Chapter 4 – The New Normal:

Crowley's prodding did not, unfortunately, manage to convince Castiel to stick around, where they could then make a concentrated effort to drag information out of him.

That being said, when they eventually extinguished the holy fire and gave up for the day, it was obvious that the angel had lost his composure, and in becoming increasingly flustered his distant holier-than-thou shell had begun to fracture.

He might be gone for the time being, but he had not left their encounter unaffected. Of that, Harry was certain.

It seemed like humanizing an angel might just wind up being a major side-quest in their attempts to not only figure out what the hell was going on, but how they were going to stop it.

oOoOo

Bobby had headed back to his own place. Despite his obvious hesitance to let Dean out of his sight again so soon after getting him back, his home was an important waypoint for hunters across the country, and he couldn't afford to be away for extended periods of time without warning.

Crowley had buggered off to who knows where once Castiel was gone, offering only a throwaway comment about not overstaying his welcome before disappearing into the night. Harry wouldn't honestly have cared if he'd stuck around, but the idea of having to deal with Crowley and Dean constantly butting heads was something akin to a nightmare scenario, so it was for the best really.

Back at Harry's place, things were abuzz.

Anywhere you went, you'd stumble across some abandoned book or a partially unpacked crate.

Because they now had a lead – if you could even call it that – Harry and Sam had thrown themselves into looking through every scrap of Judeo-Christian apocalypse lore they could get their hands on, regardless of how obscure or nonsensical or loosely-related it may seem.

In contrast, Dean had flipped through one book, looked up to see two unnervingly focused researchers nose deep in stacks of books – Harry – or drowning in the internet – Sam – and decided that he was going to be on weapons duty.

He loudly announced his intentions to haul all of Harry's hunting gear out from the basement, received absolutely no acknowledgement from anyone, and headed off to do just that.

(Moving things around made him feel less antsy than watching the two of them lose themselves in their research. Idly, he decided that that was why a book nerd should never date another book nerd – there was no one to balance them out.)

oOoOo

Without warning, the book Harry was reading was yanked roughly out of his hands. Bewildered, he blinked several times to check his vision and flexed his fingers, grasping for pages that were no longer there, before he tilted his head up to identify the culprit.

Dean returned his questioning gaze with a stern look from where he stood in front of Harry's armchair, book held above his head as if Harry was going to leap for it.

"Eat," Dean said.

Harry furrowed his brow. "Why?"

Dean's eye twitched. "What do you mean 'why'?!" He gestured angrily at the windows with the hand holding the book. "It's dark outside. I don't know if you had breakfast but you definitely didn't have lunch, and neither did Sam. I'm not letting Sam read himself into an early grave, and he'd be pissed if I left you to your own devices like this. People. Need. To eat."

Harry stared up at Dean beseechingly. "But the apocalypse is important."

Dean hissed out a frustrated breath. "I know. But you know who wins if you starve yourself to death doing research? That bitch Lilith and her beloved Lucifer."

He cut himself off, shaking his head and stepped away to put Harry's book atop one of the many haphazard piles that had been building up in the lounge.

"This isn't a discussion," Dean concluded.

He grabbed Harry's wrist and yanked him to his feet, dragging him out of the room. As they passed the kitchen table – also buried under miscellaneous print-outs and sheets of notepaper – Dean slammed Sam's laptop shut and smacked him in the shoulder.

"Dinner time," he announced sternly, shoving Harry into one of the stools at the breakfast bar and heading into the kitchen proper.

Slouching over the counter, Harry dropped his face into his hands, stifling a yawn.

He glanced back up when he felt a gentle hand on his shoulder, smiling tiredly in Sam's direction as he sat down next to him.

"I think we're out of practice," Sam mused.

Harry laughed weakly, the hazy fog of research slowly clearing from his mind as he listened to Dean bang about near the oven.

"No kidding."

Back when he first became a researcher he'd discovered a sort of hunger for information that Hermione would've been proud of, but Ellen and Jo had always been entirely unrepentant in dragging him out of his books whenever they deemed he'd spent too long on them. It wasn't a majorly recurring theme in his life at the Roadhouse, because in general no problems that any hunter had ever asked him to look into had ever been Apocalypse big, but that didn't mean he never got lost.

When he'd started working with the Winchesters there had been more footwork involved, and no real reason or chance to get too caught up in anything, and during Dean's… absence, the two of them hadn't done anything at all.

"It's easier to take breaks when you're not staring down a world-ending catastrophe," Harry lamented.

"Am I going to have to lay down ground rules for you two?" Dean interjected, putting plates on the counter in front of both of them.

Sam spluttered out a weak protest. "We're not children Dean."

"Aren't you? Because if you two don't stop skipping meals I swear I'm going to fill this house with so many alarm clocks—"

"Okay, okay, point taken."

Dean jabbed his spatula menacingly in their direction before plating up his own food.

oOoOo

"This is pointless," Harry declared, closing his latest book and tossing it aside. "We're not going to find anything."

A commiserating hum answered him, Sam dragging his attention away from his laptop to listen to Harry's outburst. He looked exhausted. Harry supposed he probably didn't look much better.

"I've learnt all sort of un-fun things about religion, but not a whisper about the seals. You?"

Sam shook his head. "Same here. Plenty of Death Match stories, but nothing about the preparations."

"If the angels were smart, they wouldn't have told anyone about the seals. That would be the ultimate way to make sure Lucifer was never freed."

Dean poked his head around the corner, drawn by their voices.

"No one said they were smart."

Harry smothered a giggle with his hand, turning it into a cough. They hadn't heard from Castiel again yet, but they had no way of knowing what sort of surveillance they were under, and he didn't want to purposely aggravate anyone.

"Whether or not humans know about the seals is irrelevant," Harry continued after he collected himself. "The important part is that Lilith knows them."

"Lilith will break the final seal," Sam quoted.

"Exactly. Fuck all those other seals. #66 is the big one."

"Why did they say it like that?" Dean asked. "'Lilith will break the final seal.' Like it's preordained. Like that's the way it has to go. I mean, what's the deal with that?"

"It's ridiculous to purposefully include demons in the sequence," Harry agreed. "That's just asking for trouble. If you're really trying to prevent it from happening, shouldn't the final seal involve, like, one of the arch-angels, or even God?"

Dean scoffed at the notion, but Sam looked thoughtful.

"If we're assuming that God is real – in the physical sense – then it really would make far more sense for the seal to be properly safe-guarded. But maybe all the seals have to be earthbound somehow? Lucifer's revival is supposed to be a punishment to mankind, right? So it would need to be something that we could, well, earn."

"Free will to the death huh?"

Harry leaned back in his chair with a sigh. "This all sucks."

"Does that mean you two are done with this stupid research?"

Sam chuckled. "Yeah Dean, I think we are. For now at least. We need a new direction to focus our efforts in."

"Great. 'Cause Bobby called earlier. We're going on a little trip."

oOoOo

'The rising of the witnesses,' huh? God, what a joke.

To think, Harry hadn't thought about Cedric Diggory in years, and now he'd returned to haunt his dreams once again.

(Cedric wasn't even vengeful in the regular sense of the word, which had made the whole experience even worse. 'People they couldn't save' indeed.)

They'd all been so shaken by what happened at Bobby's that on the drive back they'd been constantly switching drivers. Dean hadn't even complained. Nobody wanted to crash because they were too stuck in their heads to concentrate on the road.

Finding out that the whole fiasco was related to the apocalypse in their rush to find a way to stop it hadn't even been a surprise, in the end. For the foreseeable future, anything out of the ordinary was probably going to be related to the apocalypse somehow.

oOoOo

"More seals have been broken."

"Jesus Christ, learn to knock or something!"

Harry stirred, torn from sleep by raised voices. He'd only meant to rest his eyes for a moment, but he hadn't been sleeping well the last few days and he must have dozed off for real. He moved to sit up, but a hand in his hair kept him in place.

"Sam?"

Opening his eyes, Sam's face came into view hovering above him, and Harry realised that somehow or another he'd ended up with his head on Sam's lap.

"It's fine," Sam murmured, gaze flicking momentarily across the room. "Castiel showed up, gave Dean a fright."

"Why would I knock? And what would I knock on?"

"The door, like a goddamn normal person!"

"But I am not a person?"

"Wow," Harry muttered. "That relationship's going nowhere fast, huh?"

"He came to visit without being summoned," Sam pointed out. "It doesn't sound like he's bringing any happy news, but he came. Seems like a start."

"Sure."

Harry closed his eyes again and listened to the two argue for a while – if you could even call it an argument when one side was angry and the other merely confused – but eventually enough was enough.

"Castiel," he called, pushing himself upright on the couch. "Why are you here?"

Dean fell quiet at the interjection as Castiel shifted his focus.

"More seals have been broken," he repeated flatly.

Harry nodded. That was of no surprise to any of them.

Castiel shifted minutely, a tightly constrained mimicry of what Harry might usually assume was an uncomfortable shuffling of feet.

"Also, several angels have been killed."

There was still no obvious emotion in his words, but this news clearly unsettled him more than the business with the seals.

"Do you think it's related?" Sam asked.

"The possibility cannot be ignored," Castiel responded, which wasn't a no.

Was he even allowed to have opinions about that sort of thing, Harry wondered. He didn't seem willing to lean one way or the other. Had he not thought about it, or did he not want to think about it?

"Are you investigating?" Sam continued.

"…" Castiel stared past them. "At present I have received no such orders."

"You can't even investigate a murder without being ordered to?" Dean scowled at Castiel's back.

Harry waved a dismissive hand in his direction.

"I can ask Crowley if he's heard anything about it. Is that fine with you?"

Castiel looked like he desperately wanted to protest – he wanted Dean far away from demons after all, and they were enemies – but he grit his teeth and inclined his head ever so slightly.

"Then that's what we'll do. Thank you for stopping by. If you ever need assistance with anything else, you can always ask."

Dean flipped him the bird, which Harry ignored, but thankfully stayed quiet.

Castiel blinked at Harry, head still tilted. "It would be… reassuring, if the murders ceased."

And then in a rustle of feathers he was gone.

Dean threw his hands up in frustration before pointing accusingly at Harry.

"Why did you say we would help him?"

"Come on Dean," Sam soothed. "Angels dying is weird, right? They're probably more resilient than demons, and we can only kill them with the knife. So, what's killing the angels? Don't you want to know?"

Dean folded his arms and looked away, but he was clearly interested.

"Call your damn demon then. Might as well get this over with."

A/N: As a heads up, I'm going to be skipping over or ignoring a lot of stuff from S4 since a lot of it is either Ruby driven or unimportant hunts and this is a Ruby-free zone.

Also I stopped caring about SPN quite a while ago. I'm still writing, but I don't have the energy or the desire to go rewatch any of it for accuracy's sake.