Chapter 5: An Angel, a Girl and a Ghost Walk Into a Supermarket…

Author's Note: THANK YOU FOR YOUR REVIEWS! Yeah, I know I personally messaged everyone with accounts thanking them, but still. THANK YOU GUYS! Your input and encouragement is what keeps me writing this fic!

So, just a quick heads up about this next chapter: the story has jumped ahead about a month. If you ask nicely I might consider doing a one-shot or two about what happened between chapter 4 and 5, but those events weren't very important to the main story arc, so I skipped them. And yes, if you were wondering, the demon in chapter 4 was important to the plot (beyond just giving Jess some field experience). And guess what?! THE WINCHESTERS ARE IN CHAPTER 5! Yes sirree, the boys are in chapter 5, back and better than ever.

And without further ado, here's more of the (Mis)adventures of Jess and Castiel, plus Winchesters this time!

"Dean, that is quite possibly the most disgusting, dilapidated, decomposition-ridden-"

"I get it, college boy, you like fancy words! Quit it with the alliteration already!"

"…"

"What?"

"…"

"Sammy…?"

"Are you feeling okay, Dean?"

"…Yes…?"

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah, I am, what the hell's going on, you're freaking me out, dude!"

"You said 'alliteration'. In a sentence."

"You're not the only one who sat through Advanced English senior year."

"I was under the impression you slept through that class."

"Nooo… Quit looking at me like that! The teacher was hot! Ms. Simmons… and that pencil skirt she'd always wear…"

"…"

"Yeah… okay, go back to dissing the supermarket, the judgmental staring's starting to bug me."

"…"

"Sam…"

"That isn't a supermarket. It's a health hazard."

"A health hazard that sells pie and rock salt. Now get your pansy ass outta my car so I can go stock up on the bare necessities."

"…"

"No bitch-facing, Sammy, there's pie in the future!"

…

Meanwhile, inside the disgusting, dilapidated, decomposition-ridden supermarket…

CRASH

BANG

"SHIT!"

"Jessica, behind you."

WHAM

"No need to sound so calm about it, Castiel!"

"It is merely a restless spirit. I trust it is not beyond you capabilities to combat it. After all, you almost successfully dispatched a demon with 'Lysol' and 'toilet paper' a mere month ago."

"CASTIEL!"

"Jessica, I am busy."

CRASH!

"Castiel, it's chasing me! A little angelic help here would be great."

"Jessica, this is a training exercise to better prepare you for the real world. My assistance at this point would defeat the purpose."

WHUMP.

Thud.

"Jessica, was running into me completely necessary?"

"I was running for my life, you were on the other side of a corner, sue me."

SCREECH!

"That would be the ghost who's currently trying to kill me."

"There is absolutely no need to act so peeved. We have combated at least five demons since your initial encounter with that creature in the Salvation Army facilities. You were the one who wanted to practice fighting other dark creatures in their natural habitat."

"Castiel, could you be any less helpful?!"

"Yes."

"Great, I guess I'll just go back to running for my life."

"Remember what I taught you. This is a training exercise. I will be very disappointed if you do not learn from it."

"I hate you."

"No, you do not. Your soul is currently too pure."

"Spoilsport."

WHUMP

SCREECH!

WHAM

"…The ghost just shattered all of the bottles of honey. All of them. Did you know it takes an extraordinary amount of time for a single worker bee to make even one tablespoon of honey? They spend their lives creating and creating and creating. It is literally their lives' work. And you, you ridiculous, depraved, half-soul, have destroyed that. Can you fathom the crime you have committed? Are you still capable of that?"

"Castiel… I don't think the ghost appreciates you lecturing it on the sanctity of honey…and for the record, the murderous-calm thing is kinda terrifying…"

"Jessica, please close your eyes while I exorcise this nuisance."

…

Meanwhile, still in the parking lot…

Dean and Sam Winchester strode towards the supermarket. They were casual, relaxed, easy in each other's company in a way that seemed to have become painfully elusive in the past few years. Sam hadn't really admitted it, not even to himself really, but he'd missed Dean. He'd missed the knowledge that there was someone out there that knew all of the shit that he'd seen, had been right there seeing it with him and was cool with it. It was liberating to have family at your back. In its own way. But those were deep thoughts Sam wouldn't bother to think until much later in time. Now he was just superficially aware that he may have, kind of, sort of, missed his big brother.

He thought back to a simpler time, a purer time.

It was the week before Thanksgiving break during Sam's second year at Stanford. The youngest Winchester was half asleep, sprawled out on the couch in his dorm's common room. Jess was sitting on the floor in front of the couch, her head pillowed on his stomach as she leaned back, reading a book. Distantly, foggily, he perceived the faint buzz of his cell phone vibrating on the table beside him, just far enough away that he'd have to actually wake up and move to reach it.

Sam considered it. All of the obligations and responsibilities and strings attached to having to actually move to bother answering his phone. He honestly did consider it. But in the end… nah. Who needed to answer the phone? Sleep was much nicer.

Content to have made a decision regarding the buzzing nuisance, Sam drifted deeper into sleep, only vaguely picking up on the sound of Jess sighing and answering his phone for him.

"Hello, Sam Winchester's phone…"

She told him later that it had been his brother calling to say he couldn't make it to Stanford for Thanksgiving. Sam didn't really think about it after that. It was just another missed chance to finally hash things out with Dean. Nothing new there. It wasn't until a week later that he heard from his absent sibling again. This time it was a series of texts on and off throughout Thanksgiving Day.

Happy Thanksgiving, Sammy.

Tell that girl thanks for the pie she sent to Bobby's.

Keep her around. This pie kicks ass.

And, by the way, you know I'm pretty damn proud of you, right?

You don't need to respond to that.

No chick-flick moments, got it?

Good.

Eating pie now.

Sam grinned to himself and saved the texts to his phone so he could scroll through them another day. Maybe next year his brother wouldn't be so busy and could come to Stanford for Thanksgiving. Or maybe Sam could take Jess to Bobby's and they could all have Thanksgiving together. Be a weird little dysfunctional family and eat pie and be happy. Yeah, that'd be nice.

In the present Sam sighed. He would never tell anyone this, but one of his biggest, most selfish regrets was that he never got to have that weird little dysfunctional family Thanksgiving with Dean and Bobby and Jess and maybe even their dad if the old bastard bothered to speak to him again. He didn't try to think about it much. It just made him feel lonely.

But at least now he had his brother. That was something. Yeah, they were walking through a parking lot at two o'clock in the morning to buy rock salt from the world's sketchiest grocery store, but hey, that's what being a Winchester was all about. Rock salt, rock music, and not being alone.

It was all weirdly…normal for a good minute before the supermarket started glowing.

It wasn't like it caught on fire or exploded or anything like that. It was more quiet; more pure than that. White light rose in the windows, rolling outward like some sort of blazing benediction, illuminating the night with white-hot purity. And when it dimmed and faded in a blink of an eye, nothing had really changed, and yet it was as if everything had subtly shifted ever-so-slightly to the left. For a good second Sam saw an alternate path. He saw the way things could have happened this night, the way a tiny part of him thought they should have happened, if their world was different.

The supermarket could have stayed grungy, dim and generally repulsive. He and Dean could have walked in. Dean could have bolted over to the pre-packaged pies while Sam could have spent the next five minutes searching for a salad that didn't look more brown than green. Sam could have given up his search for edible lettuce long enough to bicker with Dean about pie before heading over to the baking section to grab a couple big canisters of salt. That could have been when a vengeful spirit began knocking over shelving. They could have then spent their night locked in battle with a particularly pissy ghost. They could have crawled back to the Impala at five in the morning, too exhausted to even think. They could have had a very rough, very normal sort of night.

But they didn't. Instead they were standing here, basking in the after-image of a light that could only be described as 'heavenly'. It took a few minutes for one of them to find the words or even the urge to speak. In the end, it was Dean that broke the silence.

"Hey, Sammy, did you know that Mom used to tell me that angels were watching over us? Every night before we went to sleep. She'd say it every single damn night…"

"Yeah…" Sam wasn't really sure what he was agreeing with, he just knew that Dean was right about something.

"I think I just saw our angel."

"Maybe…"

And they stood still for a few more moments, basking in the left-overs of light that was no longer really there.

…

And now back to the grungy supermarket…

Jess looked at the wreckage all around them, the path of pure carnage the ghost had carved into what had been an admittedly gross, but perfectly functional supermarket minutes before she'd triggered what Castiel referred to as a 'vengeful spirit'. Jess breathed deeply, scooping up as much air as she could fit into her lungs in one moment, then expelling it with enough force to properly show just how hard she was working not to strangle a certain trenchcoated person of the angelic variety. "Castiel. What have we discussed about collateral property damage?"

The angel sighed and shrank back into his trenchcoat a bit, hunching his shoulders as if bunching invisible wings around his body. "That smiting inanimate objects because they don't agree with me is wrong and needlessly destructive."

"Exactly," Jess confirmed. She sighed and raked her finger through her messy blonde hair, scanned the urban wasteland all around them. "Well, this training session's a bust. It's a good thing you knocked out the employees beforehand."

Castiel nodded his agreement. "Yes, melting more people's eyes in their sockets would be unfortunate and unpleasant."

"More…?" Jess began to ask incredulously before backtracking, realizing that she didn't really want to know about the blinded humans left behind in Castiel's wake. Instead she snapped her mouth shut and shook her head. "I don't suppose you could miracle all this…creative redecorating…away, could you?"

"Creative redecorating? Jessica, I have smited this store. It is lucky it is still structurally sound and that all of the humans within the vicinity survived intact, yourself included."

Jess ran her hands down her face, "Well, however you phrase it, I don't suppose you could clean up this mess before tomorrow, could you? And speaking of messes, Castiel, there is a time and a place for interfering in monster-fighting-training."

"You were requesting my help…"

"Castiel, it's one thing to help me out when I'm getting my ass kicked, it's another to destroy a store because a ghost accidentally insulted bees by rampaging through the honey aisle."

"I do not see the difference. Bees are my Father's sacred creatures as well, and they cannot defend themselves or their lives' work as well as you can defend yourself. After all, you have been training for this sort of thing." Castiel's voice could not be more deadpan and dry if he were a robot.

'God help us all, he's discovered sarcasm,' Jess thought with a sort of wry irreverence. She opened her mouth, about to say something else, perhaps to try and convince her angel to 'miracle-away' the destruction wreaked on the store, or perhaps to continue to attempt to explain the finer points of 'having someone's back in a fight' (even if it was a training exercise…sort of). However, all these words died unsaid when the sound of heavy footsteps crunching their way through the shattered window-glass littering the store's front entryway.

Voices echoed through the store, bouncing and pinging off of warped and overturned shelves and shattered, scattered and scorched merchandise.

"What the freaking hell happened here?!" Dean Winchester bellowed from somewhere in the vicinity of the door, beyond Jess and Castiel' line of sight.

Castiel and Jess shared a short, slightly panicked look. What were they going to do?

More tromping as two sets of boots made their way through the wreckage, their harsh tread punctuated by heavy muttering from the as-of-right-now invisible pair of men.

"Run?" Jess mouthed to her angelic companion.

"Yes, now," he sent right back.

The footsteps were getting closer. Jess and Cas bolted.

Author's Note: Hello there! And hey look…a cliffhanger…I'm mean, I really am. So yeah, I know there wasn't any interaction between Cas and Jess and the Winchesters in this one, but I promise there'll be something in the next chapter.

So, in related news, several readers asked if there will be other ships/pairings for this fic. So, right now I'm asking all you readers, what pairings are you interested in seeing? Obviously there will be Sam x Jess, but what else do you want to see? Are there any characters you guys want to show up? Send me your ideas in a review or a PM, I'm fine with either. :)

See ya next chapter, please review, if you have the time, I love hearing from you guys!