A/N: I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. I just...was thinking about what might happen, given how the series is going. And I thought that if I wrote out my worst-case scenario, nothing the actual writers do will hurt me anymore. Right? Right? Please?

Carrying Out Orders

-{+}-

The motel room was comfortably quiet. Sam was curled up in an armchair with an ancient encyclopedia they'd borrowed from Bobby's old collection. Dean sat at the "kitchenette" table, doing research on the laptop. He was meant to be investigating the history of this town for other strange deaths, but from the lust emanating from his body, Castiel suspected that he was frequenting one of the websites they weren't supposed to talk about.

The angel himself was reclining on the bed, reading through the local newspaper. He already knew it held no new information pertaining to the case, but the stories were fascinating in and of themselves. A local woman had won some sort of athletic competition, and there was a two-page special on her emotional journey. Furthermore, several politicians had been discovered to be lying about their taxes, hair color and sexuality, and a couple concerned citizens had written letters about the recent rash of speeding bicycles.

Suddenly, Dean was stuck by an idea. Castiel looked up.

"There are Tablets for Hell and Purgatory, right?" the hunter began, yicking them off on his fingers. "Demons and Leviathans. So what if there's an Angel Tablet, too? Complete the trilogy, right? Maybe that's what Crowley's been looking for. Maybe––"

-{+}-

Castiel didn't hear the rest of the sentence because he was pulled forcibly upwards, to Heaven, to Naomi's office.

"Kill them!" she shouted, slamming him against the side of the desk.

"But––" he protested desperately.

"It's for the best," she said fiercely, authority snapping in her voice. She pulled him up by the collar, meeting his confused gaze with eyes like grey ice. "This is a direct order. Kill them now." Then she pushed him back, down to Earth again.

-{+}-

"––he found something out from Alfie," Dean was still saying. But Sam was closer to the bed, so Castiel moved on him first. The book was still held nearly in front of his face, open to a recipe for a potion meant to kill dryads; he had barely started paying attention to his brother's words, much less the angel moving faster than the human eye could see.

"I'm sorry," Castiel apologized impossibly as his blade bit down on his friend's neck. Sam's head snapped backwards, making the blood flow even more freely, and lightning crackled under his skin as the angel's blade sliced his soul itself. The book fell from his hands, hitting the floor with a crash, spine broken.

Dean just had time to stand, hands raised defensively, before Castiel was in front of him as well.

"I'm sorry, Dean," said the angel, and it sounded like the words were being strangled out of him. Or maybe it just felt that way, because it was all he could manage to say. "It's for the best." The words echoed around his head and he knew that they were true. This was all for the best. It was better for them to be dead, so that nobody else knew about the Tablet. All of Heaven could be threatened. It was for the best.

Dean stared back at him, anger, confusion, hurt and shock all passing across his wide green eyes and slightly parted lips. "Cas––"

He didn't have time to finish the sentence, whatever he was going to say, because Castiel's knife slid between his ribs (it was for the best) and his blood, displaced by the shining blade, slipped out and ran down Castiel's trench coat (for the best), the coat he had not taken off since Dean returned it to him at the mental hospital (the best.)

Castiel cradled the body, holding it upright until Dean's soul had fractured and burnt out. Then he lifted it gently and placed it on the bed, laid out as if the hunter were merely asleep. He put Sam's empty shell next to it and stood there, watching over them. They needed watching over, those brave, stubborn, impetuous boys. Thought they knew right and wrong, thought they could save everyone, every time, but that was nothing but Pride. No mothers, hardly any fathers––they were his family. They needed watching over.

Castiel's blade was red.

"NO!" he shouted, and flew without thinking to where he couldn't remember.

Naomi, once again behind her desk, was taken aback. "Castiel," she exclaimed, "what are you doing?"

"Nothing good," he raged. "Nothing right. Nothing 'for the best'." Dean would probably spit on the floor now, but he wasn't quite that coarse, so he simply advanced on her, bloody blade held high.

"Castiel," she said, and her voice cracked like a whip, down his spine and deeper. "Stop."

Every muscle in his body tensed against the involuntary reflex to step back, sit down, and await further orders. He took a single step forward. Castiel did not have the experience to make an analogy, but for a human, it could have been compared to resisting the urge to drink when offered water for the first time after forty days wandering in a desert. It hurt.

"I will not," he said through gritted teeth, almost trembling with the effort of not lowering his blade.

"We can talk about this," suggested Naomi, and now she sounded as reasonable and understanding as an instructor of young children. But the edge of command was still in her voice, and the desperate need to retreat did not lessen.

"I could have erased their memories," he argued, still blazing with righteous anger and Winchester-inspired defiance. But tacitly accepting the offer of calm speech. "There was no need to kill them!"

"Yes there was!" Then Naomi was standing and shouting as well, stressed maybe to some breaking point. "They knew about the Tablet, Castiel, the Angel Tablet! Keeping that secret and Heaven safe is my duty. You can fight your little wars, have an Apocalypse or not, but I'm the one who keeps this all going. What do you think to your willful little humans if we were not here to watch over them? You protect them, and I protect us!"

Castiel was taken aback by the unexpected release of emotion. "I did not know your purpose," he replied, somehow suddenly on the defensive.

"No," she answered, and there was a tinge of bitterness in her voice. "To be known would be a failure. My successes are the disasters that do not happen. I am the caretaker. Which is why I have the authority to order you to sit down."

His legs buckled of their own accord and he sat unwillingly in the large white chair.

"The Winchesters had to die," she explained patiently, coming out from behind her desk. "The more who know about the Tablet, the more danger we are all in. Do you want to see Heaven locked away, Castiel? Forever? Where would you go?" She put a comforting hand on his shoulder. "You did the right thing. Their lives were hard. They are at peace now."

He stared straight ahead, at the clean, white wall of the office. The bloodied blade was still clutched in his hand. "Crowley knows about the Angel Tablet. The Winchesters could have helped deal with him."

"We will deal with Crowley. We have half the Demon Tablet––at least, the Prophet does, and he can easily be fetched. Heaven versus Hell, as it has always been."

He closed his eyes. It made so much sense, felt so right. Heaven and Hell, that was how it was supposed to be. Since the beginning of time, that had been the Story––

"No," he growled, and stood, throwing off her touch. The bone of his knuckles showed where he gripped his bloody blade. "We changed that Story. We changed it."

"Stop, Castiel, now," she ordered, eyes narrowed. A blade of her own appeared in one hand. "This is a direct order. Stand down."

Every angelic instinct he had screamed at him to sit back down, drop his sword and submit. But the chemical drives of his vessel urged him on. They recognized prey when they saw it.

"No," Castiel repeated, raising his red-speckled blade once more. "I won't." He advanced until they stood eye to eye again, and there was something almost like fear in hers. They were both soldiers of God, but he was undeniably the more experienced warrior.

"Then leave," she said furiously. "Go back to your humans and your chaos." She put both hands on his chest and shoved, hard. "Go!"

He fell back to the motel room, gaining control of his descent just in time to not crash physically through the roof. Time had passed since he'd left, but only a few minutes. Sam and Dean lay undisturbed on the bed. They had died with hardly a sound, so no other human had come to investigate.

He almost left then, but he hesitated instead. Picked up the book Sam had dropped and placed it neatly on the table, next to Dean's laptop. Without speaking (because he had no one to talk to) he took their bodies out to the Impala. Dean went in the driver's seat, Sam in the passenger's. He took the keys from Dean's pocket and inserted them in the ignition, accidentally turning on the cassette player. It resumed blasting from where it had last been cut off, halfway through the song Castiel recognized as the one titled "Carry On My Wayward Son", by the band Dean had called, "Freaking Kansas, man! You don't know Kansas? I have got to introduce you to some decent music."

There was salt in the trunk and he sprinkled it liberally over the brothers. (They could not become ghosts; both souls were gone for good; not even a human soul can withstand the Grace-forged blade of an angel. But he knew they would have wanted it.) Then he took out the small bottle of holy oil and anointed both their foreheads with sigils that had once marked the graves of fallen heroes. Again, he knew it did not matter, but it...felt right.

The rest of the bottle he simply poured over the old car. Then, standing at a safe distance, he lit it on fire. Fueled by the sacred oil, the flames covered the Impala in a matter of seconds, melting through the once-shining metal, shattering the glass, consuming the beaten fabric of the seats and the empty flesh of his only friends.

The ever-durable tape-player didn't stop blasting its song until the guns on the back caught flame and exploded, sending a fireball screaming into the sky. Castiel lingered for a moment, to be sure no one was hurt, but the only people nearby were from the motel, and they were watching from an even farther distance than he.

Then he left, flying for Garth's houseboat, to talk to the Prophet before Naomi did. There was work to be done.