked back and forth between us, settling on Cas as the reasonable one. "Is he … intoxicated?"

Cas let out a long-suffering sigh. "All of the humans within the dwelling are. It is how they deal with trying circumstances. Two more arrived earlier today, and they have spent the past several hours easing themselves into the idea of a multiverse. They are waiting on you as the final proof."

"And these new humans – I am assuming they are from this universe – are amenable to conversing with an angel who is … 'local?'"

"If they were not prior to today, they certainly are at the moment," Cas responded drily.

Much was made over how similar the two Castiels were in appearance. Cas accepted the comments with his usual grace, but Castiel mainly looked uncomfortable, staying close to Gabriel and looking to him often for assistance.

Gabe played the dutiful big brother and seemed to be earning more and more of Sam's approval. I had no idea what they'd worked out between the two of them, but as long as everyone was happy, it wasn't any of my business.

"Did Michael and his team have any ideas for restoring this world's ecosystems?" Jack asked Castiel about an hour in.

Castiel looked thankful for the reprieve, as Ellen was currently poking him in the cheek with one finger, and she withdrew to allow him to respond.

"He had several theories, yes, but our primary focus has been on the war, not on its consequences, so we do not really have much to go on."

"Bring back the sun," Bobby interjected, in his typical terse fashion.

"That's it?" asked Jack. "We haven't seen any plants since we got here, are you sure that's all it'll take?"

Bobby nodded. "They're there, waitin'. It'll take time, sure, but bring back the sun, and everythin' else'll follow."

Sam weighed in from his seat at the table. "With all the plants gone, your world should be suffering from global dust bowl conditions, or even an Ice Age by now, the way your volcanoes are erupting, but 's not."

It sounded like gibberish to me, but Sam had always been the studious one, even wasted, and it must have made sense to Jack, because he nodded encouragingly in response.

"Got a theory 'bout it, actually," Sam continued, "but if 'm right, we'll need Michael's help, and the rest of the Host, too."

Castiel looked intrigued. "I will pass on any suggestions you have, of course."

"It's the whoosh," Sam made a weaving gesture with one hand, "…flying. When the host moves, its passage disturbs the atmosphere enough that the greenhouse effect can't set in. If we can direct the combined power of the wind generated by them, we … we …"

Running out of steam, he blinked up at his rapt audience, then dropped his head onto his folded arms and commenced snoring, to general hilarity.

Gabe seated himself on the table beside him and smoothed the hair away from his face. "I'm guessing you all get the idea? We can give him credit for it when we work out the finer details."

Mary wandered over as well and traced the one visible cheekbone. I'd seen her do it before, when Sam fell asleep in the common area at the Bunker, and she might do it to me as well, for all I knew – searching the adult for any traces of the child she'd lost.

She grinned up at Gabriel, all traces of melancholy set aside. "You could fix this, you know."

Gabe grinned back at her. "And lose a teachable moment about the consequences of overindulgence when he wakes up tomorrow? Not a chance. Besides, I can't do anything in here, and who's going to carry him outside? You?"

She threw her head back and laughed. "Not in my skill set, even when sober, I'm afraid. I'll defer to your judgment on this one." And she wandered back to the other side of the table where Bobby and Bill were playing cards, giving my arm a squeeze on the way past.

Castiel observed everything with a mix of fascination and thinly masked confusion, with a dash of apprehension. Every so often, his shoulders quivered as if his wings were itching at him.

I leaned over to Cas. "The wards don't seem bother you as much as they're bothering him. Is it because you've been human?"

He shook his head in response. "This is nothing like being human. I can still feel my grace, and my wings, but it as if they are behind glass. I cannot access them. I still feel safe, because I trust you completely, but my counterpart does not have that luxury."

"Ah." I thought about that for a few seconds, then clapped my hands, drawing everyone's attention. Well, all the conscious people, anyway. "Alright, kids, it's been fun playin' host to a member of the Host, but Castiel here has to get back to his people. I'm sure we'll see him again before too long. Any last words?"

Castiel's twitching shoulders sagged in relief as everyone called out their goodbyes. He responded as politely as he could, then made a beeline for the door. Cas and I followed him out, ignoring Ellen's catcall regarding 'twins' as we left.

He seemed ready to fly off as soon as he exited the wards, but I reached out and caught his arm before he could vanish. "Do you mind staying a little bit longer? There's a couple more things we have to talk about. We can do it out here, though. I'm sorry, I didn't realize how hard on you the wards would be."

He hesitated, then nodded, and I let go as soon as a realized I was still touching him. The three of us walked up the hill, away from the Haven.

"Are you not concerned that Lucifer can locate you?" he asked.

"Nah. Cas carved the anti-angel runes into my ribs himself. I'm untraceable."

"But … but I can find you?"

I laced my fingers with Cas's again, sharing a smile with him. "Like Gabriel said, our connection runs deep. Follow your grace, you find me."

"Concerning our grace," Cas broke in. "Have you noticed any shifts in your attitude since our arrival in this universe?"

Castiel blinked at him. "I had not thought about it, but since you have pointed it out, I find that I must agree."

"I apologize for that, then," Cas said, solemn-faced. "I believe that since we share a grace, the changes that I have gone through are affecting you as well."

Castiel smiled, and it didn't look nearly as awkward as it should. We were in it pretty deep, apparently. "It seems you are simultaneously equipping me to handle any troubles you are causing. I cannot fault you for that." He held his hands up and looked at them, turning them over, flexing them into fists and flat again. "I feel … I feel like I have grown into a new skin. Does that make sense? I am still me, but … more so."

He dropped his hands to his sides again. "I fear I am not making any sense."

Cas stepped forward and grasped his shoulder. "I understand, more than you know. For the other thing we have to discuss: when you do go over my memories, please do not reveal to the other angels what you learn. We are not meant to know what happens to us when we die. That was Father's will."

He dropped his gaze to the dusty ground, though he didn't move his hand. "And please try not to judge me too harshly, when you witness all that I have done. I will not attempt to make excuses, or ask for forgiveness, but your disapproval will hurt, and I grow more able to feel with every day that passes."

Castiel, eyes wide, put his own hand over Cas's on his shoulder. "I cannot say how I will react until I have seen it for myself. However, I will keep in mind the reason for your actions," he glanced over at me, then back to his double, "and we can hope that will be excuse enough."

"Thank you," Cas said, and stepped away. "Please contact us when Michael has made a decision, or if you suspect the agents of Lucifer within the council have conceived their own plan. Be safe. If something happens to you, all avenues for contact will be lost."

"Plus," I couldn't help adding, "we'd all be sad. So don't die."

Castiel gave me a warm smile, and then vanished in a small whirlwind of dirt and sand.

Cas and I stood, hand in hand, staring upwards, trying to make out stars among the haze. I was definitely going to follow Sam's example soon, going by how hard it was to remain upright at this point, but there was something I wanted to ask Cas first. I'd always been a shut the hell up and leave me alone kind of drunk, rather than the let's discuss the mysteries of the universe kind, but this had been bothering me since we'd walked through the gate.

"So this whole multiverse thing," I started.

Cas nodded, to let me know he was listening, but neither of us took our eyes off of the clouds.

"We're assumin' that there's a Chuck for each one, yeah? One God, one Heaven, per universe?"

Another nod.

"Do you think your lady's realm is its own universe? Or, like, some kind of … pocket dimension inside each one?"

I suddenly became more interesting than the stars we couldn't see, apparently, as Cas turned to look at me.

"I just mean. I just. Um. Hang on, I had this. Ah. If there's a Castiel in every universe, but you all have just the one grace, and if her realm is where you all go when you die, do you all share the afterlife? Like, when we saw you there, were you everyone? Or, if you die here, do you get to go meet her for the first time again? And the Castiel here joins you when he bites it?"

To my annoyance, he seemed to find this amusing. "Are you jealous, Dean Winchester?"

"Course I fuckin' am! She might as well have given you an engraved invitation! Still, I'd just walk in and demand you back from this one, too, even if I've never met her before."

Part Two of my Great Thought hit me like a sledgehammer. "We haven't pissed off Death in this universe! If I die here, do I get to go to Heaven? Because if so, then you'd have to come with me, instead of to your lady. So there."

The asshole grinned even wider. "So you are suggesting some sort of suicide pact?"

I spluttered incoherently for a few seconds while he chuckled at my distress. "You know what? Forget it. I'm going to live forever, just to spite you." I took my hand back and crossed my arms over my chest, feeling the pout on my face but unable to control it.

He ran the backs of his fingers up my cheekbone. "Good," he said, still smiling. "Me, too."

The call came late the next morning while I was leading an impromptu yoga class. My life had become so absurd at this point, it was getting kind of surreal.

Gabriel had taken off with Sam a while earlier, announcing that they needed to scope out where his ecosystem recovery plan could be put into greatest effect. As he dragged him out the door, I could only hope he healed him first, because going by Sam's face, if anyone took him flying, they were going to get vomited on.

We were all sitting around the table, finishing our post-apocalyptic oatmeal, when I asked Jack if he wanted to do some yoga with me, to shake off the dregs of my hangover.

He agreed, and we were about to go change into workout clothes when Ellen spoke up.

"Yoga? Not much of that going on since the civilized world ended. Would you mind an extra pupil? I used to love that shit."

When I nodded, she asked, "Mary? You in?"

Mom grinned. "How could I miss out on the first organized yoga class in the western hemisphere in probably half a century? Let me go get changed, and I'll meet you all in the workout room. Will you boys be joining us?"

Bobby and Bill made manly grumbling noises. "Can we just watch?" Bill said eventually. "It's going to be a nice view." He waggled his eyebrows at his wife, who crossed her arms at him.

"If you're in the room, you're participatin'," she told him. "Or I'm banishin' you to the other side of the Haven until we're done."

They caved. Cas was curious about the whole thing – I'd shown little to no interest in actually practicing the art prior to his death – and so I found myself leading a beginner's class for five pupils of varying degrees of expertise and enthusiasm, with Jack's assistance.

We ran through the basic poses, and then some more advanced ones when everyone seemed game enough. After a few repetitions, I took pity on Bobby and Bill, who were red-faced and puffing a little, and let us all lapse into lotus positions for some meditation and recuperation.

It was when I'd settled, cross-legged and clear-minded, that I felt a mental itch, like a polite knock on my consciousness's door.

"I'll be right back. Keep an eye on the room, Jack. If anyone drifts from thinking peaceful thoughts of nothingness, make them run laps."

He nodded with a mischievous grin as the human pupils exchanged wide-eyed glances. I untangled my legs and strode toward the door, pausing in front of Cas. He gave me an understanding nod, trusting me to go and meet Castiel alone despite my screw-ups the past few days.

One day I would earn the absolute trust I saw in his eyes, I swore it. Even if it killed me. Again.

"Dean," Jack called, snapping me back to awareness. "Stop angst-ing and get out of here before I make you run laps."

"Ah, right, sorry." I gave Cas one final reassuring smile and headed out the door.

Castiel was standing just inside the wards, staring out at the gray hills surrounding the Haven. He turned when I ducked through the last doorway. "Hello, Dean."

I stamped on my visceral reaction to his words, hoping my Cas hadn't noticed it. "Good morning, Castiel. Nice to see you again so soon."

He looked me over. "You seem much improved from last night."

"Yeah, that was the exception, not the norm. These days, anyway." He seemed different, somehow. His eyes looked older, even for a millennia-old creature. I figured it out pretty quickly.

"Ah. You took a stroll down Cas's Memory Lane, huh?"

He nodded, face serious.

"Do I need to keep you and Cas apart? His self-esteem is low enough, he doesn't need you tearing him down."

Castiel's eyes widened. "Not at all! If anything, I owe him an apology, for being so free when he is so burdened!"

"Well, that's a relief, anyway. Hey," I grabbed at his sleeve when he turned to go inside, "can I ask you something? About him? Now that you're all caught up?"

"Of course, Dean."

"He knows I love him, right? He says he does, and I know he doesn't lie to me any more, but he knows? Like, really knows? Chick-flick style?"

Castiel smiled. "He knows, Dean Winchester. He has a few concerns, which he would never speak aloud to you, but he knows."

"But you would?" I asked, wiggling my eyebrows encouragingly. "Speak them aloud, that is?"

"I do not see the harm in it. His most superficial concern is his gender. You are a heterosexual male human, and he is an asexual angel using a male human as a vessel." He paused, looking thoughtful. "Though his sexuality seems to have been altered by the lady Freyja."

I shrugged, feeling my cheeks heat up a little at discussing these things out loud. "Not sure how long that'll last, and if it ends, it ends, and we'll handle it when we have to. It's who he is inside – the giant pillar of light – that matters, so the vessel part is kind of irrelevant. Not to say I won't want to look at women ever again, but we'll definitely talk about that when the time comes. No rush. What else?"

He looked uncertain. "He certainly would never mention it, and if he did, he would agree with your choice, but he feels that if a situation arose where you had to choose between him and your brother, you would choose Sam."

I blinked like a stunned mullet. "Oh," I managed after a minute. "Yeah, that's a tough one, and he's got a lot of historical evidence on his side. Thank you for letting me know."

I noticed the uncomfortable set of his shoulders, and remembered that he'd been inside the wards the whole time, probably avoiding being tracked, even though it made him feel vulnerable.

"Jack's probably wrapped up class by now. C'mon inside. In for a penny, in for a pound."

"What do defunct United Kingdom monetary units have to do with anything?" he asked, following me in.

Unable to stop myself, I gave him a fond smile that he hadn't yet earned from me. "Human idiom, don't worry about it."

I forgot I was dealing with the new, improved Castiel, who frowned at me. "You were not so forgiving with your world's version of myself's cultural failings."

"And you get to reap the benefits of his years of taking shit from us," I replied with a shrug. "Nice how that works, isn't it?"

"It does not seem fair."

"The universe is not fair, Castiel. Not mine, not yours, probably none of them out of an infinite number of choices."

Immediately wanting to apologize for being so harsh, I was instead startled when his smile returned.

"That is more characteristic of your early interactions with him. Thank you. I did not wish for special treatment."

That was the point where I noticed that the rest of the group had trooped into the main room, still clad in workout-wear, all looking intensely curious, so I just threw my hands in the air in surrender. "Masochists, both of you, I swear."

Ever the master of comedic timing, Gabriel took that moment to duck into the room behind us and throw in his two cents. "That'll never work, Dean; you can't both be masochists in a relationship, and you're worse than he is. As a professional sadist, I volunteer my services." He gave us a serviceable leer.

Sam, trailing him, gave him a swat to the back of the head, but he was smiling.

"Need any help?" asked Gabriel, hard on Sam's heels. "Two whips are better than one, you know."

Everyone in the room did a double-take.

"This is getting out of hand," I quipped into the shocked silence. "Now there are two of them."

The second Gabriel gave us a small wave. "Hi, everyone! Nice warded hut you've got here." His gaze bounced between Castiels, both of whom were gaping at him, finally settling on the one in the trench coat.

"This one's mine, right? Hey, little brother. Been a while, huh?" He turned back to our Gabriel. "You were right, it's much weirder seeing two versions of someone else than it is coming face to face with yourself. Why is that?"

"Because, dear twin – say it with me, Sam – we're-"

Sam joined in, grinning, "You're-"

"…just that narcissistic," they finished together, then burst into laughter.

"Ha ha," this world's Gabriel drawled. "You guys are hilarious. What, did you rehearse that bit beforehand? Never mind, I don't want to know. I can't decide if it'd be worse if you had, or if you hadn't."

"What made you change your mind?" Castiel asked, apparently eager to initiate conversation with the brother he hadn't seen in literal ages.

Alt-Gabriel shrugged. "I took some time to think. The only reason I'm sitting this one out is because I don't want to pick sides between my brothers, but the enemy here isn't my brother, he's theirs, so that threw that reason right out the window. And, I'm tired of hiding."

He glanced at Sam, then shrugged again and turned back to Castiel. "And I miss humans. Angels are boring and demons are single-mindedly ambitious. There's no one to play with any more."

Another one bites the dust, I thought to myself. They probably had some kick-ass post-Apocalyptic rock music in this universe, but I doubted Queen had made it through the End unchanged. The music alone was enough to ensure I'd never stay here, no matter how many of our lost we might recover.

He gave Castiel a suspicious squint. "You seem different somehow. Not as … foot-soldier-y. I'd say something about your rebellious streak, but I get the feeling that all the best reunion lines were already taken by Mr. Handsome over there." He jerked a thumb at our Gabriel, whose smug smirk dropped right off his face, and I thought I knew why.

If they'd neglected to mention the personality drift caused by shared grace, and this Gabriel found out that his decision might not have been as personal as he believed, his reaction probably would not be positive, to use a mild understatement. All we needed, to have a pissed-off archangel on our hands, was for Castiel to spill the beans.

However, we underestimated the new Castiel.

He just smiled at his brother. "I am very happy to see you. And, after decades of war, it is nice to have the hope of a peaceful future at hand." He made a not-so-subtle gesture in my direction.

Alt-Gabriel found my patched-up soul just as distracting as Castiel had intended, even though I was in no way the main event in the room.

"You must be Dean Winchester, the Righteous Man," he said, holding out a hand in my direction. "Your brother had a lot to say about you."

Frankly astonished by the offered courtesy, I shook it. "It's getting him to shut up that's the hard part," I told him. "Nice to have you on our side."

With that, he seemed to remember that there was an entire room full of people he'd been ignoring. More specifically, he noticed their attire, and his face split into an easy grin.

"Why didn't I get an invite to the pajama party? I'm tops in a pillow fight!"

Jack stepped forward, stretching his own hand out. "Must have gotten lost in the mail. Postman's always late 'round here. I'm Jack."

"Ah, the man of the hour!" Alt-Gabriel said, reciprocating the handshake a bit more vigorously than politeness required. "Sam had almost as much to say about you. You're going to try to save us all?"

Jack's grin twisted. "I'd like to make a Star Wars reference, but I'm not precisely sure when our worlds split." He glanced at me, and I gave him a proud thumb's-up, while Sam smiled like a loon in the background. Looks like I'd raised a couple of super nerds. "Anyway, I'm not just going to try. This is something I have to do."

"Then what's the hold-up? I need the humans to get with the rebuilding, with emphasis on the candy factories, ASAP."

We all turned to Castiel. "What's the news from Michael this morning?" I asked him.

"Ah." He looked surprised to be asked, as if he'd forgotten the entire reason he was here, stuck inside wards that made him vulnerable and uncomfortable, with people he didn't know, undergoing experiences that made him confused and probably a little frightened.

Straightening his shoulders, he announced, "Michael overruled his council, and has declared that no angels will be present at your meeting. He will also be calling a mandatory assembly of the Host simultaneous with it – any absences will be noted."

I whistled, impressed. Michael must have had his own suspicions about who had opened the Hellgate, and was openly declaring to any traitors on his staff that he was aware of their existence. Had to admit, dude had balls.

The local Gabriel frowned. "If I know my brother – and I do – then he's going to want representation at that meeting. There's no way he'd just let the course of the war, not to mention the fate of the world, be decided without a witness from him, at the very least. How is he planning on that, if everyone has to show up to the assembly?"

Clearly uncomfortable, Castiel cleared his throat. "Um." He looked at Cas, and my immediate reaction – a mental no fucking way that screamed across my brain – was apparently fervently prayer-like enough that both of them snapped their heads around to look at me, wards or not.

I hadn't said anything out loud, though, and the others took a little more time to figure it out.

"He can't possibly think no one will notice if our Cassie replaces yours," our Gabriel said. "They've spent the last human generation becoming completely different people."

"It is the compromise he is offering," Castiel answered. "He has been more accommodating to our multidimensional visitors thus far than I have ever seen him be in all of my existence, and he seems to expect this as his due in return." He lifted his shoulders in a shrug, the motion awkward with its novelty to him.

"Cas? You OK with this?" I asked. He already knew how I felt about it, but the decision had to be his.

Cas shrugged as well, much more fluidly than his counterpart. "If this is what it takes to secure Michael's assistance."

Silence prevailed in the Haven, outside of the frustrated grinding of my teeth. Then came a burst of protest from half the room, with Bobby and the Harvelles keeping their opinions to themselves.

Eventually we all simmered down, mainly because Jack exerted his will on the room. "We're here for one reason and one reason only, guys. If both Castiels are willing, then this is what we have to do."

I sent Cas a panicked glance. We hadn't been separated for any appreciable amount of time since his return, and I wasn't sure if I'd be able to handle it gracefully.

He twined his fingers with mine and gave my hand a reassuring squeeze before turning back to Castiel. "When is his assembly being held?"

"Tomorrow morning."

"Does he require my presence prior to that, or can we make the switch immediately beforehand?"

"He did not specify, but minimum exposure to the others is crucial if this plan is going to work. I suggest immediately beforehand."

I turned back to Castiel. "Lucifer thinks our Cas is dead, so he's gonna know you're the local version. Not sure if that makes it safer, or more dangerous for you."

"I will assume it offers me a measure of mercy at his hands, as much as he is capable of, but I do not believe it will come down to him against me. This is Jack's sortie, after all."

He turned back to our Nephilim, who gave us all a reassuring grin. "I've got this, you guys. Even if it doesn't go according to plan, I feel completely confident that I can keep him from hurting anyone else."

Sam and I exchanged suspicious squints, then each gave Jack full-bore disapproval. I didn't care for Jack's tone. He seemed to be implying that it didn't matter if he was hurt. In fact, he almost sounded like he was expecting it. I was reminded of why I'd been against this plan from the beginning.

"You're not gonna take any unnecessary risks, right?" I asked him. "If it falls apart, we get the hell outta Dodge and try somethin' else."

He shrugged. "I know, I'm your ticket home." It was an echo of his statement the first day we met, and even I wasn't prepared for how it triggered me.

Rage shot through me, sudden and fierce, motivating enough that I detached myself from Cas and seized Jack's shoulders.

"Do you really think that's all you are? Really? After all this time?" My fingers dug into his shirt, and I held his gaze, refusing to let him look away. "Because if you do, I've failed you completely, and there's no way you're goin' out there tomorrow."

I could tell the second he dropped the joke, because his eyes lit up, glowing golden in his too-thin face, and his grin broke through the mask of indifference he'd put on. "I just love it when you go all chick-flick, Dean."

"Son of a bitch," I growled, giving him a final shake for good measure before shoving him away. "I'm blaming you for that one," I told our Gabriel as the rest of the room dissolved into relieved laughter. "He used to be such a good kid."

Gabe grinned unrepentantly, and even managed to look a little proud of himself.

Castiel seemed bewildered. "What just happened?"

Cas shot me a glance, then tried to explain human feelings to a being who'd been born without them. "Jack was seeking reassurance that Dean cares for him, on the eve of a dangerous situation. Humans – particularly male ones – can sometimes be reluctant to express their emotions to each other."

He broke off, and his mouth quirked in a wry grin. "In your perusal of my memories, you might have noticed that Dean suffers from this affliction most acutely."

Castiel gave an earnest nod, which made my traitorous brother laugh even harder.

While the rest of the room worked on collecting themselves, Cas stepped closer so that only Castiel and I could hear his next words. "Jack also played on one of Dean's deepest insecurities, relating to fatherhood and child-raising."

Damn. Well played, angel.

Delicate arms wrapped around me from behind, and my mother pressed her cheek into my back. "I think you did a wonderful job, honey. He is a good kid."

"Jeez, does everyone know about my daddy issues?" But I put my hands over hers and pressed into the hug, letting her assurances put balm on my constantly festering inferiority complex. She'd never known the John that I had – he'd been a regular guy who'd never killed anything in his life before she was taken from us.

In the meantime, the two Gabriels had gotten into a disagreement over nomenclature.

"No way, why would you get to be Gabriel-A? This is my planet, I should get to be Gabriel-A! You should be Gabriel-B."

"No, wait. I want Gabriel Prime. You can keep the A, Gabe-Apocalypse World."

Sam stood between them, hands raised as if to keep them from an actual physical altercation. They glared at each other, and the rest of the room focused on what might turn into an archangel throwdown, surreptitiously glancing around and determining which piece of furniture they'd dive for if the tension exploded, wards or no wards.

And then two sets of lips twitched, and they both started snickering. "I'm sorry," Alt-Gabe said through the laughter. "I haven't talked to anyone in decades, so my people skills are rusty."

Our Gabe shrugged the apology off. "I've been dead for several years myself."

And that set them both off again, until they were each howling, leaning their foreheads against Sam's shoulders for support. Sam towered over them, a bemused behemoth unsure where to put his hands.

Cas and his counterpart spent the night in deep communion, figuring out what differences remained between them and how to fake it if someone got suspicious.

"He walked me through what he thought would be the important parts of his memories, so that I would know who had died and how," Cas told me, when it was time for him to go and everyone gave us a few minutes for a private goodbye. The two of them had traded clothes, and the tan trench coat draping his thin shoulders socked me right in the gut all over again.

"And he's sure that his brother won't turn on you? We both know he's capable of it, going by our last rodeo."

"Our Michael was eager for war, whatever the cost. This Michael has seen that cost and is willing to learn from it. Besides, if he does not actually deserve the faith that his own Castiel has in him, and something does go wrong, you know where to find me. I still carry my lady's blessing, so we should have no trouble convincing her to let me go once more."

He attempted a lascivious eyebrow-wiggle. It was adorable, but it made me realize how short our time was.

"Speaking of her blessing, I wish we'd had a chance to act on it one more time before you leave. I don't know how I'm gonna handle you being gone again."

His expression turned shifty – not that anyone but me would notice, but I knew my angel pretty well by now, and I'd promised myself I wouldn't miss any more of his subtle cues. "What?" I asked, trying not to sound too accusatory.

He went from shiftiness to outright panic, and I had to reach up the hand that wasn't clinging to his to pull his bottom lip out from between his teeth.

"C'mon, Cas. We're headin' into a Boss Battle in a few minutes, so whatever it is, it can't be that bad by comparison, right?"

"It seemed like an innocent idea at the time, but now that I am faced with telling you about it, I am having doubts. I do not want to hurt you right before we part."

My face went still, but inside I nursed a tiny, vicious relief. At least I wasn't doing all the screwing up in this relationship. Anything he'd managed to do in the few hours during the night when he was alone with Castiel couldn't … compare to … wait a second…

I don't think my face changed, but he must have caught something, because a hurried explanation spilled from his lips. "This Castiel asked about our lady and her blessing, as it was the only discernable difference between our vessels, even though you really have to look closely to notice it."

I could picture it: the two of them as we'd left them when we'd all gone to bed last night, sitting close beside each other on the bench in the main room, knees touching, identical heads turned down and tilted at the same angle, dark tumbled hair catching the weak light. I figured I knew where this was going – and I was far more okay with it than I probably should be – but the asshole in me wanted him to squirm a bit longer.

"Well, he asked how it felt. The act of it, I mean. He has experienced a range of emotions, thanks to our transference, but he understands that modern humans prefer to be private about their sexual experiences, so he has avoided going over my memories of our intimate encounters."

Cas paused to gauge my reaction, but I bit down hard on the inside of my cheek, struggling to keep my face a blank. Encouraged by my lack of a negative reaction at the very least, he soldiered on.

"When I could not adequately convey the sensations in words, he asked to witness the act. I objected to waking you, as humans require uninterrupted sleep to function, but he said my own reactions would be sufficient. You and I had just had that discussion regarding the absurdity of jealousy in this context, so I convinced myself that you would not object. We exited the Bunker, so that we did not wake anyone-"

Mmmm, that did it. I couldn't hold back my grin any longer. Since his lady had come through for me, we'd discovered that Cas, like Dumbledore when the Aurors tried to arrest him, was not inclined to come quietly.

"He said it … was … fascinating …" Cas trailed off, frowned, then gave me a suspicious squint as the edges of my arousal got transmitted as a prayer, hard as I tried to throttle it back. "You are not upset with me." The squint widened in shock. "You are enjoying the thought of he and I…"

I tensed my right thigh muscle as hard as I could, trying to redirect blood. Now was definitely not the time, what with everyone standing in an awkward knot as far from us as they could get and still be inside the Bunker's wards, waiting for us to finish up so that we could all go and face down Lucifer.

Castiel glanced over from his conversation with Sam and both Gabriels, as if he felt me looking. And then he smirked at me. Actually smirked. If Cas could sense my distraction, then that meant he could, as well. Oooh, that sneaky bastard!

I turned back to Cas. "Are we sure he's only gettin' transference from you? Because that move was straight outta the Dean Winchester Playbook. He finessed you like a Fender Stratocaster."

"This isn't funny, Dean," he said, needled into using a contraction, frown growing proportionately to my grin. "We do not have time to consider the implications of it right now, but it could be very serious."

He was right, of course, but that didn't keep me from laughing. "We can deal with it later, Cas. When you get back." I didn't say if. I refused to acknowledge the possibility of if.

That seemed to remind him we were supposed to be saying goodbye, and he re-tightened his grip on my hand. "Goodbye, Dean. Don't. Die." It was a fierce whisper but also a command. He kissed me hard, took two steps backward out of the wards, and vanished, leaving my hand clinging to open air.

"Finally," drawled our Gabriel, striding over and giving me a hard slap on the back. "Don't get me wrong, Dean-O, I'm glad the two of you finally pulled collective heads out of collective behinds and admitted you were pining for each other, but you have to admit you used to get shit done a lot quicker before."

"So," declaimed Jack, clapping his hands and then rubbing them together in apparent relish, "are we ready to get this show on the road?"

When we'd arrived at his chosen battlefield, a little league baseball diamond in what used to be a park, he'd arranged us in a defensive V with himself at the apex: home plate. Sam and I were on either side of him, Sam flanked by both Gabriels and me with the angel that only looked like mine at my left.

Mom and Bobby were past Castiel on my side of the V. The Harvelles had opted not to be part of the confrontation, but they were armed with some of Bobby's anti-angel equipment and were prepared to provide backup from the shelter of a hastily warded defunct snack bar not too far off.

I gave Castiel a quick glance to see if he'd object to Jack's idiom, but he shrugged it off. There hadn't been time on the walk over for the chat I'd wanted concerning his actions the previous evening, but I'd managed to warn him about taking stupid risks just because he now knew where he'd go if he died. His grace was tied to Cas's, and I wasn't going to let either of them be dragged to a different plane just because this Castiel was Borg-infected with Winchester-confidence.

"Ready as we'll ever be," this world's Gabriel said, nervousness bleeding through his carefree façade. "Let's have a big ol' family reunion."

Jack shook his head, favoring me with a bright smile. "He may be my father, but he ain't my daddy," he quoted, and I swear I almost cried. While I was still trying to figure out how to respond, he whipped the amulet off and shoved it into his pocket.

We all had just enough time to take a collective deep breath, and then a tornado-swirl of dirt coalesced on the pitcher's mound with a sudden roar, making our ears pop, and then Lucifer was there, still wearing the widower from Delaware that he fell back on every time he got booted from any attempted upgrades.

Nothing jumped us from behind, so it seemed safe to assume that our angels had successfully predicted Lucifer's prejudices. Or he could just be having them wait and take us off guard. No way to tell, with him.

His face was more serious than I'd ever seen it, and he only had eyes for Jack. "Hiya, kid," he rasped after a full minute. "Looks like I missed a lot." He finally spared the rest of us a glance, if only to include us in his punchline. "They grow up so fast, don't they?"

We'd all agreed to follow Jack's lead on this, so when he remained silent, the rest of us did, too. Lucifer didn't seem to mind, shrugging dismissively and stalking to Bobby's end of the line to face him and Mary. "I knew they'd be back for you," he told her. "Only reason why I didn't order my minions to overrun your stupid Haven months ago."

Her only response was a sweet smile.

He sauntered a few steps further into the V, pausing again in front of Castiel and me. "Well, well, well. I'm pretty sure I killed ours the last time we met – sorry, Dean, you know how I hate being thwarted – so that must mean you've hooked up with this Universe's version of my little brother. You do seem to have a type."

I had to fight back my startle reflex when Castiel reached over and laced his fingers with mine. He gave the analogue of his brother a defiant nod but stayed silent.

I was trying to figure out what the Hell he was thinking, but Lucifer caught his drift first. "Wow, got this one to choose humans over Heaven, too? And you've only been here, what, three days? New record! I'm assuming you convinced Michael to let you be representative here while they're having their big diversion disguised as a meeting upstairs? I'll admit, it's a relief to know the Heavenly Horde isn't lurking behind a cloud somewhere, just waiting to smite me."

So he was admitting to having spies in Michael's camp. And to show that we weren't fooling him either, he gave a casual wave at the distant snack stand as he turned past Jack to Sam and the Gabriels.

"Now this is a surprise, I must say. One Trickster tricked Death, and one pulled from his panic room? I get the best of both worlds!" For the first time, his face showed something other than his usual sadistic glee, and his hands twitched at his sides, as if they wanted to reach out and clasp his brothers by the shoulders.

"I'm really sorry I had to kill you, back in our Universe," he said to both of them, apparently unable to tell which was his. "I wouldn't have done it, but you were picking the wrong side. And now you're doing it again." His burning gaze flicked to Sam and back. "I guess everyone has a type."

Dismissing them, he gave Sam his turn at undivided attention. After a few seconds, he let out a wistful sigh. "What a shame you're so sanctimonious. We could have done great things together."

Sam's face turned red, and the grinding of his teeth was audible, but he managed to keep any snarky rejoinders or Harry Potter references to himself.

"Nothing? Wow, kid, you've got them all trained pretty good." He finally faced Jack, resting his fists on his hips. "What'd you use? Torture? Temptation? I know you're powerful, I felt it the second you came into being, and the second you ripped a hole back through to me, but I'm powerful, too, and even I didn't possess the ability to make any of the present company just Shut. The Fuck. Up."

He blinked, then waved a hand at Castiel. "Excluding him, of course. As far as I can tell from this me's memories, he's always been an exemplary little brother, if annoyingly pro-human. I'd tell him he's free to go, but seeing as he's already been Winchestered, I know he'll just stay anyway."

He stepped closer, raising a hand to cup Jack's cheek. "Which just leaves you. Have you been Winchestered, too? They've taken so much from me. Have they also taken the only thing that's truly mattered since I lost Heaven?"

And here we reached the moment of truth. Where it came down to Nature vs. Nurture, with the fate of the entire multiverse in the balance.

Jack's power flared gold along his skin and gathered in his eyes, glowing hot as he stared up at the being who'd fathered him by giving his mother a death sentence, whose grace had given him life – and a lifetime of bad memories and nightmares. Castiel's hand squeezed mine as the tension pulled everyone's postures as tight as hipster jeans.

Then Jack's hand came up, and pressed Lucifer's harder into his cheek as his eyes slid closed. "Hello, Father," he said hoarsely. "It's nice to meet you at last. My name is Jack."

Anguish settled on Lucifer's features. It was a weird look for him, not one I'd ever seen in all our dealings, even when he'd met his own father and been disappointed by him yet again. "Nice to meet you, too, Jack. At least they taught you manners. What else did you get?"

Jack opened his eyes and let his hand drop, but didn't step away, and Lucifer didn't move. It almost looked like he couldn't.

"Same thing they've been fighting for all along, Father. Free will."

Lucifer let out a Sam-scoff, which briefly fractured my reality. When I'd clawed it all back together again, Lucifer was drawling, "So you're saying that if you wanted, you could join up with me, take on the entire multiverse, and abandon these people," his nose wrinkled in disdain, "to their fates."

Nodding, Jack said, "I could. If I wanted. I don't want."

Now it was Lucifer's turn to drop his hand and take a step back of his own, suddenly put on his guard. "What is it that you do want, then?"

"We'll get to that in a minute. Let's start with what you want."

Lucifer's face went completely blank in shock. He shot the rest of us a quick glance, maybe checking for outraged horror, but when our only reaction was indulgent silence, he focused on his son again.

"No one has ever asked me that before. And I mean, ever."

"So take your time to think about it. Remove taking vengeance on your father's creations from the picture – your only motivation for that was to get his attention, but now you know he's not worth it – what is it that you actually want? Do you really want to rule the multiverse alone? Or have you been at war long enough?"

"I-" He cut himself off, darted a glance at the Gabriels, bit his lip. "I honestly have never thought about it."

I really thought we had him, that it really would be that easy, but then his stance firmed up and his usual expression of haughty scorn returned. "Hang on. I spent millennia plotting vengeance and hating humanity. Thousands of years, locked in a box with nothing to keep me company but my unending rage, and you expect me to, what? Go to yoga, take a few anger management classes, drive you to your soccer games on weekends, blue skies from now on?"

Jack was unmoved. "Don't see why not, if that's what you want. Just let it all go. Not like we're going to force you to keep trying to kick off the end of the world as we know it. Funny you should mention yoga, though; Dean led a yoga class for us just yesterday morning."

"Sure, sure." Lucifer's grin twisted cynically to one side as he flicked a contemptuous glance in my direction. "Dean Fricking Winchester Himself will correct my mountain pose. And then he'll stab me in the back the minute I let my guard down."

"He won't. Because he loves me, and he knows that's not what I want."

Lucifer's face went blank again. This was the longest he'd ever spent in our company where he wasn't absolutely right about the whole back-stabbing thing, so I could understand where he was coming from, but Jack was right, too. I didn't trust Lucifer as far as I could throw him, but I trusted Jack.

"Are you answering the question now? What do you want?"

"I want to get to know my father," Jack said, voice edging into sharpness. "I know you're more than the being you are in the memories you left. That all changed when you decided to make me."

Lucifer wavered – we all saw it – and bit his lip. His eyes flicked to the rest of us, then back to Jack. "I don't play well with others."

Jack snorted a laugh. "Refrain from unnecessary torture or murder, and I think we'll all get on fine. You'd be surprised – or maybe you wouldn't, you've got siblings, too – how often they hurt each other without any evil influences at all."

Despite the drama of the situation, I chanced a glance at Sam. He caught it, and gave me a half-shrug. We'd raised a wise kid, apparently.

"I'm not saying you'll all trust each other right away. That miracle is beyond even my powers. All I'm asking is that we try."

Lucifer's anger reared up again. "And if I fail to measure up? What, you stick me back in the Pit with our Michael and his half-Winchester for another millennium? Not much of a choice. How much of a trial run are you going to grant me, before you inevitably decide I'm not 'good' enough?"

His air quotes were fluid, and socially acceptable, and made the still-healing hole inside me ache the slightest bit. Just a little longer, I told myself, flexing my fingers where they interlocked with the wrong angel's.

He seemed taken aback when Jack laughed again. "You've met the Winchesters, right? You're aware of what family means to them?" He paused, darted a glance at me, straightened his shoulders a bit, and corrected himself. "To us?"

Lucifer swayed a little, apparently wounded at Jack's word choice. Jack jumped at the opening.

"Couldn't this be what you want? To be a family again? You've been on your own, fighting and hating and being angry, for so long, but you remember what it used to be like, don't you? Remember being a part of something bigger than yourself? Isn't that why you made me in the first place?"

The broad shoulders facing me twitched, as if they could already feel a knife sliding between them, and his deceptively smooth voice was rougher than I'd ever heard it. "I made you for me, to try and understand why my father loved humans so much. I never intended to share you."

"That's what love is, Father! I'm not a toy or a tool, I'm a being. I have likes and dislikes, and hopes and dreams, and sharing them with my family is the greatest thing there is, in this or any universe!"

Jack stepped forward, grabbed his father's hand, and clasped it to his heart. "Please. For me, and for yourself. Try it on, see if it fits. If you don't like it, I promise I will find a universe where you can go and be alone. I won't let them put you back in the Pit, but I won't let you destroy everything, either."

Those proud shoulders sagged just a little. "A universe to be alone in? That's just a different kind of prison, isn't it?"

"Those are the options. I don't see any other way that doesn't involve one of us destroying the other, and I really really don't want that."

"But you'll take me with you? Back to our universe?" He bit his lip, cleared his throat, fought to let himself have just a single ray of hope for the first time in eons of darkness, and started again. "While we try?"

Jack beamed, eyes lighting up as he realized his victory. "Yes! I need to repair this one first, but when we leave, you will come, too, one way or another."

"What about this universe's version of me? And of Michael?"

"We will negotiate with Michael for the end of the war here. We're hoping he's more easily convinced than the one on our end."

"You've already met with him, I know you have, and the only reason the Host didn't show when you removed the amulet is because he called a meeting so that they couldn't. What kind of deal did you make with my brother? That's the one thing he didn't reveal to anyone."

"You're lookin' at it," Jack replied with a shrug. "I asked that he and the Host leave us be while we worked it out, seeing as you're ours, and not his, anyway. In return for his noninterference, I promised the end of his war, one way or another."

Lucifer looked thoughtful, then nodded. "Seems about right, for him. And his Lucifer?"

Jack's mouth twisted up on one side. "Have you noticed a drift, maybe, in your disposition, starting when you arrived here? Making you more resigned to war, less angry at well-meaning humans when they cross you?"

Silence, then a slow nod.

"We have some theories about that. After a year here, your grace has probably reached some sort of equilibrium between the two of you. Come back with us, learn what this whole love thing is about, and when you've made enough progress, I'll bring you back, and you can share it with him. Until then, it's probably best he stays where you put him."

Another nod, then he took his hand back and turned to face the rest of us. "Well," he said, giving his hands a brisk clap. "If we're going to do this, I guess I owe several of you some pretty serious apologies."

"Don't say anything you don't mean," Jack said from behind him. "Honesty is the first step if we're all going to work on trusting each other."

Lucifer took a second to think about that, eyes roaming over Sam and me in turn, before quirking his mouth. "Sorry I'm not sorry, I guess, for what I did to you guys. Yet. Give me some time."

I shrugged back. I wasn't sorry, either. There was a long road behind us, and we had a long, long way to go.

He moved over to the Gabriels. "Which one of you is mine?"

Our Gabe glanced at Jack, who gave him an encouraging nod. "You mean, which one of us did you actually physically stab through the chest? That'd be me, then."

Lucifer gave in to the impulse he'd restrained upon arrival, and took his brother by the shoulders. "I am sorry – truly, deeply sorry – for thinking my own revenge was more important than your life. As you've probably noticed, it's something I need to work on. It's like a miracle – a real one, nothing to do with our father – that I've been given this chance to make it up to you. I hope that, in time, you can learn to forgive me."

It was the most baldly honest statement I'd ever heard out of him, assuming he meant it.

Gabriel looked properly shocked. "I'll work on it, too," he managed to respond after a few beats had passed. "I'm still beyond pissed at you, but the place I went, it wasn't so bad-"

He cut himself off with an undignified squawk as Lucifer pulled him into a fierce embrace. Sam and the other Gabriel looked alarmed, but our Gabe just relaxed into it and gave him a few awkward pats on the back. "Yeah, yeah. We'll get there. We're a family, after all."

Lucifer pulled away, and I was startled to see tears on his cheeks. "Thank you."

Then he stiffened. "Family," he murmured to himself, then spun back around to face me. "You," he said, jabbing a finger at my chest. It was a struggle not to flinch, but I held my ground. "How can you be so open to the idea of getting along with me? I took your Castiel from you! Why aren't you trying to murder me where I stand? I mean, the two of you were so co-dependent, how did you even live this long without him?"

I gave him a grin, but I let my eyes show the depth of the hurt he'd done me, the gaping hole he'd ripped in my chest when he'd stabbed Cas through his. Castiel disengaged his fingers from mine, now that the need for the charade was over, and I stood alone and faced Lucifer.

Jack crossed his arms in the background, but didn't try to step in to defuse the situation. This needed to happen.

Lucifer's eyes went wide. "How did you survive that?"

"Love, Lucifer," I told him, trying not to feel too smug. "And the responsibilities that come with it. You'll find out, eventually. Jack will make sure of it."

He looked chastened, another emotion I'd never seen on him, but Jack spoiled the novelty. "Dean," he warned, "honesty, remember?"

I threw my hands up in mock frustration. "Alright, fine. We got him back a few days ago, okay? At the same time we got Gabriel. We busted into another realm, and we all strolled out together. He's babysitting Michael, making sure he holds to his end of our deal, and honestly, I can't wait 'til we sort this out and I can get him back."

Leaning in, I spoke directly into his ear for fullest effect. "And then we're going to shag. Like fuckin' bunnies."

"There might be such a thing as being too honest," he said, pulling away and wrinkling his nose. "But what about all your macho bullshit? Last time we interacted, you were so painfully awkward, I wanted grab you both by the back of the head and smush your faces together."

"Yeah, and then you took him away from me. Kinda put things into perspective. Maybe I should thank you for it." I tried to keep my tone light, but had to finish my sentence through clenched teeth.

"Let's not go crazy. We'll call it an issue and work on it, yeah?" He offered his hand.

I looked at it, callused and in need of moisturizer, and thought of all the things he'd done with it, all the people he'd killed. And then I thought of what I'd done in Hell. My hands weren't any cleaner than his. I took what he was offering and gave it a brisk shake.

My first act of faith in him on our new road together: trusting that he wouldn't use the opportunity to yank me forward and gut me like a fish. He justified it by holding on for the appropriate amount of time, and then disengaging and stepping back. It looked like he knew the extent to which I could be pushed. In our new détente, I'd have to keep reminding myself how expert a manipulator he was.

He turned to Jack for any ideas on what to do next. Jack made a fluid gesture in Sam's direction. Lucifer gave him what were probably supposed to be pleading eyes, but Jack crossed his arms over his chest. "At least say something to him, Father. You did literally torture him to insanity, after all. There's going to be a lot of awkward silences in our future if you don't break the ice now."

Sam's mouth was a thin, pinched line.

Lucifer, to his credit, did not heave a childish sigh. Instead, he squared his shoulders, and stepped closer to Sam, careful not to get too close. He established eye contact, and held it for almost a minute, apparently not wanting to rush into this.

"Like I said, I can't honestly apologize to you, you know I'd only be saying it to make Jack happy, so I'd appreciate the chance to apologize in the future, when I might actually mean it. Can we start with, I promise I won't hurt you any more?"

There was a stretch of silence, but Lucifer was patient for once. He didn't push or prompt, he just waited, until my brother finally forced a breath out through his nose and gave a short nod.

Neither of them offered a handshake, but Jack looked satisfied with the effort on both sides.

"Now that that's settled, what's our next step?" Lucifer asked, turning back to Jack. "You going to keep me on a short leash while you finish your business here?"

"Next step is settling the two armies. Call off your demons. If you want to meet with Michael and have peace talks, I can arrange that. If not, he'll probably get the idea once you vanish off the planet with us and leave Hell locked in a power struggle."

"So, when you say call off my demons, you mean…?"

Jack's brow wrinkled. "I mean call them off, tell them the war's over. What's the confusion here?"

"You're letting me go back to my domain. That's the confusion. You've seen my memories, and I'm guessing the Winchesters have given you the Don't Trust Him talk. How can you just assume I'll ever come back?"

"Well, won't you?"

"Yes! But how can you … Ah." He stopped, and the agitation painting his features vanished in a split second. It would have been disconcerting, but we'd all witnessed his lightning mood shifts before. "This is Step One, is it?"

Jack grinned. "Trust works both ways. You said you're willing to give being a family a try. Until you give me a reason to doubt that, I'm clean-slating you." The grin fell away. "Just know: should you decide to return to your old habits, I can stop you."

"Acknowledged. So I'm free to go? How can I contact you again? I'm assuming you don't want to wander around at full broadcast all the time, which is how I spotted you today."

"You can leave me a message here, I'll check back a few times a day. Let me know what you decide about meeting with Michael. Do you have any terms I can pass along in the meantime?"

Lucifer cupped his hand on Jack's cheek again, then backed away a few steps, until he was outside the V of good guys. "I'm going to need to think about it. This war was supposed to end with one side winning pretty definitively, so I don't think Michael will know what to do right away either. We're re-writing history, here, in more ways than one."

He swept a deep, almost-mocking, bow to everyone, drawled, "See you soon, kid," to Jack, and vanished in a whirl of grit.

The tension lingered for a few more seconds, and everyone eyed the Gabriels sideways. If Lucifer was still hanging around, Gabe would be able to tell.

A few more seconds, and our Gabriel's shoulders sagged as he released a deep breath. "I think we're clear, people. That went well, right? No one got stabbed, anyway."

This world's Gabriel had gone dangerously still, however. "And just when was anyone going to tell me about the shared-grace thing, huh?"

A stab of apprehension shot down my back as everyone froze. Shit, busted.

Sam started stammering an excuse, but Alt-Gabriel broke and grinned. "Man, I had you going for a second there. Did you think I couldn't tell?" He turned back to our Gabriel and quirked a corner of his mouth up. "You show up, ask me to join you, I say thanks but no thanks, and then the next day my feelings go through a one-eighty? Yeah, I've been the Trickster too long to not notice something like that."

Our Gabriel still looked unsure. "And you're okay with it? We just figured it out ourselves yesterday, if that helps."

"Honestly, Cassie here makes it really obvious to anyone actually looking. Especially when you put two of him in the same room. I've known my little brother a long time, and I know he was built to question, but he's never been this far along before."

He stepped up to Castiel, and wiggled his fingers at him. "It almost feels like you Fell, little brother, but you still have your wings and your grace. Last time I checked in, you were still following orders, and angels don't change overnight." He turned his golden eyes toward me. "Not without help, anyway."

The stab of apprehension came back, stronger this time, as Gabriel continued to frown at me.

Castiel stepped sideways to get between us, holding his hands up. "Please, Gabriel, do not blame them. They could not have known, and it cannot be helped anyway. I, for one, am not sorry about any of it."

"You wouldn't be," his Gabriel replied, "because they brainwashed you just by showing up! Me, I feel like I haven't changed that much. Other Me, he's basically the same guy, but he made a choice instead of sitting on it, and then he was dead for a bit. But you…"

He grabbed Castiel by the shoulders. "Can you remember what you were like even just last week? Can you remember that you were, if not happy, at least content with your existence? They've ruined that for you! There's no going back to that, even after they take their ball and go home!"

Castiel's eyes started to do that storm-cloud thing again. "Last week I was blind. Unaware that anything else was even possible. Unaware that Father is still out there, that he wants this for me. Would you have me remain a foot-soldier forever, when I am capable of so much more?"

Gabriel threw his hands up. "But why are you compelled to do 'so much more'? Why you?"

"Who else is there, brother? You said you knew I was built to question. Are there others like me, who should take up this burden in my place?" When Gabriel bit his lip and looked away, he continued, "I did not think so. This is my purpose! The other me, Dean's Cas, he Fell, because he believed. Can I do any less?"

Gabriel looked inclined to argue further, and we were starting to get some strange swirling winds whipping around the erstwhile field as the argument got more heated, but a warm wave of power rolled over us, and we all turned to look at Jack.

"I have our Castiel's memories – which means I have yours, as well, up to a point – and while I admit there's a lot I haven't gone through in depth yet, I don't remember being all that close with Gabriel. No offense," he added. Both Gabriels returned dismissive shrugs. "So why are you so upset about the choices he's making?"

The Gabriels turned to each other with mirrored quizzical expressions, while Bill and Ellen climbed out of the snack stand and joined us. Mom and Bobby caught them up in hurried murmurs.

"Oh," said our Gabriel after a minute of the pair of them making thoughtful faces at each other. "Looks like that baggage came in with me. Sorry." He faced Castiel. "Apparently there's a lot I left unsaid with my own little brother. This shared grace is tricky business."

He turned back to the group, spreading his hands. "Can we get him back, then? Dean? I know you're in."

Castiel's assessment of his oldest brother's good intentions turned out to be accurate. Jack put his amulet back on, and Cas reappeared at my side within minutes, looking a bit haunted.

"That was … uncomfortable," he said into the expectant silence. He turned to Castiel and pressed two fingers to his forehead. "Here is what I have witnessed. You should return before you are missed. The others will tell me about what has passed here. Report back to us when it seems safe."

Castiel vanished, wide-eyed, and Cas faced the group. I laced my fingers into his, flooded with sweet relief at his safe return as he told his story.

"I was standing with my garrison when Michael called the meeting to order and began speaking to us about a new development in the war. Then, we all felt it when Jack removed the amulet, and the meeting almost fell apart in a panic, but Michael shouted them down and made them pay attention.

"He explained about multiverses, about how this version of Lucifer did not belong here, and about how the Nephilim we were sensing had volunteered to assist. He left out who had fathered Jack, and that any other beings had come with him.

"They took to the idea of alternate worlds better than I had expected, but there seemed to be some resistance to working with a half-human. Everyone was shocked when he said he had already met with Jack, and that he anticipated a speedy resolution. The great hall filled with whispers, and he let them go on for a while. I spent most of that time avoiding Ishim's eyes.

"And then Jack's power went away, and everyone stopped talking, and looked some combination of angry and frightened. I am certain a vast majority of them had never experienced either of those emotions before.

"Michael actually looked smug. Into the new silence, he added that he would send updates through the garrison commanders, and by the way, please keep an eye on your fellows for possible treason, as he knows that Lucifer was released by some being or beings in the room at that moment. And then he dismissed us and left the dais while everyone was still stunned into immobility.

"I was concerned that I would need to remain, as departing at that point would have aroused suspicion, but all the garrison commanders unanimously decided to have a meeting of their own and told us we were free to go."

"Well, that's set the fox in the henhouse," growled Bobby. "Helluva way to break the news. What's he tryin' to accomplish?"

Our Gabriel looked almost awed. "Holy crows, he's tearing up the script! He has faith in Jack, so the war's already over for him."

Alt-Gabe was nodding. "Next step will be cleaning house. He'll want to ferret out the traitors before their lord abdicates, just in case y'all pull a reversal and release our Lucy when you go. No need to leave him a standing army."

"How can he have so much faith in me, and so little in the rest of you?" asked Jack, forehead wrinkling.

"You said the magic words, back at your summit," said our Gabriel. "You reminded him of the old days, and there's only a handful of creatures who know what it used to be like." He glanced at Cas. "And the version of Cassie here has probably never disobeyed an order in his entire existence, so Michael had no reason to doubt him."

"But the rest of you are unknown quantities," said Alt-Gabe, picking the thread back up. "Michael doesn't know much about deceit, other than that it exists, so he's trying his best to safeguard against it."

The Gabes shrugged at each other. "Plus," said ours, "he probably checked out a bunch of possible future timelines, and maybe y'all let Lucy out in one of them, so he's aware of the option."

Ah, right. The angelic ability for non-linear time. My grip tightened in Cas's, remembering the fading hippie version I'd met when that asshat Zachariah had sent me forward, relishing how many different ways we'd averted that particular situation.

The few times my nightmares didn't involve blood or death or pain, they conjured a human Cas who'd given up on himself, and it made me ache with despair down to the depths of my patched-up soul.

Jack and Cas spared me brief glances as I fought my way back to the present, but didn't comment. Instead, Cas offered his free hand to Jack. "Will you give me the short version of what happened here while I was with the Host?"

"Sure thing," Jack said, grinning, and took Cas's offered hand.

Cas blinked. "Ah," he said after a few seconds. "That seems to have gone well. And you are sure that he means to keep his word?"

Jack shrugged, aware that the rest of the group's attention had sharpened at the question. "He meant it at the time. I still believe that I mean more to him than the war he's been waging, but he does hate you guys, specifically, and you raising me instead of him is going to be a burr under his saddle for a long time."

Bobby looked almost proud of the cowboy metaphor. "We can have this all out back at the Haven. Truce or no truce, I still don't like standin' out in the open like this."

There was a general murmur of agreement, and we all started moving back in the direction of home. I couldn't speak for anyone else, but I felt like a wrung-out dishrag after all the tension of Lucifer's visit, and I was looking forward to a nap, and maybe a drink, before I started feeling human again.

So when a bolt of lightning struck the ground in front of our group and, when we'd blinked away the afterimage seared into our retinas, the figure it had brought turned out to be Michael in his Young John Winchester meat suit, I think I can be excused for groaning, "Oh, for fuck's sake!"

Luckily, he didn't pay me any attention. "What has passed here between you and my younger brother, Nephilim Jack? You have not slain him, I would have felt it."

Jack gave him a disapproving frown, then proceeded to ignore him in favor of turning to Mary and putting his hands on her shoulders. "Are you okay with this? We can talk somewhere else if it's going to bother you."

Mom managed a weak smile. "I'll be fine. Thanks, sweetie. I knew this was a possibility."

Michael's face had darkened when Jack failed to respond to him immediately, but as he studied Mary, it turned thoughtful, then pained. One of his hands twitched.

"You are the human, Mary Campbell?" he asked.

Shocked at being addressed directly, Mom took a second to recover before smiling at the being wearing the man she'd married. "Mary Winchester. Since August 19th, 1975."

Michael's other hand, the one that wasn't twitching, rose up to press at his own temple, but he never took his eyes off of Mary. "I see. That explains his enthusiasm. He says you look just like his Mary, and that you haven't aged a day."

Her smile turned upward in one corner. "Neither has he."

The twitching hand stilled as Michael exerted his will on his vessel. "This is the strongest emotional response I have ever felt from him, and we have not had an easy partnership, he and I."

Give 'em Hell, Dad, I thought, but kept it to myself, nursing a quiet glow of happiness that his soul had been resurrected along with his body before Michael had moved in.

"To answer your question," said Jack, now that he was satisfied that Mary would be fine, "I spoke with my father. He agreed to call the whole thing off, as long as he gets to go with us when we return to our universe."

The eldest archangel's dark eyebrows rose. "That's all? He had no demands to make of me?"

Jack shrugged. "He's just as new to this idea as you. Said he was going to have to think about it."

The brows drew together, and Michael gave a thoughtful nod. "I agree. Did he share with you what he did with our world's Lucifer?" There was an odd mix of hunger and fear in his eyes, and for a second I felt sorry for him, imagining what I would be going through if this were about my younger brother, apparently missing in action and possibly dead for over a year.

Jack grinned. "He's in the Pit, where ours tossed him when he came through. We all agreed it was for the best that he remains there."

"I see."

A range of emotions flashed over Michael's face: relief, annoyance, curiosity. He finally settled on vague indignance. "How did he manage to overpower my brother, if they are the same being at heart?"

"Not quite the same," said Jack. "Yours had never met a Winchester. Angels have to develop an entirely new skill set to deal with us."

Michael's face froze, and though I'd never seen the expression that grew there, I could guess it was one that a person got when someone else was laughing uproariously inside your head.

Apparently deciding to ignore it, he continued, "Well, that explains our Castiel, at least. I've never known him to choose anything over Heaven, until your group arrived here."

"Hey, hey, hang on," I said, drawing his attention for the first time since he'd arrived. "He's not choosin' anything over anything. As I see it, he's doin' you a favor, being a go-between like he is, puttin' himself at risk."

The cool look I got for my efforts rolled right off my hide. His disapproval couldn't hurt me, even if he was wearing my father's face. Cas's hand in mine, and the pleased expression that I could see him wearing out of the corner of my eye, were all that mattered.

The cool look moved on to Cas. "That's one way to look at it, I suppose. I'm going to have to decide what to do with him, once you leave. It's clear he's being wasted as a foot-soldier. Maybe he needs a promotion. It looks like I'll have some spots to fill, after the traitors are rooted out."

He gave the group a final once-over, lingering on Mom the longest, and then vanished with another crack of lightning, without another word.

"Such a drama queen," said Gabriel into the silence. Everyone startled a bit, nerves already on edge, as he and his counterpart popped back into our midst. I hadn't seen them leave, but since Michael hadn't remarked on there being two of them – or even one of them – I assumed they'd made themselves scarce at the instant of his arrival.

"Always has been, even when there was just the four of us," the other Gabriel agreed. For a minute, I couldn't tell which one was ours, but then we all started walking again, and one of them drifted a little closer to Sam without apparently meaning to. Bingo.

Sam gave him an encouraging nod, and he reversed angles and drifted toward Cas and me instead.

"Cassie, it seems we need to talk. Can I borrow you for a bit?"

Things moved fast after that.

Within a day, Lucifer had reported back, claiming he'd called everything off and quelled any dissidents Down Below, and asking for nothing from Michael but eventual forgiveness for both himself and his double.

Michael – by way of Castiel, as he was far too busy with his internal affairs to come and see us himself – agreed, and granted him the possibility of it. I was there when Jack told Lucifer the news. I'd never seen such a look of soft pleasure on his face when there wasn't any blood or torture involved.

The day after that, Castiel showed back up at the Haven and requested Sam. Michael had promoted him after all; he was in charge of the angels assisting with Jack's grand recovery effort. All hand-picked for the project, he told us, but we all knew he meant, all cleared by Michael as not secretly working for Lucifer.

Sam was delighted, having taken a few trips with Gabriel to test his theories at elevations previously only available to scientists through weather balloons and remotely piloted submersibles, and began trying to explain to the Host about air currents and the Coriolis effect and -

Castiel stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. "They just need orders, please, Sam. Tell them what to do, and they will do it. They need structure, after the doubts and betrayals they have been through."

Sam took a second to look like Christmas had been cancelled, but swallowed it and switched into what I liked to call Leader Mode. Digging a tabletop globe out from Bobby's storage room, he broke down directions, elevations, and speeds, advising maximum surface area for increased drag.

I lost interest when he was tasking yet another group with seeding the atmosphere with moisture, and wandered off to help Bobby with making more bullets for the Colt. He was holding on to his wary edge around us, but I knew we'd wear him down eventually.

Bill and Ellen took off again, now that all the action had cooled down. They said they wanted to spread the word about the end of the war, and maybe that was true, but mostly I think they'd gotten used to the world having fewer people in it, and we were just a few too many for them to be comfortable hanging around with. She promised to make Jack that cake next time they were in town.

Jack pulled me aside to ask if he could spend some solo time with his father. I gave him my manliest hug, told him I trusted him, and let him go.

I heard a flutter as he walked away but didn't turn my head. Cas had been delighting in the return of his wings, using them at every opportunity, and taking a perverse pleasure in startling me. It made me remember how it used to be, back before the end of the world (the first time), when he'd pop up behind me and act all confused when I shouted at him.

It was a lot more adorable these days, and there was almost no shouting.

"I have been thinking further about the shared grace issue," he said, wrapping his arms around my middle and resting his chin on my shoulder. His exhalation on my neck and the tickling vibration of his growl in my ear made it extremely difficult to focus on what he was saying, but I put in the effort.

"Oh? Thought we'd got that all sorted."

"The basics between those of us in multiple universes, yes, but there is still you, who share my grace to some extent, and Jack, who received a portion of Lucifer's at the moment of his conception. I am not overly concerned about transference between us, but I am wondering if Jack and Lucifer can affect each other."

"Hmm," I murmured, settling back against the solid wall of his chest. "That does seem worth thinking about."

"I have to hope that if a link does exist, it does not work quite the same way. If so, Jack is being pulled toward both Lucifers here at once. I know you brought him up and taught him well, but would that be sufficient?"

I thought about getting worried, but decided not to. "He's a solid kid. He had some problems with nightmares during his first year, but he always came back to me."

Cas was watching Jack's distant back as it got farther away. "If he does turn, we will not be able to stop him. We could not stop Lucifer even before he conceived a son, and if Jack joins him-"

"Not gonna happen, angel. He's got you in his head, too, remember?"

Cas's frown pressed into my cheek. "I have acquiesced to Lucifer in the past. I fail to see how my presence can affect that decision positively."

It was my turn to frown, and I turned my angel to face me. Since he'd made his choice to return with us, I hadn't seen much of the hopeless, lonely creature he'd become in his Lady's realm, but every so often I got reminders like this. Reminders I would have missed or ignored, once, but no more.

"Hey, none of that, now. You said yes to him because you thought it was literally your only choice to save the entirety of existence."

His eyes avoided mine, so I grabbed his chin. "Hey. No one blames you for it. We were out of ideas but didn't want to admit it, so you did what had to be done." I shook his face. Not gently, either. "Like you always do. In all the time I've known you, you've never done anything you didn't believe in, no matter how hard it was. With right on your side, I'd put your will up against a hundred Lucifers."

Those eyes were now suspiciously watery as they looked into mine, which weren't much better. He really did break my heart sometimes.

"I know no one's ever said it, so thank you. For all the hard choices you had to make." I let his chin go in favor of putting my palms on his cheeks and holding his face still. "I meant what I said when I asked you to come home. You are worth so much to me, to everyone, and one day you'll be able to acknowledge that to yourself."

A single tear spilled down over one of my hands, and his whole frame trembled in my grip, but I didn't let go. I'd volunteered for this fight, and the hell if I was backing down.

"Speakin' from experience, here, I know what is to feel like you failed everyone. I'm still workin' on being okay with myself. You choosing to come home, with me, that was a huge step toward making me feel like I was worth somethin'. That someone like you, who only does what he feels is right, chose me, the hopelessly guilt-ridden screw-up."

He took in a shaky breath, let it out slow, and then leaned forward to press his face into my chest. I carded my fingers through his hair and rubbed circles on his back. "I know it's not something you can accept overnight, but I'll never stop telling you, and some day, you might even believe me."

He turned his head to the side so he could speak without eating my shirt. "I came out here to speak of you," he said, half-laughing, half-sobbing. "I had not intended to bring up any of this, and now I am finding it difficult to stop … leaking."

"Welcome to the Wonderful World of Neuroses," I told him. "Or did you think your lady only gifted you with the positive stuff?"

He shook his head, smearing more fluids on my shirt. "If her original gift was empathy, then she would want me to have the full experience."

I nodded, feeling unaccountably wise. "She gave you the capacity for sadness, so that you could also enjoy happiness. I'm sure there's some proverb somewhere that sums it up, but you get the gist."

We leaned on each other for a little longer, steadying our breathing, as Jack vanished into the distance.

"Dude. We need so much therapy."

He snorted a laugh. "As would any therapist who consented to see us."

We ended up hanging out in the Alt World for about six more months while Sam and Jack directed the Host and tried to save everything. Once they brought back the sun, and got regular weather patterns re-established, Sam had some concerns about mass extinctions – pollinators in particular – but Jack smiled and told him he could handle it.

He and Sam would choose a place where there'd been "a high concentration of biodiversity" or whatever, and then one of the angels would fly him there. I tagged along a few times – Cas claimed that the process was a spiritual experience for those who could witness it on all the levels, but I had normal eyes and it looked cool as heck to me.

Sam and our Gabriel came to watch as well, when Jack said he was ready to do a rainforest. Apparently, he'd been working his way up to it, to be sure he could do it right.

Our feet settled in the ashy remnants of a once-proud forest, the last few months of regular rain already calling forth little tendrils of green from the blasted earth. Jack settled cross-legged in a clear space, and the rest of us moved several hundred feet away.

It started slow. Jack removed his amulet and closed his eyes, open palms face-up and loose on his knees, and for a few minutes, nothing happened. Then we all felt a sort of tremble through the soles of our feet, as if the earth itself was doing a nice slow stretch after a long snooze.

Then came the cool part. Jack's skin lit up from within, casting golden shadows on all the broken stumps and scuffed dirt. Everything touched by his light soaked it in, bathed in it, until even the greyest and most dead-looking husks were glowing in their own right, tinged green now. The greenish glow spread in a widening ring, startling us as it passed us by and kept going.

"He must be getting stronger," I murmured to Sam. "Last week, this was a safe distance."

Sam nodded. "There's a whole lot more to work with here than in the middle of a cornfield," he whispered back. Neither of us wanted to break the awed silence that hung over everything.

Jack's glow intensified, and little pinpricks of red light began to dot the area in irregular clusters. I gave myself a swift once-over to make sure none had showed up on my own skin, but the humans and human-shaped creatures all looked clear. Satisfied, I lost myself in the beauty of the scene, bathing in the glow a little myself. It kind of felt like Cas to me, and my soul resonated with it like a struck bell.

He kept it up for a few full minutes, and several more colors bled into the mix of lights, forming shapes and breaking apart, dancing with each other. Streaks of cool green shot into the air and blossomed like fireworks high overhead, weaving their way back to the ground in intricate patterns.

The air grew busy and warm, full of joyful whispers and chirps as pink and blue shapes swung and flitted and slithered in all directions. Even the earth was active, churning gently and glittering silver beneath our feet.

On a tangible level, the tender green shoots I'd noticed when we'd landed looked stronger, healthier, and the burned stumps had lost their greyish tinge. Even the soil looked richer.

Eventually we all saw his distant shoulders slump, and the glow faded, sinking into the ground and vanishing. I knelt and slid my fingers into the loose dirt, feeling a lingering warmth and sending up miniscule sparks of gold. Sam put his hand on a tree that had broken off at head-height and received the same result.

We all let out a collective breath, a silent wow, and jogged back to Jack's side.

"That was amazing, kid. You okay?" I asked when I was close enough to be heard without shouting. Not being a Nephilim, I had no concept of what all this was costing him, but he never did anything halfway. He'd probably give up his last spark if it meant saving this world.

He lifted his head like it was heavier than usual and gave us all a dreamy smile. "That was awesome!"

Cas and Gabriel situated themselves on either side of him and hoisted him to his feet, supporting him as he swayed a bit. I shot Cas a raised eyebrow, but he gave me a quick smile and nod in return, so I wasn't too concerned.

That all changed when Lucifer popped up behind him. Then I got concerned real quick. Even the soft look of awe on his face didn't put me at ease.

He put a hand on Jack's shoulder. Cas let go as Jack swung around, though Gabriel held on, giving Jack a shoulder to lean on as he faced his father.

"What did I just watch, here?" Lucifer asked, ignoring everyone else as usual. "I've never felt anything like it."

Jack's smile was a little guarded, but it was still warm and welcoming. They'd been spending a few hours together at least twice a week for the past several months, and Jack implied that some progress was being made.

"You came!" he said now.

"Yeah, well, this one was kind of hard not to notice. You've been all over the map lately, but those were peanuts compared to whatever just went down. I'm honestly impressed you don't have angels raining down on your butt right this second."

Jack laughed. "I'm sanctioned by Michael himself to do whatever I want, as long as it's for the greater good. And this," he waved the arm that wasn't wrapped around Gabe's shoulders in an encompassing gesture that took in the healthier landscape, "is just setting some guidelines for what's to come."

Lucifer's forehead crinkled in confusion. "Care to explain further?"

We all glanced at Sam, who usually started spouting off about biomes and microbes at this point, but Sam shook his head. "I know the science, and the desired outcome here, but what Jack did? That's outside my ability to explain."

It was the politest thing he'd managed to say to Lucifer so far, and Jack glowed at him, not having replaced his amulet yet.

"A lot of things died out when the war blasted the earth," Jack told Lucifer. "We can get the plants to grow again, but without the birds and the bees and things, this world will never be able to support any sort of animal population. All I'm doing is donating some energy to pull the pollinators – and everything else – back from the beyond."

Lucifer gave our mostly barren surroundings a pointed glance before raising his eyebrows at his son.

Jack shrugged. "It's on a timer. For instance, there's no good in pulling back the populations of howler monkeys when there's no trees for them to hang out in; they'd all get eaten by leopards. It's going to take several hundred years for this place to even get enough of a canopy to get the right amount of rain. All I can do is lay out the road map. As you are probably aware, my grandfather reserved the power of actual creation for himself."

The wicked grin we'd all come to dread in another lifetime reappeared on Lucifer's face. "Oh, I don't know about all that. Us first-born have a few tricks up our sleeves. Right, Trickster?"

Gabriel grinned back. He and his doppelgänger had both done their own visiting with Lucifer over the past few months, re-establishing the age-old bond that Lucifer had shattered when he chose to Fall. Alt-Gabriel said he figured it counted for his as well, stuck in the Pit but still able to feel the transference.

Now it was Jack's turn to frown in confusion. "I know you made me, but I thought he was pretty clear on the whole 'Only I can bring light' schtick."

"Light to the Darkness, yes." Lucifer spared a glance at Cas, who had tensed up at the reference, before looking back at Jack. "But that bit's already done. Any fool can follow a road map. Care to assist, brother?"

"Are you calling me a fool?" Gabe said, but his grin had widened. He gently unwrapped Jack's arm from his shoulders and passed him to Cas before cracking his knuckles and stretching his arms above his head. He jogged from foot to foot a few times, took in a deep breath, and we all heard the fluttering of great wings as he rolled his shoulders and cracked his neck.

"Alright, let's do this."

Sam bit his lip against a token protest and moved with the rest of us to a safer distance as the two archangels knelt and threaded long, agile fingers into the dirt Jack had so recently reanimated.

The Nephilim himself seemed to be recovering nicely, keeping a hand on Cas's shoulder to steady himself as he leaned forward, trying to see.

"On three?" Lucifer asked.

Gabriel nodded. "Try not to strain anything, old man."

Lucifer counted off as we watched, frozen in anticipation, and when he hit three, light burst from both sets of eyes and lit up under their skin like beacons. Spending time with angels, getting to know them as personalities, it was easy to forget that they were so much more than humans, compressed and stuffed into tiny packages.

The light flowed into the ground, streaming past us even more smoothly than Jack's ring had. Both archangels had their heads thrown back in what looked like ecstasy as the ground trembled, then shook, then vanished beneath our feet.

Shocked, it took me a few beats to figure out that Cas had managed to grab ahold of all three of us non-winged spectators and lift us into the air, and not a moment too soon.

The earth split in hundreds of places, shoots stabbing into the air, twisting and darkening as they solidified into bark-covered trunks that swelled in height and girth, splitting and branching as they raced up toward our dangling feet. The ground came alive, green and grey and brown and gold almost to the horizon in all directions.

I shifted in Cas's iron grip, trying to find a position that would both let me see what was happening below us and shift Sam's bony elbow away from where it was digging into my ribs. Cas made a displeased noise and squished us harder. Jack was nearly as tall as me by this point, so it's not like we were small men that he was dangling aloft at dangerous heights.

And then there was another set of wingbeats close by, barely audible over the creaking and groaning from below, and another set of hands was extracting me.

"What-? Oh, hey! Thanks."

Sam and Jack glanced away from the spectacle to nod at the newcomer as Cas re-arranged them more comfortably, and Castiel smiled back at us all, an arm wrapped around my waist as he hovered in place beside his double.

"Hello, Winchesters. Michael sent me to see what was occurring here."

"I am surprised he did not come himself," Cas replied, a little more sharply than was warranted. "It is not like he could fail to distinguish Lucifer's energy, even from his distance."

Castiel's face went blank, and I could tell he was wondering again how he had managed to offend. "Yes, and Gabriel's as well. He instructed me to observe and report, but not to get involved. He is very busy. Surely you remember what it took to run Heaven?"

Cas looked stricken, and we three cargo-packages winced as the tension ratcheted up as fast as the new trees. I remembered how much of Cas's time had been consumed when he'd been in charge, how little we'd seen of him, and how ragged he looked when he did manage to make time for us.

"Samwich, I set up the microclimate patterns under the canopy, like you-"

Gabriel cut himself off mid-sentence, a unique occurrence, after popping up in our midst. "Yikes," he added, taking in the atmosphere. It was getting humid above the trees as they started doing their thing, but the storm clouds that were gathering were a bit premature, no matter what miracle the archangels had worked.

"Anyway, Lucifer says y'all can come back down, the dramatic bit's done. We've got to work out the river situation, but other than that, this area should be marked on the map as 'restored.'"

I blinked, and there was suddenly solid ground beneath my feet again. Castiel released me and put space between us as Cas and Gabe also hit the ground between one second and the next. He learned fast.

Gabriel smashed the awkward silence to pieces by slinging an arm over the shoulders of both versions of his little brother. "Can't you boys just kiss and make up? You're not so different, you know, and the longer we stay, the less different you get."

Cas shrugged a little and attempted a smile. It fell a little short, but the effort was noted. "I think that makes it worse, Gabriel," he said. "It was easier when he was less like me."

Ah, so it was a self-loathing issue. Those were tricky, especially when his self was in two bodies and he could loathe them both at the same time.

I was wondering if either of them were going to address the "kiss and" part of Gabriel's little speech when Lucifer chimed in again. "I'm glad we're all so self-aware, but can we skip the group therapy session? Exploring feelings wasn't on my to-do list today. He should report back before we're all pre-emptively smited."

Jack shot him a quelling look, but reluctantly agreed. "I feel bad saying it, but we can talk this through later. You probably need to report to Michael, the sooner the better, that Lucifer isn't rolling out some grand new plan, with Gabriel's compliance."

Castiel nodded, but before he could vanish, Cas reached out and snagged his sleeve. "I apologize," he rumbled. "You are not responsible for my issues, and I should not be taking them out on you."

The other angel blinked in surprise. "Thank you," he replied. "We can discuss this further another time, but Lucifer is correct. I must go."

Cas released him, and then he was gone.

"Look at us, learning and growing," drawled Gabriel, smiling. "When's the last time we said 'Lucifer is correct' when the world wasn't ending?"

Lucifer looked ready to object, then paused, considered it, and shrugged it off.

"Speaking of growing…" Sam said, and trailed off as we all took in our new surroundings. Trunks wider than I could reach around, covered in shaggy bark and draped with moss, towered overhead and split into spreading canopies that filtered the sun into a murky green haze.

The air was damp and rich in my lungs, but the silence seemed unnatural. I'd never been to a rainforest before, but even I could sense, on some instinctual level, that the setting deserved a backdrop of riotous birdsong, which was conspicuous in its absence.

Jack glowed again, happiness radiating from him along with his light. "This is amazing, you guys! Growth like this will get the daily rainfall pattern established in weeks! We could start seeing some animal life-"

He broke off as the little red dots we'd seen in his light show reappeared along the bark of the nearest tree with a multitude of tiny popping noises. The dots swelled, solidified, and then cracked open, each containing an insect of some sort.

For a minute, nothing moved, but then they seemed to get their bearings, and the winged ones exploded off the tree and headed in all directions, while the non-winged ones scattered along the bark, getting down to the business of insect things after their extended stay in wherever bugs went when they died.

"…almost immediately! Yes!" Jack pumped a triumphant fist in the air while dancing in a circle. The rest of us watched him fondly, content to let him have his moment, until more red dots popped up on the rest of the trees as well. The small noises added together rolled like thunder through the forest.

"Um. We should go," I said. "It's about to get seriously creepy-crawly up in here."

There was a lot of vigorous nodding from everyone besides Jack, who pouted just the slightest, and then each angel grabbed an earthbound soul and in another blink we were all back at the little league field where we'd held our first summit with Lucifer.

Jack's pout melted back into a sunny smile. "Birds and bats will come next. I'm so glad I got to see it! I thought I'd be long gone by the time the first creatures chose to return."

We all exchanged confused glances, even Lucifer, but Sam was the one that voiced our single thought. "Chose?"

"Well, yeah," said Jack with a shrug. "Even I can't yank things back through the veil once they've crossed it. My power is just poking holes between dimensions, or I would've gotten Cas back a year ago. All I did was open some doors – well, a lot of doors – and offer them the chance to come back if they wanted."

More skeptical looks were shared, and this time Gabriel led with, "So you spoke to the bugs and the microbes and the fungi? And asked them if they wanted to leave their Afterlife?"

Jack shrugged and tried for modesty. "It sounds more complicated than it is, even with the higher life forms. You guys chose, too, when you all came here that first time."

"So your whole repopulation plan is based off of everything that used to live on this planet going 'oooh, shiny'?" Lucifer asked incredulously. "No offense meant, humans. I fell for it, too, that first time."

"Most Afterlives seem pretty monotonous," Jack said. "Even the complex ones."

The three angels exchanged glances that excluded me and Sam, then nodded their agreement.

"That was the main reason I left in the first place," Gabriel said. "Family politics aside, Heaven can get pretty boring. I'm sure present company can agree, if their actions in the past are any indication."

We all took a beat to recall Cas's and Lucifer's pasts, and everything both of them had done to avoid playing the dutiful soldier for even one second longer.

"But we're capable of higher thought," objected Cas, when he was done getting weirded out by being in the same boat as Lucifer for any reason. "What would make a single-celled organism desire anything other than boredom? Why would they risk it?"

"I may have strongly implied that the grass was greener – or whatever their equivalent was – on this side of the door," Jack admitted, looking a little sheepish. "It's not technically a lie. The grass in Reality is definitely, tangibly, greener than the dream-stuff in Bug Heaven. They just probably would never have noticed the difference on their own."

Lucifer looked south, as if he could see the forest they'd created from our distant vantage. "You've made them a Paradise here on earth. They just don't know it yet. All that virgin, unclaimed territory? If bugs had an oral history, they'd sing your praises for centuries to come."

"We'll be finding your image on every tree, like a dude version of the Virgin Mary on toast," added Gabe. "I'm assuming you offered the plants the same deal as the bugs? But they get to be the greener grass?"

Jack's eyes got dreamy. "Plant Heaven was nice. I might go back just to visit when all of this is over. I couldn't see much, from this side, but it smelled amazing."

"Maybe a date might like it," I said, nudging him with an elbow. I received my desired result: his cheeks pinkened like ripening tomatoes. I didn't want to use Claire's name; I wasn't sure if Jack trusted his father enough to share that with him quite yet.

Gabriel opened his mouth to add something to that, but instead the leer dropped off his face. "Oh, fuck," he groaned instead.

We only had a half-second to blink at him in confusion – Gabriel generally believed that cursing was beneath him – before there was a rustling of wings, and an Amazonian woman wearing leather armor and an expression of extreme distaste stood before our group.

Lucifer looked unperturbed while Gabriel aimed for nonchalance, but Cas's eyes widened in recognition. He tugged me behind him, mouth set in a hard line.

The silence stretched as they stared at each other. None of the angels seemed to want to be the first to speak. Once, I might have interrupted their pissing contest with some sarcastic remark, but I'd learned to not go looking for trouble. Well, not every time, anyway. Like Sam and Jack, I waited and watched. The newcomer was nice to look at, but anyone that made Cas react like that probably wouldn't take well to me commenting on that fact.

Gabriel broke first, but he did it with style. First an eyeroll that would have detached any mortal retina, accompanied by a gusty sigh that would do any teenager proud, followed by an equally teenaged tone of utter disdain. "Raphael. To what do we owe the dubious pleasure?"

The bronzed Amazon sneered at him. "Even that is stretching it a bit. I have no idea why Michael is letting you and your band of mongrels run around doing whatever you want."

Raphael was very carefully looking only at Gabriel, with occasional glances flicked at Cas. She gave the impression that while she acknowledged the existence of the others in physical proximity to her, we were all beneath her notice. Even her older brother.

Which, of course, Lucifer couldn't allow. "Hey, little sister! Nice vessel!" He made a gesture, as if to lay a hand on Raphael's shoulder, but she hissed at him, whipping into a defensive position, and he backed off, grinning. He'd gotten her to acknowledge him, at least.

"You are no brother of mine! None of you are." The bold features on her dark face contorted with un-angel-like rage. "You are all … invaders. Interfering meddlers from an inferior version of reality, subverting Father's plan with your mere presence here."

Both of her archangel brothers opened their mouths, but she steamrolled onward, hitting her stride. "We were doing fine! We were winning the war! There was no need for Michael to allow that," she waved a hand at Jack without looking at him, "that … abomination to make peace."

She jabbed an elegant finger into Lucifer's chest, and her tone was one that people usually reserve for something found on the bottom of their shoe. "Peace! With you!"

For Lucifer's part, he seemed amused, as if a small dog were nipping at his ankles. "Middle child syndrome," he said to Gabriel, shaking his head in mock sadness. "Textbook case. Sad, really."

Raphael balled her fists at her sides and let out a scream of frustration. Lightning arced off of her hands, blasting tiny craters in the ground beside her feet. She didn't seem to have done it on purpose.

"Look, our timelines diverged a few blinks of an eye ago, sis," said Gabriel. "Do the millennia we shared count for nothing? I've met your Gabriel. I'm him and he's me, down to the last scintillating iota of shared grace."

"Well and good for you, Gabriel. But what of Lucifer? The brother I knew would never have fathered a Nephilim." The thing on the bottom of her shoe grew smellier and more disgusting.

Lucifer grinned like a shark. "Wouldn't I? Think about it. What's more disobedient than taking Dad's power of creation and using it for myself? I'm just amazed I didn't think of it earlier."

Without changing his expression or his tone, he loomed closer to her. "And if you ever call my son an abomination again, I will end you, peace or no peace."

Fear entered Raphael's eyes for the first time, and she stiffened her back in an effort not to retreat.

Castiel popped back in at that point, reappearing at Raphael's right hand and cutting off whatever she was going to say. I was glad to see him but was getting sick of people appearing out of thin air all over the place.

"Raphael, what are you hoping to accomplish here, besides directly disobeying Michael's orders?"

His gravelly voice had steel in it, steel a foot-soldier shouldn't be using to address an archangel, and a spark of concern nibbled at my conscience.

Raphael shot him the same flickering glance she'd been giving Cas but didn't respond. I wondered if Michael had told her what Cas had done to her, back on our world, or if Castiel had sought out Cas's memories of that day and she was reacting subconsciously to his new attitude.

Lucifer let out a delighted laugh at Castiel's question. "Have you been ordered to stay away from me, little sister? Why?"

"Because you do not belong here! If I get rid of you, I can release my real brother from the Pit again and we can go on the way we were meant to!"

She slid her archangel blade from a sheath at her belt and slashed for Lucifer's throat in one smooth movement. Her blade, as fast as it had been moving, struck sparks from three others and was halted. Cas's reassuring solidity had vanished from my front, reappearing several feet away, defending Lucifer alongside his counterpart and Gabriel. Lucifer, still grinning, had not even flinched.

She fell back, a wounded look on her face.

Lucifer's grin widened as his protectors stood down. "So it was you? You broke the seals and let me out in this Winchester-less universe? I'm touched. How did Michael find out, and how is he punishing you?"

"I told him myself," Raphael growled, blade still naked in her hand. "After you showed up a year ago. The only thing that has saved me from prison is troop morale."

She hadn't spent enough time among humans to develop the instinct for using air quotes, but her tone implied them anyway, even as her hands tightened on her hilt.

"And my punishment was to be shackled, though not physically. He barred me from the front lines, refused me my chance to deal to my brother the retribution he so deserved. And I accepted it, because breaking the seals was against Father's will. But this, you all, you're even more against Father's will. How can removing you from the equation be wrong?"

"That's not for us to decide, Raphael, unless you are intending a mutiny against Michael's stewardship," said Castiel. "Are you?" The steel was stronger now. Cas took his eyes off of their opponent to give Castiel a worried look of his own.

She lifted her blade again, frame growing even tenser. Her eyes blazed, sparks lit off the ends of her hair, and for a second I thought she actually meant to go through with it, but after a silent eternity the fire died and her fingers unclenched. The blade sent up a puff of dust as it landed in the dirt, followed shortly by her knees as she dropped to the ground.

"No," she whispered in a desolate voice. "I dare not go so far. Michael could not overlook such an act, and will not be as lenient, should I disobey him again."

Her eyes welled up, and a single tear spilled down her cheek. I'd heard people say they wanted to cry out of sheer frustration before, but I'd never witnessed it until now.

"Why come now?" Gabriel asked, plopping down onto his butt in front of his sister so that she had to look at him. "We've been kicking around here for months and haven't seen hide nor hair of you 'til today."

"I have felt the …" she cut her eyes at Lucifer, twisted her lips, then continued, "the Nephilim carrying out many deeds for some time now, but today-"

She halted, seemed to struggle for words, tried again. "Today, I could not overlook. He on his own is harmless enough, and seems to be only encouraging the earth to heal itself. But what he did to the rainforest-"

"We did that, little sister," interjected Lucifer. "Gabriel and me. Don't pretend you're mad at my son for growing a forest ahead of schedule. What's really bothering you?" He paused, rolled his eyes. "I guess we're doing sharing-and-caring today after all."

I glanced at Jack. Every aspect of Raphael's behavior today was uncharacteristic for her, especially the sudden shift away from bloody action once she'd decided to commit to it, and I only knew one creature who could affect the emotions of a being as powerful as her.

Jack caught me looking, gave me an innocent shrug, and focused back on the scene in front of us. Man, he was so busted.

Without even being aware that there was something to fight, Raphael was fighting Jack's influence, but she was losing. Her eyes sought out Lucifer's, and she lost the battle.

"When you rebelled," she told him, "you left us. You and Father had your differences, but you left the rest of us behind, too."

Lucifer stopped grinning and sank to his knees in the dirt as well. When he reached to put his hand on Raphael's shoulder again, she let him. "And you felt me here, and wanted to come confront a version of Lucifer that wasn't your own, since you're barred from him?"

The three archangels were in a tight little knot on the ground, knees touching, so Cas and Castiel came back to the rest of us, and we withdrew as discreetly as possible.

When we'd moved far enough that we could converse without being rude, Sam turned to Jack. "Did you-?"

Jack waved a hand at him to cut him off. "They may not be listening, but they can still hear us. Let them work out what they can before we bring me into it."

Castiel stared at Jack, eyes growing wide, and I could see him figuring it out from context. If his loss of innocence was progressing as expected, next should come the inkling of suspicion that Jack had used this power on him as well. Ah, yes, now those blue eyes were going narrow and laser-focused, dark brows drawing together.

So we'd ruined his doubt-free existence, but hey, at least he knew how to look out for himself now.

Cas, of course, had boarded the same train of thought, and put a hand on Castiel's shoulder. "He did not, not to you," said Cas, when Castiel's gaze snapped to him. "You would have noticed."

"How can I be certain? She did not, though that is a good thing in this case."

"My father's grace created me," said Jack, "but my soul – or what passes for it – was more influenced by Castiel than by Lucifer." Jack shrugged. "I can try it on you, if you like, so you can see for yourself?"

I thought he was going to go for it, but then his brows drew together again. "How would I know you are not just letting me feel it, in order to better fool me in the future?"

Woo, boy. We'd really done a number on him. Everything that Cas had learned through his experiences with us, but none of the trust.

"An excellent notion," Cas said, "and definitely an instinct to develop, but not applicable in this instance. Let him try, and you will see. Are you saying you did not feel him, back there, when he was calming her? There is too much of our grace in him for anything he does to pass our notice, even if the others cannot sense it."

Huh, I hadn't known that. Castiel held the gaze of his other self for a few seconds, evaluating, then looked back at Jack and nodded sharply.

Jack's eyes didn't glow, but we all saw Castiel twitch.

"Ah," he said. "I see what you mean. It feels like when I heal an injury to my vessel, but more. And less, somehow." He narrowed his gaze at Jack again, but seemed more resigned than anything else. "Why is everything you do impossible to put into words?"

"I'm pretty impossible, myself." Jack grinned his regular infectious grin, relieved that the tense moment had passed. Castiel wasn't an archangel, but that didn't mean he couldn't do some damage if he decided we were a threat. "Born of a human and the archangel who hated humans the most, and raised by the family that refused to bow to Heaven's will, even if it meant the end of the world?"

Castiel nodded, face serious. "You are a contradiction, but I do not believe you are an abomination. Anyone who witnesses your deeds can see that. Why do you continue to think of yourself that way?"

The grin dropped off Jack's face. "What makes you say that?"

"Just now, when you reached out, I heard you. I believe it was what the humans call a subconscious thought, but I heard it anyway."

"Ah. Um."

Ordinarily I would have helped the kid out, but I found that I'd like to hear his answer to that question as well, so I put on my best stern face and let him squirm.

He glanced over his shoulder at his father, still deep in communion with Gabriel and Raphael. "I just don't want to let myself forget where I came from. I know I have value outside of what I do, and I am worth more than what I am – Dean taught me that – but that doesn't mean that the weight of my father's deeds is easy to bear."

"Nor should it be," Castiel agreed.

I shared a look with Sam, a little stunned by the wisdom of this weird kid we'd managed not to fuck up beyond repair between the two of us. Like the rest of us, he still needed some major therapy, but he was way more self-aware than I'd ever been.

Sam was frowning. "We talked about this months ago, dude. You know you can come to me if you need to work through a self-esteem issue." Definitely don't take that one to Dean, he didn't say.

Jack shrugged. "It's not an issue, really. Just something that's going to live in my head with me for the rest of my life. Not good or bad, and it's not going to control me, but it's there, and it's not going to go away."

"Join the club," I told him. "Own that shit and be proud." Struck by a thought, I turned to my angel and poked him gently in the chest. "Works for you, too, Cas. We've all got things in our past we'd rather not think about, but could you say you'd do anything different, if you could go back and try it again?"

He gave me a grumpy face for making him the center of attention but shook his head.

"So why let it screw up whatever relationship you could have with Castiel, here and now? Dude, he's you but different. When are you ever going to get a chance like this again?"

That got me a raised eyebrow, and wicked snickering from Sam and Jack.

"Keep your minds out of the gutter, you know what I mean. Look at the Gabriels. I've never seen the dude happier than when both of them agree with each other and tell the rest of us we're wrong."

"I wouldn't discount the gutter on our account," Gabriel chirped, slinging an arm casually around Sam's waist as he leaned in to our huddle. We all startled a bit, eye-checked the trio still bonding behind us, and squinted back at him.

"What?" he said, unashamed. "Raphael's my brother, too. Well. Sister, now, apparently. 'S not like I'm going to let my alternate do all the bonding, even if I do get the benefits of it through our shared grace."

Giving Sam a final squeeze, he flounced off across the field to plop down in the midst of his siblings. Our Gabriel and Lucifer made pleased noises of welcome, but Raphael lit up like Gondor calling for aid.

With Michael and Lucifer locked in their constant competition, even back before Lucifer Fell, it made complete sense that Gabriel had been her favorite.

We turned back to look at Sam, faces painted with morbid curiosity.

"Did he mean it? About... them?" Castiel asked.

"Why's everyone looking at me?" croaked Sam. He got a bunch of skeptically raised eyebrows of his own, but after starting and abandoning a few different sentences, he straightened his shoulders. "You know what? None of your business."

It was a good effort, but his face was bright red and his eyes were shifty. I knew my brother well enough to tell when he'd gotten laid, and he'd been showing all the signs for months now. I'd never even suspected he swung that way, but Hell, who was I to talk?

Everyone's morbid curiosity dissolved into morbid disappointment, but no one tried to force the issue. Sam and Jack started discussing which area he should tackle next, but my mind fell into the gutter all on its own, and I found myself wondering why Castiel had been the one to ask Sam the question we'd all been thinking, if he was as asexual as angels without a lady's gift were supposed to be.

Both versions of Castiel were looking at me with surprisingly similar hooded eyes, so I guess I'd let that train of thought gain too much focus. Crap.

"Hey," I said, as an awkward cover that neither Castiel seemed to believe. "Should we head back? It doesn't seem like the archangels are gonna be done any time soon."

Lucky for me, Sam hadn't noticed my little mental slip, though Jack gave me a knowing look as we all started walking. He mouthed the word "twins" at me and waggled his eyebrows.

"Shut up," I told him, tucking my chin down toward my clavicles.

"Do you have to report back to Michael about Raphael's actions?" Cas asked Castiel. It was a dry question, but his tone promised we will talk later.

They had fallen into step behind us, but by the time I turned my head to listen in, Castiel was already gone.

Lucifer and both Gabriels started helping Jack out after that. On rare occasions, Raphael turned up as well, but we only ever heard about it afterwards. She never showed up if anyone else was tagging along, and she never came back to the Haven afterward for an unneeded meal or quality hang-out time.

Lucifer did, though, after Jack sat down one-on-one with Bobby and with Mom and asked their permission to bring his father into their safe place. The wards were good, and Cas had been working on improving them over the length of our stay, but there wasn't much that could stop an archangel if he actually intended to harm you.

Bobby had been a hard sell, but Mary swept Jack up into a hug and told him that she trusted him. "Even if your judgement of him fails, I know your strength won't."

So yeah, every so often we all sat around the dinner table and tried to pretend that one among us hadn't literally driven another insane after failing to destroy the world. Sam was only doing it for Jack, I could tell, but we are all getting better at it as the months went on. Even Lucifer.

The first time it rained, Bobby actually cried. We had all gone outside to play in it, tossing around an old football and tussling in the mud as this corner of the world got its first honest soaking in decades. He stood a little way off, hands at his sides, face tilted upward, and sobbed like a mom at a wedding.

He'd resigned himself to living out the rest of his days thirsty, dirty, sometimes hungry, sometimes lonely, always stoic, and constantly in anticipation of a ridiculously powerful being deciding to end him on a whim. Even through all that, he never gave up, never gave in, because there were still people out there who needed him. I can't imagine carrying a burden that size, but watching Bobby weep from joy, I got a small idea of what it might feel like to have it lifted from you.

Of course, when he looked around to find out why we'd all gone so quiet, we all pretended not to have noticed. He wasn't fooled – it's near impossible to fool Bobby, in any universe – but he gave us a gruff grunt of acknowledgement and waved the universal sign for "I'm open."

Sam sent him a neat spiral, and he trapped it in the basket of his arms, wiping his nose discreetly on a plaid-covered shoulder mid-motion.

Even after several months, he still had a little trouble handling a set of sons that had been raised by him, even though he hadn't raised them. So he dealt with emotion using dark humor. Just like he'd taught me to do. Which occasionally turned into a downward spiral of awkward jokes when we each realized the other was doing it and no one else was there to head us off.

It amused Cas to no end, watching Bobby and me fumble around, but he usually took pity on us and intervened before I resorted to asking Bobby for the Colt so I could end myself permanently.

Sam and Jack were busy kickstarting ecosystems all over the world, so Cas often volunteered himself as long-distance transport. To the bunker, to crack it open for later use, and to what had once been Singer's Auto Body. The familiar wrecks and the tools in our hands gave us something solid to grasp – and something solid to talk about.

Convincing him I was competent to work on his cars, decrepit as they were after being left on their own and exposed to the elements for so long, was a challenge we both relished. It was a useless practice, since it wasn't likely that the gasoline industry would rebound any time soon, but the look of pride on his face when I reassembled an engine he'd dismissed as junk was worth all the awkwardness.

Cas would either pick a spot nearby to keep watch from or vanish for hours to go about his own business. The first time he left us behind, Bobby gave me an odd look. "Do I wanna know how you're gonna let him know when we're done here? It's a long walk back."

"I got bits of his grace mixed in with my soul," I said, leaning over an open hood and torqueing a bolt with a hex wrench so that I wouldn't have to look at him. We hadn't gone into detail about our stays in Hell when we'd told Bobby our life story, so he didn't know the extent of the damage we'd suffered, only that Cas had patched us up. "If I call him the right way, he'll hear me."

Bobby grunted and turned back to the car he was working on beside mine. I was getting used to speaking his language again, so I figured that one meant either, "You two have a beautiful relationship," or "I know there's plenty you ain't tellin' me, but I'm not gonna pry."

My best guess was a little of both. While this Bobby was intensely curious about the one who'd raised us, he was reluctant to step into his shoes. He had all this knowledge about surviving the wasteland to share with us, but he always caught himself a few minutes into an enthusiastic explanation, slowed down, and distanced himself from it, like a hesitant stepfather afraid of getting the dreaded "You're not my real dad!"

It was different when we worked on cars together. We could go for hours in silence, punctuated by the clatter of tools and the occasional request for an opinion from the other. I didn't bring up my frequent episodes of déjà vu whenever his gruff voice asked me for a particular wrench, nor how it dragged me back to my early teens spent at his elbow, learning all of this for the first time.

And in turn, he didn't mention the chance at family he'd lost so long ago, before the end of the world, but sometimes I would catch him staring, wearing an expression I can only describe as wistful, which was weird as hell to see on his face.

Hybrid cars hadn't materialized in this universe, so we spent several pleasant afternoons discussing the theory. I was telling him our Bobby's opinions on them ("damn fool plastic eggs, what self-respectin' car is that damn smooth?"), and we were laughing at the memory, when he got that look on his face again.

He must have been getting better at reading me as well, because he started to apologize for it. "'m sorry, Dean, you keep makin' me forget that I'm not-"

Suddenly sick of it, I cut him off, stepping close and smearing grease on his coverall with a jabbing finger. "Stop it. You are. You're the same person he was. If someone had dumped two gangly awkward boys on you, you would have done it exactly the same way."

"But I didn't!"

"So? You have the capacity, just not the opportunity! This whole thing is weird enough without tryin' to throw guilt on top! Can't you just let me 'n Sam 'n Cas be happy to have you around? You don't have to worry about messin' us up like a bad parent or somethin'. We're grown-ass men, in case you hadn't noticed, and pretty damn screwed up already. Havin' you back, even though you're not quite the one we lost, is one of the best things to happen to us in years."

He closed his mouth, which had dropped open during my little outburst, then considered a minute and snorted a wry laugh. "You boys don't get out much, do you? I'm no prom queen."

I laughed too, stepping back and letting my hand drop as the anger drained away as quickly as it had come. "It's been a rough decade or two, that's Chuck's honest truth. Things should be lookin' up now, though."

We hadn't put any limits on when we were planning on returning to our own universe, not wanting to rush Jack, but I found myself thinking about that other place, as much pain and loss as I'd felt there. I missed Baby, and I missed junk food.

Bobby was watching me with his head tilted, like he'd heard what I hadn't said.

"You could come back with us, you know," I told him. "You don't have to stay here, not when there's another option. It would make Mom's decision easier."

That was another thing we didn't talk about: his relationship with Mary. I had no idea if they were emotionally involved, or just comfortable together physically – I sure as hell wasn't going to ask – but I'd seen the two of them interact. Asking Mom to choose between the sons she was just getting to know and the universe she'd adopted as her own was not something I was looking forward to.

I thought he was going to clear his throat and change the subject, like he did whenever we strayed too close to emotions, but he stuck it out, even if he couldn't meet my eyes while he did it.

"This universe may be screwed up, but it's mine, and I'll stick with it. Your mom, though…" He trailed off, toying idly with a handful of screws as he stared into the distance. "From what she's said about the other side, she didn't really feel like she belonged there anyway."

He shot me a quick glance to see how I was handling the direction of the conversation. Lucky for me, Cas had shared what Mom had confided in him, so this wasn't exactly news. I shrugged at Bobby, and he took it as a sign that he could continue.

"She loves you boys, never doubt that, and she'd never even think this to herself, but if she goes back with you, it'll kill her. Not right away, but slow, like poison, she'll turn into a livin' ghost, and she'll haunt that world that took everythin' from her until either she ends it for herself or one of you boys does it for her."

Ooof. That one hurt, because I knew he was right.

"And if she stays here?" I asked. "If we head back through that door and close it up behind us, what happens to her then?"

Bobby squared up to me, arms folded across his chest, even though it had been an honest question with no anger in it. "Then she gets to live happy an' fulfilled with bouts of melancholy when she thinks about you-all, alive but far away, rather than livin' melancholy with bouts of happy in a world that moved on without her when she died thirty years ago."

He stayed squared, shoulders tense. It looked like he'd been building up to this conversation for a while, polishing it in his head so that he wouldn't fumble the words when the moment came.

"D'you expect me to fight you over it?" I asked.

"Well, yeah," he responded, blinking a few times, startled. "She's yer mom. I'm just some guy, tellin' you I know her better 'n you do."

I shrugged again. "You do. She died when I was four. I kept her on a four-year-old's pedestal in my head for decades, but I didn't really get to know her until recently. I know it's been hard on her, seein' me and Sam like this, knowin' she missed everything. It'd almost be easier for her if we'd died as kids."

Aghast, Bobby's eyes popped wide. "What? No, she'd never-"

"She wouldn't, no. But I've been getting better at the whole emotions thing lately, and the child-raisin' thing, too, and I can make some pretty informed guesses."

I reached out to grip his shoulder. "Hey, it's alright. If it comes down to a family discussion, I'm on your side on this one. Her children are grown, and she needs to do what's best for her. Besides, 'slong 's Jack's willing, we can set up regular visits. It doesn't have to be goodbye forever."

The tension in his frame bled out under my hand, and his knees wobbled a little before he caught himself and straightened back up. For that brief snatched second, I saw how old and tired he really was, and how much it would hurt him if the one good thing he'd found in half a lifetime was taken away.

In that moment, I almost asked if he loved her, if he would cherish her and see that she was taken care of, but I hesitated too long. He stepped away from my hand with a nod and a gruff harrumph and bent back over the car he'd been working on.

"Good talk," I told the curve of his broad back, grinning, before mirroring him over my own dismantled engine. A chat with Bobby, any Bobby on any topic with very few exceptions, acted on me like a magic tonic, making me feel secure and comforted.

His dry chuckle echoed out of the space under the hood.

When I wasn't off at the junkyard with Bobby or doing yoga with Mary, Cas and I were racking up points toward our Urban Explorers merit badges, seeking out other survivors and telling them the good news. There were more of them than Bobby had told us to expect, which was a good sign.

Every little hidden enclave of humanity Cas sniffed out for us, I couldn't stop myself from looking for familiar faces, even though it hurt every time when I didn't see any.

Most people eyed us with mistrust to start, and I didn't blame them. Even with Cas keeping his wings under wraps, we were awfully clean and well-dressed for two dudes wandering a decades-old Hellscape with a marked lack of washing machines and shopping malls. It's not like everyone was dressed in rags, but they did seem like they'd been wearing the same pair of jeans for a while, and the rips in them weren't the fashionable kind.

They usually softened up when we offered them a jug of Bobby's finest moonshine. We'd had to scale up his operation a bit, with the angels pitching in to speed up the fermentation process to meet this new demand, but the wary-eyed gaunt-faced humans we found in sewers and caves didn't need to know that.

"Heaven's war is over," we told them – luckily, Cas spoke every human language. "Come on out and live your life under the sun again."

"Or don't, whatever," we occasionally had to concede when we came across a stubborn commune that declared that they were fine where they were. "Just wanted to let you know you had options if this ever stops working out for you."

Whether they followed us back outside immediately to dance about on the soft new grass or chased us off with pitchforks and torches, they got to keep the moonshine and a physical description of the Haven's location, in case they were inclined to travel in the future.

Cas and Castiel met up often while I tinkered with cars, allowing Cas to work through – or emotionally repress – whatever it was that bothered him so much about Castiel, so sometimes Castiel tagged along as well, if Michael didn't have any orders for him that day. He and Cas passed themselves off as human twins, with Cas taking the lead and Castiel acting as the shy one until he got the hang of it. They garnered a lot of attention from the huddled masses.

"They have seen no new faces for a generation, at least," said Cas when I pointed this out after a first contact mission where all the women in the underground town had trailed after us, giggling and whispering to each other, even after their Elders had declared a need to "meditate" on our news. "We are a novelty to them, that is all." Castiel nodded agreement.

"You're kidding, right?" I huffed a frustrated breath as we trudged away from the cave entrance. We'd approached on foot and needed to get far enough away that it wouldn't blow our cover when we vanished.

They exchanged glances, then gave me back identical frowns.

"You're not kidding. Of course you aren't." I kicked at a rock, skittering it up the path ahead of us. Their shared grace had settled somewhere in balance between the two of them – though their personalities still held the quirks they'd acquired through living their own lives – but even with whatever they were somehow taking from me, kidding didn't come easily.

"I know lusting when I see it," I told them. "Been the target of it myself, a time or two. One of you is bad enough, but a matched set? Those poor girls don't stand a chance."

"Precisely," said Cas. "They do not, as you say, stand a chance. I belong to you, and my counterpart is not inclined to partake. So why do you find it so upsetting?"

His casual statement of ownership did very little to dampen the uncomfortable prickling feeling in the pit of my stomach, but it did help me to identify it. The caveman part of my brain wanted to chase away anyone who even looked at him for too long – and it didn't help that he was unfailingly polite to every person he met – but he'd never given me the slightest reason to feel jealous.

Not that jealousy was rational, but I didn't want to admit it to him. To them, since they were both studying me with growing curiosity the longer I stayed silent. No, please don't do that thing with your head, I accidentally prayed.

Which, of course, immediately backfired, because they both heard me, and both cocked their heads in confusion, and I nearly combusted on the spot.

They might have been unaware of the local fauna's lusting, but they couldn't miss mine even if they wanted to.

Which, apparently, they didn't, as I discovered when they spoke right over my fumbled apology.

"Why is he even more disturbed by a simple gesture than he was before?" Castiel asked Cas without taking his eyes off of me.

"He finds my inquisitive nature very attractive," Cas replied, grinning smugly.

"Wait, you did that on purpose?" I near-wailed, boiling in my boots from embarrassment. "Why?"

"We have a proposition for you," Cas replied, "and I wanted to put you in the mood to be receptive to it."

They glanced over their shoulders at the enclave we'd just left, exchanged a nod, seized one of my arms apiece, and vanished us on the spot.

When my feet hit the ground and my stomach caught up with us, I opened my eyes and gasped. Oeno Island was even more beautiful now, greener and brighter, with jewel-like birds flitting through the proud saw-palms that danced in a salt-scented breeze coming off the sparkling sea.

I got over the scenery in a hurry when the implications of them bringing me here caught up to me as well. Castiel had let go when we landed, but Cas still gripped my arm, so I looked at him first.

"What proposition?" I asked him, stomping hard on any graphic images my perverted brain tried to suggest.

Said perverted brain roared in triumph when Cas looked over at Castiel and raised an eyebrow. Receiving a nod in return, Cas turned back to me.

"Castiel wants to attempt sexual intercourse with us."

As always when wishes come true, I looked for the catch. "Cas, you sure you're okay with this?" I tried hard to keep any begging from my voice. If he was even the slightest bit uncomfortable with it, or unsure of my devotion to him, there's no way I'd go for it. Even if it was the best offer I'd ever received, even in djinn-dreams.

"Dean," Cas chided, gripping my shoulders and turning me to face him. Golden sand crunched under my feet, and the sunlight was bright in my panic-wide eyes. "There was no need for you to be jealous of the women we just met" – shit, he'd figured me out – "and there is no need for me to be jealous of Castiel."

I looked over at the other him, the one we'd leave behind. "Not that I'm such a prize, but you know this isn't permanent, us bein' here. Do you really wanna cross this line, knowin' we'll be gone soon?"

Castiel smiled back. "That is part of why I wish to attempt it. I have been a student of human nature since your kind began walking upright, and I have long wanted to know more about sex, as it seems to be very important to most of you. You and your Cas provide the greatest opportunity I will ever have, to study the intricacies of feeling bound up in the act that are unique to humans among all other creatures."

"And the other part?" I raised a dubious eyebrow at him.

He shrugged, a much more natural gesture these days. "I like you, Dean Winchester. I may not feel sexual attraction the way you do, but I was created to serve humanity, and I am certain that giving you pleasure will be fulfilling for me as well."

I was in agony, wanting this so much but knowing for certain it was more than I deserved, so I turned back to Cas to give him one last chance to try and talk me out of it if he wanted to.

He didn't.

A few weeks later, we were exiting the Haven' wards, saying our goodbyes before we all headed off in separate directions for the day when Cas, Gabriel, and Jack abruptly went blank.

Sam and I exchanged a tense glance while we waited for their attention to return, or lightning to strike, or whatever was coming, but it turned out to be much less sinister.

Jack blinked, then beamed at us. "Angel Radio is back online!" he said. "Michael must have cleared the remaining Host from suspicion."

Gabriel's face was screwed up in concentration. "Still sounds pretty guarded – I'm guessing it won't return to its original levels until after we've taken our Lucifer and gone home. Still, good sign, right?"

I was struck with a thought. "How long has it been off-line? Have any of the other angels mentioned?"

"Probably went silent as soon as they realized Lucifer had been released," Gabe responded. "So a few decades. Why?"

"Anna. This is how it started for her, back in our universe. If she's still alive out there, she's gonna think she's lost it. Is there any way-?"

But Cas was already shaking his head. "She would just feel like a human now, unless I get up close. We can only carry on as we are, seeking out the remaining populations. If she is among them, we will find her."

"Have we checked that tree in Kentucky yet?" Sam asked. "If this Uriel didn't betray Heaven, he wouldn't have taken her grace from it. If it's there, then we know she's alive, right?"

"It's there," said Jack, looking a little smug when we turned to gape at him. "I noticed a tree that hadn't burned like everything else, so I examined it, and it felt like that lady we met in Freyja's dimension." He shrugged. "Seemed like it'd be okay to leave it and come back for it if it was needed. Since it was the only thing that kept the tree alive through the end of the world, it seemed a shame to just rip it out."

Sam was looking worried. "How many human groups are still out there, do you think?" he asked. "She won't be stuck in an asylum just for hearing angels like ours was – these people know just fine that angels exist – but she might be incarcerated for it. Maybe even executed, depending on how hard-line her faction is."

"Maybe this version will know to keep her mouth shut," I said. "Ours was pretty innocent, right up until we ruined it for her like we ruin it for everyone. This one will have lived her whole life during a war."

"I can find her, I think," said Jack into the grim silence. "But I'd have to portal to her, which might make things worse for her, incarceration-wise."

"Can you portal near her?" I asked. "Does it even work like that?"

"Depends on where she is. If she's deep underground, there's a good chance whoever steps through will end up encased in solid rock."

Gabriel raised a hand. "So that's me volunteering as tribute, then. Won't bother me a bit. Let's pay our Fallen sister a visit."

"And say what, exactly?" Sam interjected, before Jack could focus on the task. "'You were born a human, to human parents, but you were once an angel who made the most painful choice an angel can make'? And 'would you like to change your mind now, we promise Heaven is different and you'll only go to jail and get tortured for a few dozen centuries?'" He scoffed. "What outcome are you hoping for?"

Nodding, I added, "She's got no reason to love Heaven, after what the War did to humanity. Why would she return to the fold now?"

Cas countered me with a shake of his head. "She deserves to know who she is, and to be offered the choice to make up her own mind. We do not know what she has been through."

I frowned at him. "Are you sure you're not just doin' this for Castiel, so he'll have someone when we leave?"

That caught him off-guard, but he firmed his resolve along with his jaw. "She still deserves the choice. That is what you do, after all: offer impossible choices. Or have you once again decided that you will make the choices on behalf of others?"

Oof, hard to keep arguing after such a ruthless gut-punch.

Taking my capitulation as a given, Gabriel turned back to Jack with an excited grin. "Activate the beam, Scotty, let's energize!"

"We're all agreed, then?" Jack asked, studying each of us in turn, looking for any sign of dissent. "Alright, one portal to Anna's vicinity, coming right up."

"Wait," I interrupted hurriedly. When Cas glared at me, ready to jump back into the argument he'd just won, I held my hands up. "I just mean, you said that pokin' a portal through can weaken the fabric of reality, so maybe we should do it from somewhere farther away from the Haven. In case it affects the wards or somethin'."

There was some sheepish murmuring as everyone admitted I was right, and then the angels zapped us to a certain field in Kentucky to mulligan our false start.

Jack had been wearing the amulet off and on, trying not to fall out of the habit, but today was apparently an off day. He closed his eyes, frowning, and his signature golden glow lit him up like a firecracker, dancing under his skin as he concentrated. "Anna, Anna, Anna," he murmured, using the grace from the tree behind us and the memories of her that he'd taken from me and Sam as a focus. "Ah, there you are!"

His hand came up and the golden light gathered in his palm, wavering upward like a heat mirage or a sweet anime fight move as it waited for him to give it direction. "Now, just a few hundred feet away from that," the outstretched arm moved a few degrees toward the south, "and bingo."

The light leaped off his hand and snaked its way to a point a few feet in front of him. Its leading edge touched the ground and the rest of it snapped up straight, vibrating to a halt like a giant harp string. There was an awed silence as we all acknowledged how friggin' cool that had been.

"Here goes nothing," Gabriel said, and vanished. I thought he'd gone, but Sam jumped a little as something invisible pinched him. There was some laughter from an unseen source, and then the harp string twanged, and then silence.

We waited a few minutes, staring hard at the golden tear in case something that wasn't Gabriel tumbled back out of it. We were so focused that when Castiel popped up behind us, he had to pretend to clear his throat to get our attention.

"Ahem."

We startled like cats, spinning around and flailing weapons from holsters. Even Cas flickered and vanished for a second before he caught himself and returned.

Castiel's lips turned up at the corners, twitching, which was the angel equivalent of rolling on the floor laughing. "My apologies," he said, when he'd brought himself back under control. "I was sent to report on the nature of your portal."

Something had eased in him since our little romp, or maybe even before that: since he and Cas had worked out their differences, so to speak. Without changing his posture at all, he managed to seem as if he were slouching comfortably, instead of standing at constant ramrod attention.

Sam, who knew me and my signs every bit as well as I knew his, had figured out within minutes what had transpired between the three of us when we'd reappeared at the bunker later that evening, and after giving Cas a thorough look to make sure I hadn't wounded him with my uncouth demands, he gave me a hearty slap on the back and said no more about it. He even did us the courtesy of not telling either of the Gabriels, who would have teased us mercilessly.

Ever since, Sam'd been easier with Castiel, treating him more like a member of the family than just a valued ally. If Castiel hadn't been Winchestered before, he certainly was now.

Jack gave Castiel a welcoming smile and went back to focusing on the portal. Unlike us, he could see what was on the other side, so when his eyes widened in horror, we all tensed up, raising the weapons we still held. He hurriedly began pinching the glowing rip back together, top to bottom, stopping when only a knee-high segment remained.

The harp sang again, a much higher note from a much shorter string, and Gabriel ground a furrow in the new grass as he slid through the remaining opening on his back with an armful of redhead, hollering, "Close it up! Close it up!"

Jack hurried to obey, squeezing the edges together with both fists until their glimmer vanished in the sunlight. Nothing else had time to emerge, and Jack powered down as we turned to the new arrival.

Sam was already there, holding a hand out to help up Gabriel's passenger. "Hello, my name is Sam. Are you okay?"

She accepted his hand and when she was upright, we could all see the smoke smudges and tear tracks on her cheeks as she shook her head. The red of her hair glinted in the sunlight, and I had a vivid flashback to the backseat of my car the night before the end of the world. We'd found Anna, all right. More pale and gaunt than the one we'd known, but her all the same.

Gabriel popped to his feet unaided, dusting himself off with angry little slaps. "Hell no, she's not! I thought humans gave up that sort of barbarism back in the 1600's! I've got half a mind to go back and-"

He halted his tirade when she seized his arm, but then she let go as if his skin burned her and backed away. "Who the hell are you people?" she asked. Her voice was rough, as if she'd been screaming recently. "What just happened?"

Her gaze shot from face to face, seeking something familiar, but we couldn't provide that for this version of her, so we just tried to look as harmless as possible, re-holstering weapons with practiced nonchalance. Cas and Castiel's twin visages threw her, but only for a second.

Castiel rolled with it, cocking his head to the side to study her in return. I saw it hit him a few seconds later, when his eyes went to the only tree in the field and then shot back to her, wider than before. He had learned enough subtlety to keep his mouth shut until she calmed down, but the air where his wings would be rippled a little, and his lips did that twitch thing again as he fought back an excited grin.

Sam stepped into the mediator role, holding his hands up like he was gentling a pack of velociraptors. "We're happy to answer all of your questions, but it might be easier to explain if you tell us what happened on the other side of the portal first."

"What the hell is a portal?" she demanded, though the tension in her frame eased a bit when no one jumped her. "Are you guys angels? Is that a new thing, too, along with the voices?"

"The portal was mine," said Jack. "I'm Jack, and I'm no angel, but I do have special abilities. The voices, though, those are angels. And we can explain why you're hearing them, if you'd like."

She squared her shoulders and breathed deeply for a few beats. "Okay. My own family just tried to burn me at the stake, and I was rescued by an invisible man who whisked me away through a magic hole in space. This has already been the weirdest day ever, why not pile it higher?"

"They did what?" Sam squeaked. The horror on his face was reflected on everyone else's as well, but as the official mouthpiece of the group, he got to express it out loud.

"Yeah, pretty crappy, right? Granted, it was stupid of me to admit to anyone that I had started hearing voices, much less that I thought they might belong to angels, but I thought I could trust my own mother not to turn me in, and anyway, they seemed to be saying that the war was over! Next thing I know, it's all torches and pitchforks and for the good of the colony."

Turning back to Gabriel, she said, "If you hadn't pulled me out when you did, I'd be ashes by now. So, thank you. But I'd really like an answer to my original question: who are you? We've been out of contact with outsiders for decades – no one should know we exist."

Sam's next words were going to be something along the lines of we were looking for you, which would lead us down a path of no return, and she would make her first choice without even knowing she was making it, which didn't seem fair to me.

"Before we get to that," I interrupted, "could you live with not knowin' the answer? We can take you to a place where you'll be safe from angels and demons alike, with some open-minded humans who will see that you're taken care of as long as you pull your weight, and there'll be no more talk of burnin' anyone. You won't even have to hear the angels any more, long as you're inside."

Sam was giving me bitch-face for interrupting, but this was the right thing to do, I could feel it. "If we tell you the answer to your question, your life will change forever. Just thought you might want to know that first. I'm Dean, by the way."

Her lips twisted as she considered it. "I'm Anna," she said, "but I suspect you-all already knew that. I appreciate the offer, but I do think I really have to know."

I nodded in understanding and gestured for Sam to take the thread back up. He rolled his eyes at me but grew serious again as he stepped up to her, careful not to crowd her. "Anna, there's no sugar-coating this. Before you were born to your parents, you were an angel. You pulled out your own grace, and you Fell, because you wanted to be human. You can hear angels in your head because you used to be one of them."

She blinked as if concussed. "How- How do you know this?" she asked, which was a better reaction than I was expecting.

"That's … complicated. We can get into it later," said Sam. "And we don't have any knowledge of your human life, but we're not wrong about the angel part."

"Okay, so, say I believe you," she said. "What comes next?"

"Next comes a choice. You can still take the option Dean gave you, knowing what you know now but remaining a human and living out a human life. Or, you can reclaim your grace and become an angel again. The voices are correct, the war is over, so you wouldn't have to fight or anything like that."

Her eyes narrowed. "If being an angel is so great, why did I stop?"

Cas put a hand on Sam's shoulder, indicating that he'd take this one. "You were stationed on Earth, studying the humans for centuries, and you grew frustrated with your inability to feel what they felt. You saw angels as cold and uncaring, even before the war started."

His lips twitched into a brief grin as his eyes held hers. "You expressed the specific desire to enjoy sex. And chocolate cake."

She grinned back, almost in spite herself. "Cake's pretty rare, these days, but past-me had the right idea about the sex. If I take my grace back, that all goes away?"

Cas shot me a quick smirk before replying, "Not necessarily. You would not be inhabiting a vessel, which creates the distance you found so distasteful. You were born in that body. It is yours, to feel and to taste with."

The excitement in her face abruptly cut off. "Wait, wait. I know enough about angels to know that they won't be happy with me. Would I be taking it back up just to be punished for it?"

"Not if you're careful," Gabriel said, piping up for the first time. "There are ways to hide from them for extremely long periods of time. Speaking from experience, here."

That brought her suspicions right back around. "Still haven't answered my question, have you? Who are you people? Making portals, hiding from angels, telling me my own life?" She took a few steps backwards. "You're not … demons, are you?"

If she didn't look so concerned, I think we all would have burst out laughing. As it was, we strangled the impulse down to some involuntary snorting. "Hardly," said Jack, waving a hand. "And of course, we need to introduce ourselves completely if you're ever going to trust anything we say."

I pulled the collar of my shirt aside, exposing the anti-possession sigil tattooed below my clavicle. "You've been out of contact for a while, so I don't know if you've seen one of these-"

"We were isolated, not stupid," she said, pulling up the sleeve of her t-shirt to show a cruder version of the sigil burned into her own upper arm. Sam and Jack exposed theirs as well, when she directed pointed glances at them, but the angels looked uncomfortable.

Fists on hips, she turned back to Sam. "What's their deal, then?"

Now Sam looked uncomfortable, too. "They're. Um. They actually are angels."

Surprising me again, she just nodded. "Yeah, that makes sense, I guess. Have to know them to be able to hide from them. How long do I get to think about this?"

"Long as you want," said Sam. "You'll need one of them to get your grace out of that tree over there so you can reabsorb it, but there's no consequence for delaying."

She blinked at him again, then spun around and gaped a little at the lonely giant in the field of waving grasses. Its leaves rustled in a passing breeze, as if calling out to her, and it was some time before she returned to the conversation.

"I feel … something when I look at it, that's for sure. It'll be safe here?"

We all looked at Castiel, who was supposed to report back about Jack's portal. If he breathed a word of her existence, her grace would be confiscated and she'd be snapped up by Heaven before she ever had a chance to get used to breathing fresh air again.

"Yes," he said. "No one here will tell them about it, and no one knows about it but us."

Such a treasonous statement, so casually spoken.

"While you're thinking it through, want to come visit that place I mentioned, with the nice people and the lack of angels in your head?"

Anna stared hard as Castiel for a beat. "Well, I've only been hearing the voices since this morning, so I'm not an expert, but I think this one just reported that the portal was to contact a remote human settlement unreachable from the surface. I feel safer already. Let's go."

"Do you mind travelling by angel?" asked Jack. "It's a lot faster than walking."

We went the old-fashioned way, via forehead-boop. A bit less personal than being swept into Cas's arms like a romance novel cover model, but it got the job done. Between two blinks, I was standing on the hill near the Haven again.

Another blink, and Anna was there as well, looking a little windswept and wide-eyed. Jack and Sam arrived with our three feathered friends a second later.

Anna took a second to study their twin faces. "Angels do have names, right? How come I don't rate an introduction?"

This was Castiel's Anna, so Cas let him field this one for them both after a quick exchange of glances. "That is part of the complicated explanation, related to how we know so much about your past. The short answer is we are both called Castiel."

"And I'm Gabriel," said our resident archangel, giving her a little finger-wave. "I've got another me hanging around somewhere as well, but he's just as cool as me, so don't worry about it."

"Another … you?" Anna's face went blank.

"Too much information, not enough alcohol cushioning your system," said Sam. "Last time we explained everything to someone, it took several hours and a whole bathtub of moonshine. Come in and get comfortable before we fracture your reality even more."

"Oh, right," Anna said, the revelations of the past few minutes apparently having knocked the whole murder by burning thing right out of her head. "Thank you. Where do we go from here?"

I'd been coming and going from that nondescript little hole in the ground for months now, and I could pick it out of a lineup of twenty other nondescript little holes in the ground, but looking around now, trying to see it through the eyes of a newcomer, I could see all over again what a great job Bobby had done.

The new grass that was springing up all over the world had taken root here as well, and some scrub bushes were even starting to push through the stony ground, but his boulder-ringed fortress just looked like a gentle swell of earth, a coincidence of geological physics. There was nothing to indicate a place of safety for humans in a world gone mad.

"It's just down this way," Sam said, starting down the hill ahead of us. We trailed him like imprinted ducklings.

"Is it permissible for you to stay with us?" Cas asked Castiel on the way. "I do not want you to miss what will come next, but Michael…"

He trailed off, trying to put into words what suspicions their oldest brother might be forming about his independence of thought, and what the consequences of that might be, without revealing too much too soon in front of the new human in the group.

Castiel's return smirk was so familiar that I involuntarily put a hand to my own face in case he'd somehow stolen it.

"Michael's standing orders are to learn as much from you as I can, at every opportunity." His shoulders did their customary shimmy as our group slipped beneath the Haven's outermost wards and his connection to Heaven was severed, but he finessed it into a shrug. "I will share with him what he needs to know."

"Hey, the voices are gone!" Anna said, pressing her long, pale fingers into her grimy temples before looking around, wide-eyed. "What did you do? Are you turning me in now that I can't hear you?"

"They're just as cut off as you are," said Sam. "We're about to enter the safest neutral zone this side of the Rockies." He gestured to two large rocks tilted against each other at a seemingly haphazard angle.

She squinted into the darkness between them, then shrugged and strode forward. "I've spent my entire life in caves, what's one more?"

As she stepped under the first stone lintel, she halted again, shuddering. "Gross, it feels like I just walked through a spiderweb." She shook her arms, and jumped in place a little, doing the multiverse-acknowledged Icky Dance. "And it feels like it took something with it. Eeeewww."

Sam gave her a sympathetic nod. "That was probably the remnants of your grace being blocked by the wards. Even if you didn't know it was there, it'd still feel weird when it's gone."

She gave a final shiver and went still. Her eyes went to the angels strung out behind, waiting for the bottleneck to clear. "It must be even worse for them," she said, voice quiet and a little sad.

He nodded again. "There'll be time for them to tell you their stories once you're settled. They each have their own reasons."

Pulling her shoulders back, she started forward again, pulling the bipedal train along until we all popped out into the main room.

Mom was sitting at the table where we'd kissed her goodbye not a half-hour ago. Her sturdy mug slopped some tea onto the scarred wooden surface as she gaped at us in shock. Recovering like a champ, she stood and crossed the room to us, smiling. "A new face, boys? Who's this?"

We all grinned back with varying degrees of guilty sheepishness. The angels would all deny it to their dying breaths, but they loved being Mary's 'boys' every bit as much as Sam and I did.

Sam kept up his role as spokesperson. "Mom, this is Anna."

Anna's face whipped back and forth between the two of them, her mouth forming the word mom? while her eyebrows rose toward her hairline, but Mary had already scanned her from head to foot, noting the torn clothes and tear tracks and soot.

"Welcome to the Haven, Anna. I can already tell your story is going to be something else, but let's get you cleaned up. Do you want some tea?"

After a nice scrub with water from the spring that ran through one of the lower rooms, and donning some of Mary's spare clothes, Anna seemed like a new person. She gave Mary the first smile we'd seen out of her as she requested a mug of the coffee-sludge that we male humans preferred over Mary's hand-picked herbal tea, doctored with a medicinal dose of booze.

She slugged back a swallow, wincing at the burn of it down her throat, and chased it with a cookie that Mary handed to her. "This is all very civilized," she remarked, looking around the room and back at the mixed-species group now seated around the table. "So the war's really over, then?"

Mary nodded, smiling wide. "Thanks to Jack, actually, but that is a long story that doesn't get any easier to wrap your head around from starting at the end."

Anna darted a glance at Jack, but let it go for the moment. "You all keep saying that – it's complicated – but it can't possibly be that big a deal. What, are you aliens or something?"

Jack made a hmmm noise. "That actually is a pretty good analogy. We're not from this world, though we are from one just like it."

We were all waiting for her to faint or scream or something, but all that happened was that her already-pale face went even paler. Her voice and hands remained steady as she took another swallow and asked, "Analogy? Not literal aliens, then."

She looked at Cas and me – too close to each other as usual – and at Castiel – across the table from us but definitely connected by an invisible tether – and her eyes lit up. "Holy. Shit," she breathed, setting down her mug and placing her hands flat on the table. "Are you guys from another universe?"

"Ding ding ding, give the lady a prize," said Gabriel, looking impressed.

"I knew it! I knew it was possible! This is amazing!"

Bobby, who'd returned from a patrol while she was cleaning up, goggled at her a little. "That was easy," he said. "Took me durn near a month just to stop thinkin' Mary was crazy, and I was there when they came through in the first place."

"Our colony had a bunch of angelic scrolls they salvaged from somewhere," she replied, hiding the twist of her mouth at the thought of her people in another sip of coffee. "They detailed the Winchester Prophecies. You're familiar with them? Most people said they were garbage, since things didn't shake out like it was written, but how could angels predict the future wrong?"

She gazed off into space, cheeks growing a little pink, and I thanked Chuck that her upbringing led her to assume that everyone was familiar with the prophecies. Most humans wouldn't have been, but there was no need to tell her that.

"I used to sneak into the relic room when I was little to read them over and over. I truly believed that if I could just figure out how to move the right way, I could slip sideways out of this universe and into the one where they came true."

She snorted a laugh, coming back to the present. "I know, it sounds stupid now, but the thought that somewhere out there we'd gotten it right got me through a lot of crap."

"Wait, wait, hang on," I said. Everyone was looking sort of confused and uncomfortable, which I recognized as my cue to jump in with both feet. "You'd prefer the world of the Winchester prophecies? Where Michael and Lucifer each got their ultimate meat suits and went to war in full glory?"

Her cheeks got even pinker. "I did say I knew it sounded stupid. And…" She cut off, toyed with her mug a little, then continued, "and I was an only child, but I was also a silly little hopeless romantic, and I … I always hoped that since it was brothers they were possessing, that their bond would be stronger than the archangels' hate, that they could throw it off and save the world anyway. What? Why are you all smiling like that?"

Sam and I were avoiding each other's eyes, uncomfortable with talking about our bond, but Gabriel was making an obnoxious awwwwww noise while everyone else tried not to laugh.

"These boys are just adorable when they're being modest, is all," he said. "Didn't introduce themselves properly when we picked you up, did they? Anna Milton, meet Sam and Dean Winchester. Archangel-plot-foilers and world-savers extraordinaire. In our universe, at least."

Anna put one hand over her mouth, eyes wide and bright, then let out a high-pitched squeal, reminding me of another red-headed fangirl I'd known, one that'd probably never even been born in this universe. "Okay, now you have to tell me everything!"

Mary pulled me aside once we'd talked past our Anna's history and her own resurrection, moving on to the British Men of Letters. Both Anna and Castiel were listening with rapt attention; he'd eavesdropped on bits of it before, and seen it all in Cas's memories, but the tale was quite a ride.

"What are her options at this point?" she asked once we were out of the room. "Of course, she's welcome to stay here, but now that she knows what she used to be, will that be enough for her?"

"That's up to her," I said, shrugging. "She knows where her grace is, and how to get it back, if she decides she wants to be an angel again, but we're gonna make damn sure she's aware of all the risks first."

She startled me by snatching me into a hug, snaking her arms tight around my waist and pressing her face into my chest. "You're a good kid, Dean. I probably don't tell you that enough."

"Mom, I'm almost forty," I told the top of her head, but I hugged her back anyway, closing my eyes and soaking in her soft warmth while I still could. It would about kill me to leave her behind, but Bobby was right. She deserved better than what her own world could offer.

"Age doesn't matter for you and me," she said, pulling back and grinning up at me as she put a hand to my cheek. "Relatively speaking, we've spent more time off this world than on it. I don't care how big you are, you're still my baby. You and Sam, both."

Her other baby, all six-feet-four-inches of him, stuck his head into the hallway. "All good in here, guys? Anna's almost caught up, multiverse-wise, so Jack's about to start on his part of the story. Do you want to be in the room, just in case?"

Ah, yes, the admitting-to-being-Lucifer's-kid part. Just because our Anna had been nice about it in Freyja's realm didn't mean this still-human Anna would, too, even after learning about her own rebellion.

We followed him back into the main room, and I returned to Cas's side while Mary started bustling around making sandwiches for everyone. Anna's mug still sat at her elbow, half-full and stone-cold, as Jack started on the sordid tale of his own conception.

"It's … it's gone!"

We were back in the field in Kentucky, facing the tree that had – until at least a week previously – sheltered Anna's grace. Its leaves were already yellowing, turning brittle at the edges, and Anna's desolate wail rattled them a little.

She'd spent the last week inside the Haven, recovering from her ordeal and thinking hard about her options while the rest of us went about our business, putting the finishing touches on this world's reboot. Castiel visited when he could, letting her get to know him again and reassuring her that he'd still be her friend, no matter what she ended up choosing to do.

She had announced that morning that she'd reached a stalemate and would like to visit her grace, to see if just being near it could convince her one way or another, but when our gang landed in the field once more, we made an unfortunate discovery.

Cas put a hand to the tree trunk before nodding in confirmation of Anna's gut feeling. His expression stayed neutral, but I could see his angel blade slide into his other hand behind his back. Open field, invisible super-powered airborne enemies, it was enough to set anyone's teeth on edge.

The rest of us moved into ready positions, with Anna noticing and mimicking us a few beats later, eyes wide. Sam and I were probably safe – any angel that would steal a grace wouldn't consider humans a threat – but it had been a while since someone had underestimated me. My lips stretched, teeth baring in an anticipatory grin.

"Anything on the radio, guys?" Sam asked, but there was a round of head-shaking in response, which ratcheted up the tension even further. If anyone on Heaven's side had found it, they would have reported it like a good little soldier. Lack of buzz meant that Michael had missed somebody in his Host-wide purge.

Question was, who?

"My money's on Uriel again," I murmured, keeping my eyes moving. "Michael may have cleared him, but ours was cracked all the way through. There's no way this version avoided it completely."

"Astonishing. A logical conclusion from a mud monkey, if crudely put."

I gritted my teeth and held my tongue as we all turned to face Uriel, who was suddenly standing ten feet away, still wearing the stern-faced older man he'd favored back on our side. Any one-liners I might've managed would've been wasted on him anyway.

By announcing his presence like he had, he seemed to be indicating he wasn't here to fight us, which was a promising start. I had no doubt that Jack could take him alone, even if Cas and Gabriel weren't also along for the ride, but this was Castiel's planet, and Castiel's Uriel, and our actions here could have consequences for him.

Uriel's condescending gaze scanned our group. "What do we have here? Lucifer's child," he gave Jack a respectful nod, "several useless humans from the wrong reality," he sneered at Sam and me, and to my surprise, Gabriel, "my erstwhile commander," his eyes glowed at Anna, and I started to get really concerned about his motivations, "and an errant angel. Who is …?"

He trailed off, peering at Cas, who was wearing a grey t-shirt and a pair of ripped jeans under one of my long-sleeved flannels – not exactly the paragon of tidiness one would expect from a member of the Host. I found it ridiculously attractive, myself. "Castiel, is it you? Truly? You have been acting more independently since this whole affair began, but I did not think you were capable of this."

He gestured at Anna, his tone combining with the simple hand motion to convey the sheer depth of the shit Castiel would be in if Uriel tattled on him.

"Do not mistake me, Uriel," Cas said, face stern. "While we share many of the same memories, I am not this world's Castiel."

Uriel's eyes widened. "Michael did not mention that an angel from the other universe accompanied the Nephilim! How…"

He trailed off, and I saw calculations flash over his face, the pros and cons of another angel discovering his secret, speculations about both Castiels' loyalties, how to use this unknown quantity to his advantage.

"You removed the grace that was sustaining this tree," Cas stated. It wasn't a question. "How did you learn of its existence?"

"Can you not feel them, then?" asked Uriel. "The weak spaces where the Nephilim has torn the fabric of our reality? I suspected my ability was unique, but it is satisfying to have confirmation. This world is riddled with them, now."

Jack looked horrified but stuck to our fall-back plan of keeping our mouths shut. Gabriel kept his head down as well, and the rest of us avoided looking at him, even though I at least was desperately curious about how he was masking himself from his brother.

"So many holes – most of them smaller than the limited human eye can perceive – in every possible environment. And I can tell that a larger one was opened here. I wanted to find out why. This field is no large-creature habitat, so why would you create an opening of such size?"

He turned to Anna, who hid her fear like an old pro and faced him with shoulders squared. "Then I noticed your tree. Ah, commander, how you have Fallen! Even now, they remember you, search for you, to punish you for your betrayal. Though it does seem to have become less of a priority as the years pass."

"You could earn a promotion by turning her grace in on its own," suggested Cas, after glancing at a stoic Anna. "There is no need to inform Heaven of her continued existence as a human."

Cracked as he was, Uriel managed to give Cas a shocked look. "Counseling treason? You? I never thought I would exist long enough to witness the day!"

Cas didn't reply, a move designed to invite a classic villain monologue, and Uriel went for it hard. "No, I seek no advancement under Michael's stewardship. His little purge reversed millennia of hard work. It takes time and effort to change an angel's mind. Commander, you are the key to my new beginning: an embodiment of the rewards to be reaped by following a different set of orders."

"Whose orders are those?" she asked, speaking for the first time since his arrival. "Do you intend to release Lucifer again, to restart your war when this planet is just getting back on its feet? I refuse."

Everyone's eyes shot back to Uriel – we all knew what he was capable of when refused, after all – but he just smiled. It was a small smile, but it was more than we'd ever seen on his face before. "Take up your grace once more. With it will come the memory of what you once were, what you once believed. We were allies, you and I, and shall be again."

Anna's pale face went even whiter in shock. This was something new, something our Anna either hadn't experienced or hadn't shared with us.

Moving slowly, since everyone but Gabriel was still holding a weapon of some sort, Uriel slipped a hand into his coat and withdrew a softly glowing vial. He held it out on the flat of his palm. Anna didn't even seem to realize she was being drawn toward it until Cas halted her with a hand on her shoulder.

"You do not have to," he reminded her. "You can still lead a fulfilling human life, help to rebuild society for the others of this planet who do not have your knowledge."

Uriel's smile grew crueler as his blocky fingers closed over the vial, cutting off the glow. "I am afraid that is not an option. She will take her grace back up and join me, or I will inform Michael that she exists. You will not be able to hide her from him forever, and when she is captured, she will be punished."

I felt my teeth grinding in sheer frustration. Angels were such dicks. But could we ignore his statement that she'd worked with him before? One rotten angel in a newly-cleansed Host wouldn't spoil the whole barrel, not for a long, long, time. But two?

"Anna, catch." Gabriel raised a hand and faced his open palm at Uriel. The vial popped out of its cage of fingers, and she snagged it as it sailed through the air toward her.

Uriel's eyes went wide in sudden realization. "Gabriel," he breathed in a voice tinged with awe. Then his brow furrowed. "What are you doing to me?"

"Making sure you hold still while we sort ourselves out." I'd never seen so much disdain on his mobile face. He flexed the palm still pointed at Uriel, who stiffened like a board in response, face contorting with his futile efforts to resist.

Gabriel turned back to Anna as if it was no trouble at all to hold a member of the Host against their will. Maybe it wasn't. "Ball's in your court, honey. The way I see it, you have more options than this crow-ridden pile of goat droppings let on. I can keep you hidden, and comfortably at that, even after we leave."

Uriel gasped. Gabriel froze, and then let his shoulders droop as he realized what he'd just given away. If this world's Gabriel wanted to continue unmolested once we went home, we were going to have to go with Option D.

Looking at Gabriel's face, I could tell he'd known how this was going to end from the moment Uriel showed up, but just because he knew it was inevitable, it didn't make him feel any better about it.

"We can't," said Sam the Peacemaker into the ensuing silence, looking from face to impassive face in our party. Even Anna was grim and frowning. "As far as Michael's concerned, Uriel passed the test. He wouldn't welcome any vigilante-ism from us."

Gabriel gave him a smile, though it seemed a little forced. "Then maybe it's time we declared our welcome to be officially worn out. We're pretty much done here, right, nephew of mine?"

Uriel's jaw dropped at Jack's reluctant nod, though Gabriel's will kept him from making another sound.

I didn't want to be the party pooper, but I did have to bring up one last point before we brought Uriel to his conclusion. "What about Castiel? Shouldn't he at least know what we're plannin' before we gank this dude and make a fast exit from this universe?"

Our prisoner's eyes bounced around between us, confused and concerned as everyone nodded in reluctant agreement. I figured even with his imminent demise, Uriel didn't need to know just how closely Castiel was tied to us, so when I prayed for him to join us, I did it as discreetly as possible.

Gabriel was scowling. "I wouldn't mind running it past other me as well, but I can't trust this son of a pig not to go straight to Michael while I go find him."

"Well, if this is our grand finale, there's no reason to hold anything back," said Jack. A glowing line snapped into existence in front of him with startling suddenness. He'd gotten so much better at that. "Back in a flash." He took two steps forward and vanished, reappearing after about thirty seconds with the other Gabriel in tow.

"Never a dull moment with you guys," Alt-Gabriel said, taking in the tableau we presented. "Ah, Uriel. Couldn't just slip away quietly, huh?" He approached Anna, took her hand, patted it gently. He'd been in and out of the Haven over the past week as well. "Don't worry, honey. We won't let him spoil everything."

"But what if he's right?" Anna asked in a small voice. A flapping of invisible wings signaled Castiel's arrival as Jack closed his portal to Gabriel's safe place, but Anna was focused entirely on her decision. "What if I take up my grace again and remember that I'm your enemy?"

"That will not happen," announced Castiel, and Anna startled a bit, gaze bouncing between the trench-coated angel that had appeared before her and the flannel-clad one she'd come with.

"I know of the alliance he speaks of," Castiel continued, proving what a quick study he was when it came to snagging Cas's memories on the fly – or just that he'd been there a while, watching without being seen. "You confided in me before you Fell, and I do not believe you held anything back."

His eyes narrowed as he moved to stand in front of the frozen Uriel. "A simple non-aggression pact. You both agreed that you did not want to follow Michael's orders forever, but you did not agree with the freeing of Lucifer. You assisted him in convincing several others to his cause, but you never truly joined it yourself."

The panic that lit behind Uriel's eyes showed that this was news to him, but Anna just seemed relieved.

Castiel glanced at his Gabriel, then gave the rest of us a look that dripped cynicism. "Did you have an exit strategy for this mess? Uriel can – and will – make life very difficult for everyone present if allowed to leave with his current knowledge, but Michael will not…oh."

His dwindling innocence finally allowed him to make the last logical leap, and his face fell the slightest bit. "So this is it, then? You all will be leaving soon?"

The empty place in my gut, the one that Cas had been steadily filling, panged with a throbbing echo of loss. I didn't love this Castiel, but leaving him felt like abandoning a puppy. Like booting Cas out of the bunker to survive on his own all over again.

Cas took my hand without looking at me, rescuing me from drowning in the memory of that particular betrayal. "We do not have a choice, if Anna is to have hers. Once Uriel is dispatched, we will not have long before he is missed. Have either of you made your decision?"

He looked from his double to Anna and back again, and my stomach dropped in shock. "Castiel, you're thinking of exiling yourself?" I squeaked. I hadn't known.

He opened his mouth to reply but stopped and frowned. "This will not become easier with waiting." And then he whipped out his angel blade and plunged it into Uriel's chest before anyone could make a move to stop him.

Brightness flared out of Uriel's eyes a final time before they went blank forever, and the smoky shadow of his wings draped itself across the waving grass. We gave him a moment of silence, out of respect for Castiel's act if not for Uriel himself, and then Jack stepped up and all evidence of Uriel's existence vanished in little golden sparkles as he scattered his molecules via portals.

"Does Heaven have a way to detect when an angel dies?" asked Sam. "If so, I recommend we be inside the Haven when they figure out what we did."

The Gabriels gave him twin frowns. "Michael will have felt it, but he won't have a way to tell who or where," said Alt-Gabriel. "Process of elimination will bring him 'round to you-all pretty quickly, but Anna can't go there just yet, not while her grace is …" He broke off, waved his arms around as if that could help him locate the right word, then tried, "…disembodied?"

Our Gabriel nodded. "No telling what Bobby's wacky wards will do to it. Not to rush you or anything, honey, but if you could reach a decision in the next ten seconds, that would save us all a ton of trouble."

Anna looked down at the glowing vial resting on her palm. When she looked up again, she was smiling. "Let's do it. Give me back my wings." She smirked at Alt-Gabriel, then added, "…Roomie."

He beamed back at her. "And a welcome one, after all this time alone! Everyone with mortal eyes, please cover them immediately, unless you want to lose them. Anna, this is going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me."

"Jack, that means you, too! This is not somethin' we want to experiment with," I yelled before burying my face in Cas's shoulder. Our mingled scents on his shirt distracted me while light flared around us and Anna screamed in agony.

It seemed to go on forever, but it was probably less than a minute before Anna, a bit hoarse now, called an all-clear.

"And now we should definitely go," said Gabriel. Cas's arm tightened around my waist, and when I opened my eyes, we were all standing on the hill above the Haven again, as if by prior agreement.

"He might not be able to pinpoint where one of us dies, but when the angel bell rings, he usually comes running. It's a skill unique to him, and uniquely annoying," the other Gabriel added.

Jack was frowning at the horizon. "Do you want to say your goodbyes now? Or would you all like to come inside the wards for a bit, before Heaven's judgement arrives?"

Anna smiled at him and started walking. "I have all the time in the world to get used to having wings again, and sorting through my old memories," she called over her shoulder. "I can give it back up for a little bit to say farewell to the people who saved my life. Call it the final wish of an imminent fugitive?"

We all startled into motion, jogging after her and keeping up a suppressed-panic-mild-hysteria trot until we were safely inside.

Mary was sitting at the table with her mug of tea again, much like she had been the first time we brought Anna home. "What now?" she asked, eying the group and taking in everyone's shock-glazed eyes.

"There was a complication," Anna said, twitching her shoulders in an unconscious mimic of Castiel on his previous visits. He'd gotten a lot better at hiding how uncomfortable the wards made him, but losing access to your grace wasn't something he could get used to, and it didn't seem to be any easier for her.

Mom, of course, noticed it right away. "You're an angel again?" she asked. She'd never said anything, not wanting to influence Anna's very personal decision, but I could tell that she'd sort of wanted Anna to hang around for a bit longer. As much as she loved her boys, we weren't so good at girl talk.

Anna nodded, and gifted Mary with a beautiful smile. "But I won't forget your kindness to a poor traumatized human girl. I'll come back to visit and help out when I can, even though I can't hope to repay you."

Sam frowned. "But we have to go. Today. Mom won't-"

"She's not coming with us, Sammy," I interrupted him. The room went dead silent as everyone's stunned gazes bounced back and forth between my brother and me. Mom looked stunned, too. I hadn't discussed it with her, and it looked like Bobby hadn't either, so me coming down on this side of an argument we didn't have the time to have was understandably off-putting.

"What?" Sam recovered enough to be angry. "Of course she is! She can't stay here-"

"Where she has a safe home and a strong partner and a shiny new world to rebuild and defend?" I interrupted again. "Why the Hell not? What's back at home that's so great?"

"Her family!"

I shrugged. "We'll come visit, if Jack's okay with it. She's made a new family here, anyway."

Sam started to retort, but then took a look around the room. Bobby hovered in a doorway, summoned by the shouting but not wanting to intrude. This world's angels, even the freshly minted one, gave him encouraging nods, and Gabriel put his hands on Mom's shoulders.

"We'll take care of her, Samwich, don't worry. She can be happy here."

"Don't I get a say in this?" Mary asked, but behind the annoyance in her voice, there was a tired sort of relief. She didn't even bother shrugging Gabe's hands off.

I went over and straddled the bench seat, facing her. "Of course you do. But don't make this decision based on what you think we want." I touched her cheek, skin soft under my rough callouses, and my eyes welled up. "You deserve the chance to actually live, not just exist, and that's what you've been forcin' yourself to do ever since we got you back."

I glanced over at Cas – we'd never settled the disagreement I was about to bring up, but that would have to wait. "When Sam and I made our deal with that reaper, to escape from that government lockup, and she said she was leavin' with a Winchester or there'd be consequences, you were gonna volunteer, weren't you? If Cas hadn't intervened, we would've lost you right there."

Her eyes were suspiciously shiny as well, and after a few beats she could only manage a quick nod as a response.

"So live here. No one has to lose anyone, it'll be just like you moved to a different country. Hell, we can even be pen pals, if Jack doesn't deem it a frivolous use of his powers."

I glanced over at the kid. He wasn't making any attempt to corral the tears that were sluicing down his cheeks, but he was grinning, too, and he gave me a vigorous nod.

Mary was wavering, wanting to give in but hating herself for it. "Does it have to be so soon? What did Sam mean, today?"

"Our big brother missed a miscreant," said the Gabriel that was still standing behind her. "Uriel got to Anna's grace first, and then he knew too much to be allowed to leave. Unfortunately, with the war being over and all, any angelic death is going to raise some serious red flags."

"Not to mention reinstating Anna, here," our Gabe threw in. "The only way we all get out of this alive and not under Heaven's scrutiny for the rest of our existences is for us off-worlders to leave now while Castiel tells Michael that Anna went with us. If Castiel doesn't decide to bug out, too, that is."

We all turned to Castiel, but he was already shaking his head. "No. I can better protect everyone if I keep my place. What?"

Every face in the room – even the non-human ones – had assumed a half-pained expression at his decision, and he was having difficulty reading us. If it had been Cas, I would've been the first to launch into the Free Will lecture, but this one wasn't mine to fix.

Cas stepped in for me. "What you said is technically correct, but it is risky – Michael probably thinks you a sympathizer already, and after today…"

He trailed off, no doubt thinking of the nonchalance with which Castiel had ganked a fellow angel, consequences be damned. "Do you think any here could live with your sacrifice," he started again, "if this action is not what you truly want? This existence is yours, and you cannot continue to live it solely for the benefit of others." He gave his double a gentle smile. "However, it is possible to do both. Is that the case here?"

Castiel smiled back, pleased at being understood. "Yes. I have selfish reasons for protecting the beings in this room – I will need them when I do decide to walk away from my brothers and sisters. Until that day comes, I will keep Michael's faith. With Uriel gone, I am the only one who can detect when Jack opens a portal. He needs me."

There was a beat of silence as we all realized that that really should have been obvious, if anyone'd taken the time to think about it at all. Castiel could sense when Jack used his power; we'd figured that out ages ago. He kept showing up whenever Jack did something big, claiming that Michael sent him, and I'd just accepted that, thinking of course angels could feel Jack punching holes in the fabric of space-time.

Turns out he'd been reporting on us all along, getting sent to us on official business instead of sneaking away and risking getting caught. It was such a genius blend of angelic rule-following and human guile, it left us all gaping.

"Color me impressed, Cassie," said Alt-Gabriel. Even with everyone else in the room rendered speechless, Gabriel always managed to find something to say. "Well done. And yes, Anna and I will welcome you with open arms if you ever need to get away, even if it's just temporary. I'll show you where the Batcave is when everything's over."

"And you-all will always be welcome here, too," Bobby threw in gruffly, stunning us all further. "If you don't mind the wards. Never thought I'd be sayin' it to a pack of angels, but it's gonna get damned quiet 'round here with just Mary and me rattlin' around."

He crossed the room with sure strides, nudged Alt-Gabriel aside with a gentle elbow and took his place at Mom's back, one hand resting at the base of her neck. She gave him a warm smile over her shoulder, and I suddenly felt like an intruder on a private moment.

"When you do drop by, knock first," our Gabriel hissed as an exaggerated aside behind his hand, and Mom's cheeks flushed pink. Even Bobby looked a touch self-conscious, but I'd never seen the man blush before and he probably wasn't going to start now, even with both Gabriels favoring him with mirror leers.

He gave me a grateful nod over her blond head, and his approval gave me a serious case of the warm and fuzzies. It's hard to think of yourself as a terrible person when Bobby Singer respects you.

Looking at the pair of them, it hit me hard that we'd be leaving them behind in just a few minutes. "Sam?" I asked. He was looking at them, too, eyes soft, but his gaze snapped to me in response. "Any further objections?"

He made a suspicious sniffling noise and shook his head.

"Mom? Are you gonna make the right choice here?"

She placed a delicate hand over Bobby's on her neck, paused, then nodded.

And then every human and part-human in the room openly embraced the chick-flick-ness of the moment, with the hugging and the crying and the murmurs of how much everyone loved everyone and how much everyone would miss everyone. Old Me would've hated it, but Better Adjusted Me was smiling through my tears at the novelty of saying goodbye to someone that wasn't dying.

All of my life, when people left me behind, it was because they were either too angry to stay or because they were dead. The sweet certainty that these people were sad to see me go – and that I would definitely be seeing them again some day – was a bittersweet ache in my gut.

The angels stood in a little clump, saying their own goodbyes. Had they been the regular sort of angel, we would have baffled them – and made them very uncomfortable – with our flamboyant display of human emotion, but these were no ordinary angels. They'd been Winchestered, and now could never be the same.

When the humans were done with each other, we turned to that knot of slightly damaged beings and started all over again, though we toned it down a little. Both Gabriels, of course, toned it back up several notches, draping themselves over each other and Sam and wailing in a comical fashion.

Or it would have been comical, if it hadn't been apparent that at least a small part of both of them was completely serious. Gabriel had never Fallen, but he'd made more of an effort than any of his siblings to understand humans and now he was paying the price.

I gave Anna a tight hug, feeling the power that her petite frame now contained thrum in response to her emotions.

"Thank you for everything," she murmured. "Even the stuff you did for the other me, your me." She pulled back enough to see my face and gave me a decidedly non-angelic smirk. "Especially that stuff."

My mouth dropped open. "How did you…? You don't even have her memories!"

Her face grew serious. "You boys changed all the rules, when Jack started popping in and out of universes. I think a bit of her rode in on your Castiel and Gabriel. They were dead as well, yes? I don't have everything, but there are bits and pieces floating around in my grace that I know aren't me."

She placed a hand on my upper arm, mirroring the mark I'd had when our Anna had seen me in just my skin. "This, for example. How would I know about this, if I didn't have some of her?"

Cas appeared at my side as if he'd popped there, even though his wings didn't work inside the Haven. His fingers slipped into mine and squeezed hard, though his face retained its pleasant expression. Mmm, Jealous Cas was hot.

Castiel moved in on my other side, drawn by my horrid lack of self-control, and Anna gave me a knowing grin and one last peck on the cheek before moving off to sit with Mom while we finished up.

"Keep an eye on her, will ya?" I told him, squeezing Cas's hand back and ignoring the way his expression grew slightly sheepish. "She knows things that this Universe's Anna shouldn't, so maybe there's a leak somewhere? A small one?"

Castiel tilted his head, considering it, but I was ready this time, focusing hard on death and being sad to keep from broadcasting my attraction to that particular action. "It would have to be a complicated leak," he said, giving me a small grin to show that my efforts had not gone unnoticed. "From here to your world to our lady's realm through it? Though, we did not satisfactorily determine whether every universe had their own lady or if she had her own realm outside of all of them."

I shared a glance with Cas. "Could this be your lady, helpin' Anna out? Givin' her somethin' to remember us by as she heads into exile?"

His eyes grew wide, and then a glowing smile spread across his face. "That would explain many things. Particularly, how my counterpart here has gotten so much from you. I knew it could not be explained by simple grace transfer!"

Castiel was starting to smile as well. "If so, then I am glad for it. Both of you have given me many gifts, and your absence will ache, but the knowledge of my lady's favor – and her approval – will be some comfort until your next visit."

"We will be back, though maybe not too soon since Michael will probably be pissed at us for a while. Don't snitch on Jack's next portal in, yeah?"

He looked back and forth between me and Cas for a second, and then his eyes welled up, spilling moisture down his cheeks, much like the first day we'd met him. He seemed less confused this time, but still sort of in awe about it, putting a hand to his face and staring at the wetness on his fingers.

Cas gripped his shoulder, drawing his gaze. "Feel if you must, brother, but do not Fall. Not yet. Not over this." He shot me a smirk, including me in their little moment. "I do not believe Dean could survive the guilt of inciting me to Fall again."

"Shut up," I grumbled, falling back on my standard retort to hide the fact that my own eyes were filling up for the tenth time in ten minutes. "This one's at least a little your fault, too. He's a team effort."

That managed to draw a wet-sounding chuckle from Castiel, which I took as a victory. And then the Gabriels were mobbing us with hugs and more tears and everything sort of blurred for a bit, and then we were all standing outside, carrying the stuff we'd packed in and saying our final goodbyes.

"Six months," Mom said. "I want to either get a letter or see one of your faces in exactly six months or I swear I won't he held responsible for my actions."

Sam and I exchanged grins as we engulfed her tiny figure in our arms one last time. She may not have been born a Winchester, but she had the attitude – not to mention the casual disregard for consequences – down to a frickin' tee.

Bobby offered us respectful handshakes when Jack traded him to us in exchange for Mary, but of course we ignored that in favor of more back-pounding embraces. "You boys be safe out there," he said gruffly. "I'd be real proud, 'f I were that other me. Hell, I'm proud. Don't you worry 'bout yer ma, I'll keep her safe. She'll keep me safe, too."

"Thanks, Bobby," I said, squeezing his shoulder, trying to force myself to let him go again. It was extremely difficult. "We'll see you around."

And then the whole group – native angels included – trudged off up the hill and left the pair of them standing there, waving a hand every time one of us glanced back.

I moved to walk beside this world's Gabriel for a minute after we crested the hill and left them behind. "Did you, uh, move things along back there? Get us out the door faster?"

He gave me his best attempt at an innocent face, but his golden eyes shone in suppressed mirth and after a few seconds he gave up and he shrugged. "I didn't want to rush y'all, since you-all are leaving and I get to stay, but Big Brother is definitely watching us by now."

He felt the rest of the group's attention shift to him but didn't bask in it like he would have under different circumstances. "That's right, kids. We're going to have to time this properly, and you, Castiel, need to have your story straight when the rest of us vanish. Speaking of the rest of us, aren't we missing someone?"

He raised an eyebrow at Jack, who grinned back. "I called him when we left the wards. He'll join us when he finishes tying up loose ends."

I was lost for a brief second, and then I realized that of course he meant Lucifer. In the rush of Anna's reinstatement and our hurried goodbyes, I'd managed to forget the entire reason we'd come here in the first place.

"If he's watching," said Anna, scanning the skies as she walked, "why doesn't he just show up right now and snatch me? That's more in line with what I remember about him than just waiting around."

"He's a purist, our Michael," Gabriel replied. "When we all go back to our universe and stop getting our chocolate in his peanut butter, he can have his world of black-and-white rules back. Until we do, it's hard for him to label your existence as 'wrong.'"

"Plus, Lucy's showing up soon," this world's Gabriel added. "It'll be three archangels – plus two regular angels and one abstention – against one, and even if he didn't mind those odds, he just settled a war. Probably doesn't want to kick off another one quite yet."

Castiel gave Gabriel his stolen smirk. "The abstention is me, I assume?"

Gabriel shrugged back. "Well, yeah. He knows you're still on his side, but even he wouldn't force you to fight your own double. He's not a cruel being, just a righteous one. So when we've all gone, and he shows up with his regular impeccably dramatic timing, you can tell him the truth: yes, you knew about Anna, but us three archangels made you keep quiet about her until she was no longer Michael's problem."

"Three archangels? Am I being included in something without my consent?"

Even though we were walking through broad daylight, Lucifer still managed to materialize from the shadows. Adrenaline spurted into my system, an automatic reaction after a decade of the sound of that voice being followed immediately by an attempt on my life.

While I tried to chill myself out with some deep breathing, Gabriel beamed in greeting. "Speaking of impeccably dramatic timing! Just getting our game plan together about Anna, here. You remember Anna, right?"

Lucifer flashed her a dismissive once-over, then did a double-take and took another more thorough look. "It's coming back to me," he purred. "What do we have here? Another little angel all alone inside her very own human skin?"

Anna's red hair glinted in the sun, set off by her pale skin and the whites of her too-wide eyes as he shifted closer. I'd never seen her look so much like a deer caught in the headlights, but I remembered how complimentary our Anna had been about him when we'd caught up with her in Freyja's realm, so this had to be the equivalent of meeting a favorite celebrity who was known for being an asshole to his fans.

"Do we have one of her at home?" he asked out loud, keeping up eye contact that bordered on menacing as we trudged along the path.

"Ours got disassembled by Michael a while back," said Gabriel, making sure to enunciate clearly for anyone listening from afar. "She'll fit right in. Is this far enough?"

We all stopped walking, and Jack looked back in the direction of the Haven, judging. "Feels like we're clear," he said. A golden line sliced downward in front of the group, a sparking seam where two realities met. The light of it played across his grim face. "That means this is goodbye, then."

This is where the timing got tricky. We all said our farewells to Castiel – Cas and I snuck in some physical affection, leaving him with an adorably baffled look – and then he stood back a bit, forlorn, as the rest of us sorted ourselves out.

"You're going to love the new reality," said our Gabriel to his counterpart and Anna. "It's just like the old one, but better."

"Every place is better, with friends," Alt-Gabriel agreed cheerily, and we all groaned. Sam managed to sneak in a final squeeze of Alt-Gabe's arm before Jack's portal whirled us away.

Epilogue

The final spark of the rift fizzled out into thin air, and Castiel felt the last vestiges of Jack the Nephilim's magic vanish with it. For a fraction of a second his senses stretched themselves thin, reflexively searching as far as they could for any sign of the group that had dropped out of the sky and changed his life, but he chided himself at his own futility and reined them back in, waiting for the inevitable next step.

"Castiel!" His name – in Michael's most intimidating voice – cracked through the sky like heat lightning, heralding his brother's imminent arrival. He would have liked Dean and Gabriel to witness it, just so that he could enjoy the sardonic rolling of their eyes, but his memories of their time together would have to remain tucked away, close to his heart, his most precious secret.

He allowed himself to hope that his Gabriel and their Anna had reached their hiding spot safely, offering a brief prayer to a lady he had not met – not yet – that Michael had not noticed them flying away as the others went through the portal. Then he tried to make himself focus on Michael, on this conversation that they were about to have, which would determine if he was to be punished or rewarded for his recent behavior.

"What have you done?" his brother demanded, now standing before him with arms crossed over his chest. Castiel took another distracted fraction of a second to examine his brother's "meat suit" with new eyes, slotting it into the memories he had gleaned from Dean.

John Winchester had been dead when Michael had raised him and asked to be invited in, as recompense. In all the millennia that Castiel had existed, he had never known Michael to cede a single iota of control to whomever was his host, but John Winchester's reaction to seeing the woman he had loved had been … edifying.

His own relationships with his long string of hosts – up to and including Jimmy Novak – had always been distant ones, for all that their consciousnesses slumbered, dreaming, a heartbeat away from his own. Jimmy suddenly awakening and stealing back control of his limb had been a shock, and Castiel was nowhere near as powerful as Michael, so he could only guess at the power of John Winchester's love for Mary.

Love was a concept he would be content to spend the remainder of his existence contemplating. He had thought he had known its meaning, taught to 'love' the humans by his Father's laws, but what he now knew … it was beyond anything he could have conceived of on his own.

His wandering attention, minute as the interval had been on a human scale, did not escape Michael's notice, and the righteous glare on the young face his brother wore faded. "Are you quite well, Castiel? Have they done something to you?"

Castiel blinked at him, a human response he'd picked up, before remembering to bow his head to show respect. "It is difficult to define, brother," he said to his feet. "I know that I should have reported the presence of the Fallen Anna to you at once, but … I found myself unable to."

'Lyin' works best if you stick as close to the truth as possible,' Dean's voice growled in his head, an echo of a memory. 'Easier to keep track of everythin' that way.'

'He's an angel, Dean,' retorted the exasperated voice of his other self, the one who had made all those difficult choices and managed to reap the greatest possible reward. 'He is not likely to forget anything.'

'But Cas, you're really bad at lyin', I'm just tryin' to help him.'

Love, thought Castiel again, unable to stop his lips from curling up ever so slightly at the corners.

Michael was starting to look concerned, a furrow forming between his heavy eyebrows. "Are you having a reaction to the absence of the others who share your grace? You do not seem to be entirely … present."

"That … seems a logical conclusion," Castiel responded, startled that his brother had figured out his problem before he had even noticed he was having one. "I was assuming that this empty feeling was simply loss, but …"

He trailed off, letting Michael read whatever he wanted to from his sudden silence while he explored this new idea. Over the past six months, he had become accustomed to the gentle tidal pull of his other self, their shared grace pulling them along like the moon tugging at the ocean, but now he was unmoored, adrift. Alone.

When this had all started, he had been afraid that he would lose himself, become something unfamiliar overnight, but even with all of their differences and choices, Castiel was still Castiel, and so was Castiel.

He couldn't help the snort of laughter that escaped him on the heels of that thought, and now Michael looked downright alarmed.

"Maybe you should take a break," Michael said, cupping Castiel's cheek and tilting his face up so that he could peer into Castiel's eyes. Eyes that seemed to be on the verge of leaking, again, which didn't help his case. "I relied on you too heavily while the visitors were here. See to your own needs for … for a week. Then report back for debriefing."

The lewd smirk that Dean Winchester would acquire if asked to 'debrief' flitted through his brain, filling in for the absence of its owner in Castiel's reality, and he laughed one more time, and then his eyes overflowed.

"I apologize for my lack of control, brother," he managed after a deep breath, swiping his tan sleeve across the cheek that wasn't still in Michael's custody. "I've never … felt like this before."

And that was Father's honest truth.