I have no excuses for this crack. It had to be done. An alternate, crackalicious ending to "Once There Was a Piemaker".

"So all one has to do to make Dean propose marriage is to make pie?"

"Not merely pie, Cas, it has to be heaven baked into a pie…preferably delivered with great legs and a skirt."

Sam isn't looking at Castiel when he spoke and therefore doesn't see Castiel's eyes narrow thoughtfully and then the trenchcoated figure disappear, a suddenly empty space opening up beside Sam. He turns toward Castiel and finds no one there; Sam blows out a breath and shakes his head. Typical. The angel has to secretly love his dramatic exits.

Five hours later the Winchesters are back in their motel room, Dean sprawled across the bed by the door and Sam bent over the ancient tome on the peg-legged table, carefully turning its pages and occasionally sneezing from the dust he stirs up. Sam had to take over driving after Dean drifted off the road twice and nearly hit a cat once because he was leaning across the Impala's front seat to sniff the boxes on Sam's lap. When he narrowly misses a tree and gives both of them a fright, although in Dean's case he was more concerned about damaging the car, he listened to reason, sounding suspiciously like Sam's insistent one-step-away-from-bitchface voice, and turned the car reluctantly over to Sam. Then he got high on pie fumes in less than ten minutes, walking sideways into the motel with a cheesy grin on his face.

"Dean."

As Sam straightens abruptly he notes that Dean, even with his honed Cas-dar, lurches in surprise too. He swivels in his seat to see a most startling image and cannot stop his jaw from cracking against the table's Formica surface.

Castiel is standing between Dean's bed and the door, facing both brothers, his expression as inscrutable as ever, his poise stiff with the broomstick up his ass. However, regularity ends there.

The angel's dark brown hair is streaked with a white powder, probably from running his fingers through it, that also dusts his black dress shoes. A purple smear starts on the left side of the bridge of his nose and continues over to mottle half of his right cheek; it really does bring out the intensity of his blue eyes. His customary tan trench coat is nowhere to be seen and Sam has never beheld Castiel without it, let alone without the black suit jacket he knows is under the coat—no, the only clothing he recognizes is the white-marked-with-purple-splotches dress shirt with unbuttoned sleeves cuffed up to both elbows, crooked blue tie drawing a familiar line down Castiel's chest.

And then there's the rest of his wardrobe. His black trousers are gone, revealing hairy legs with black socks straggling down from the knee, but Sam can't see Castiel's knees. They're disguised by pink lace attached to cloud-pink silk—real silk?—cloth that Sam's stuttering brain eventually recognizes as an apron. He prays to anything and everything out there with all sincerity he's capable of that Castiel is wearing something beside a shirt under the pink…thing.

He glances at Dean when he hears him choke, possibly on his own tongue, and Castiel shifts, faces Dean more fully. Sam gets a flash of a pink monstrosity of a bow sprouting from above his hips and a short, tight black skirt that ends definitely above his knees, covering only half his thighs. His brain turns over like a diseased car engine and fails to restart. Slowly easing down into his seat, Sam stares speechlessly.

Dean's hazel eyes are the size of the Impala's windshield and his mouth is half-open in astonished horror, watching the angel advance on him, and Sam thinks he won't be able to scramble away if he wants to, he looks so shocked.

"C-Ca-as?" Dean's voice cracks and there is no mistaking the flush reddening his skin, from his hairline to his gray shirt collar, the freckles fading into his rosy flesh.

"Dean," he says somberly, "I have made you pie." He solemnly holds out a tin topped with something fluffy and white to Dean. Sam's brain rouses itself enough to say, yes, there was indeed something in Castiel's hands earlier; its presence was simply overridden by the…absence of others.

A garbled sound trembles faintly in Dean's throat and he bolts like a terrified deer, vanishing into the bathroom in a nanosecond. The lock clicking echoes in the silent room.

Sam stares at Castiel, the closed door, Castiel again.

Castiel stares at the door.

"But he likes pie."

"It might've been the skirt, Cas," Sam manages, chewing vigorously on the inside of his cheek.

"A skirt was required along with the delivery of pie and I have observed that he prefers them to be short."

Sam decides that a chair isn't going to hold him much longer and he staggers to his bed, falls across it, and laughs until he can't breathe.