Author's Note: This work is inspired by TheRiverScribe's By the Grace of God series. If you try reading this without reading that first, it will make no sense and you will be so confused. Also, you don't want to miss her series. It's amazing.

CHAPTER ONE

Ohrwurm

There were a lot of things that Sam didn't like about being little again. The fact that he was little again was at the very top of the column, along with being unable to fight like he had not very long ago, when he'd had larger hands and better coordination. Stupid short legs.

But there were also a lot of things he was finding he liked about it, even loved. Seeing Dean smiling, laughing, and so much at ease was at the very top of the list. Number one. He hadn't seen Dean so relaxed since they were kids, and even then it had often been a ruse that Sam was too young and inexperienced at seeing through. He had seen Dean try to fake ease a lot lately, try to pretend that he was unaffected by everything, even as they were thrust again into the middle of the world ending, struggling to try and defend from all sides.

But now, Dean ruled the kitchen with an iron fist and real laughter, arguing with Gabriel and smiling at everything as though the world were perfect. Their mom – their mom – was with them, and Castiel and Gabriel. They had found a new ally – friend – in Raphael, and added Morpheus to their growing family.

Since leaving for Stanford, maybe even since before that, Sam hadn't thought he would ever have more family than Dean, and maybe Bobby. And after losing Dean, not just the first time but every time after, Sam had thought he would be alone. Not even Bobby, when he was still alive, had been enough to keep him present, enough to save him from himself in a world where Dean didn't exist.

But since he had been turned into a child again, since becoming a freaking angel, their family just seemed to grow. And while nothing would ever replace Dean's laughter as number one on his list of things he was grateful for after all these changes, having a family again was so very close behind it.

Sometimes, he still couldn't even believe this was his life. He kept expecting to wake up and realize it had all been a dream, had to keep convincing himself that it was real, that he was here.

Sam padded down the hall. Dean had tried to put him in footie pajamas that morning and Sam had kicked him in the ribs until he'd put him down and let him dress himself. Mary had declared Christmas Eve as much of a pajama holiday as Christmas Day would be, so Sam was wearing bright red pajamas with little white fluffy dogs all over them that looked like Morpheus. Mary had found them at the store one day and brought them home for him, after which Dean had laughed until she said there was a polka-dotted pair she'd thought would suit him very well.

Despite Dean's teasing, they had become his favorite pair of pajamas, and not just because the little dogs looked like Morpheus in his smaller form. They were incredibly soft and comfortable, and when he'd put them on, the look on his mom's face had been perfect. It was still new, having her around, but he didn't think he was ever going to get tired of her smiling at him. It was even better when Morpheus had taken to sniffing the little white dogs and hearing her laughter, up until he had dug his nose into Sam's ribs and sent him into peals of uncontrollable giggling. Mary had swooped in and rescued him. Eventually.

Sam had been watching as his mother directed Cas and Raphael through decorating. That had originally been Raphael and Gabriel's job, but once again they had been thwarted by "artistic differences," which really meant that Gabriel had decided to instigate a glitter-bomb war. Cas had fled the library for the kitchen, where Mary and Dean had been cooking together, and pleaded for mercy, after which Mary had taken over the decorating. Gabriel had been banished to the kitchen, where Sam could occasionally hear the two of them argument. Or, more frequently, Dean yelling and Gabriel laughing.

Sam had been trying to read one of the books that Raphael had brought him from Heaven, but it grew increasingly difficult to focus on the words until he had been forced to put the book down. When he'd woken up that morning, there had been a weird feeling under his skin, like an itch that he could ignore easily enough, and he'd done so, pushing it to the back of his mind. But as the day went on, it became harder and harder to ignore. The itch became a low hum, like a song he couldn't quite hear, that grew increasingly louder as the hours ticked by, and even more intrusive as he tried to focus on other things. It had been fine for a while, but Sam hadn't been able to concentrate on his book, the humming too loud in his mind. He'd finally given up.

There were a lot of things that had changed when he'd been regressed into a child, but his curiosity was apparently not one of them. He had always been curious. His need for answers had been a constant irritation to his father. There was a reason he hadn't known what his mother looked like until he was eight. John hadn't liked to hear any questions unless they were helping him with his latest hunt, and even less so questions that referred to the time before, when they had still been a family. The time that Sam couldn't remember and it seemed, sometimes, that he had never really been a part of.

But being unable to ask his father questions hadn't stopped the innate curiosity. Instead, he'd asked Dean, and when Dean couldn't or wouldn't answer them, Sam went looking for answers elsewhere. He'd ended up with more scrapes and bruises from his search for answers than anything else prior to his joining in on hunts. Once he'd learned to read well enough on his own and learned that every town they stayed in generally had a public library, he traded in bruises for dust and scrapes for papercuts. He learned how to research as he answered his own questions, and then learned how to use those skills to help on hunts in a way his small form hadn't allowed him to do physically.

But there was a downside to finding his answers. He hadn't satiated his curiosity, only fueled it more. Suddenly, he wanted answers to more questions than just those about creatures and hunting. He wanted to learn all he could, about everything, about the world that the people around him lived – those that had no knowledge of the supernatural. His need to know continued as he grew, and the lack of understanding from his father fueled a bitterness even his love for his family couldn't ease. He'd left for Stanford for more reasons than just his desire for normalcy. Books could only teach so much, of course, but he'd also needed to know, for certain, which of them were blind – those who lived their lives unaware of the creatures in the dark, or those who lived outside of the normal. There had to be more to life than killing, hadn't there? Or was his father right in thinking that nothing was more important than the next job, the next hunt?

Maybe it didn't matter. Regardless of what he tried, the hunt always drew Sam back in. Maybe it was impossible to be normal once you had been a hunter. Or maybe that's just because he was Sam Winchester. He shook his head to shake off the other names that tried to follow that. Lucifer's vessel. The boy with the demon blood. So many names that whispered of so many ways he had messed up, had hurt the people he cared about.

He forced the thoughts away, for the moment grateful for the humming that so easily slid to the fore of his thoughts. It was like a half-murmured song, loud enough to distract but not for him to understand, and he wanted to understand it. That curiosity again, perhaps even worse than it had been before, because now there was a whole new side of the world to see. He had senses now that he'd never had before, and if he looked as things a certain way, they were so different from the way they had appeared under a human's gaze. This was surely no exception. A low humming song he thought he might be able to hear the words to if he could just tell where it was coming from, and a tug on his skin that told him to come, come along, come here and find me that he couldn't help but to follow. If he opened his eyes a certain way, he could see the angels beyond the vessels they wore in a way that would have destroyed him as a human. He didn't know how he was opening his ears, but clearly he was, because he'd never heard this song before Chuck changed him. And it was a beautiful song. He wanted to listen to it more and more, find its source and hold it in his hands and never let it go.

He'd thought about asking Cas if he could hear the humming, but the angel had been changing the color of the lights he was hanging with Mary laughing as Cas continued to get the colors wrong.

"Those ones you have should be blue, Castiel."

"Hm?" The angel waved his hand and the tiny bulbs on the string of lights changed colors.

"That's… um… that's lovely, Cas, but I don't think pink really fits with the holiday."

"I see," Castiel said, the confused expression on his face suggested that he, in fact, did not see, and the lights changed color again.

"I…" Mary stared at the lights for a long moment. "What color is that exactly?"

"Blue?" Castiel asked, tilting his head to the side.

"Nooo," she said slowly. "That's not blue. I'm not even sure what that… are those fish?"

If Sam hadn't known Cas for as long as he had, he might have suspected the angel was as confused as he appeared, but there was a light Sam recognized in his eyes as being a softer version of Gabriel's vibrant, shining amusement, and he knew the angel was teasing his mother on purpose.

Sam hadn't wanted to interrupt what was clearly a moment of bonding between the two, Castiel's eyes filled with laughter as his mother's filled with amused suspicion as she continued to tell Cas that, no, that color was not blue, but go on and try again. Raphael with a soft smile on his face as he pretended to be trying to find the perfect spot to hang the lights so it was just so.

He could hear Gabriel laughing from the kitchen, interspersed with Dean's furious shouts about pie crust and keeping fingers off, and Sam had instead decided to go have a look at whatever he could hear humming in the back of his mind. After all, the angels hadn't said anything about it but they surely must have also heard it, a song in the back of their mind, and must have ignored it because their senses were not new to them. They might have not even realized that Sam had opened his hearing and thought that the song was still muted to him, but he could hear it, and he didn't want to wait. He wanted to know what it was.

So he padded barefoot down the hall, idly wishing that Morpheus was there with him. The dog had seemed to find an empty spot just his size in their family and slipped in like a missing puzzle piece Sam hadn't known they'd needed. The little (sometimes big) dog had wanted to go visit Hecate in her sanctuary but had been reluctant at the thought of leaving, It had taken Sam two days to convince the dog to go. His mother was here with them this Christmas, for the first Christmas since before Sam could remember. It wouldn't be fair if Sam got to have Mary, only to keep Morpheus away from his mom.

He'd only be gone a few hours, Morpheus had promised, and really it hadn't been an hour since he had left, but Sam found he was missing the little dog already. He wished he was here so Sam would have someone to investigate the source of this strange song with him. He wondered if Morpheus would have been able to hear it.

It was so strange to be spending Christmas with so many people. It was like having a family. It wasn't the normal one that Sam had always thought he'd wanted while growing up, but he thought it might be even better than anything he could have imagined for himself. He tried to ignore the little voice in the back of his head that was whispering about how much it would hurt when it stopped. When everyone got bored and went away.

His thoughts might have continued in that vein if Sam hadn't been startled by nearly walking into a door, so preoccupied was he with his thoughts. He shook off the morose thoughts, forcing himself to not think about it, and opened the door. As he stepped into the room, he realized it was one that he and Dean had been in only twice before, and had probably been avoiding unconsciously since.

He and Dean had done a cursory investigation of all the rooms upon their arrival at the bunker, the same way they checked over a hotel room to make sure nothing was going to attack them unexpectedly when they had their guard down. Sam remembered this one because the two of them had argued about whether they needed to take the time to go through everything that was in it right then and there. They'd been busy with a hunt at the time and their attention really would be better spent elsewhere, but the room was so full of junk and knick-knacks that it was impossible to tell whether there was any sort of order or if everything was tossed haphazardly about like a gigantic junk-drawer.

In the end, they had done a very brief investigation for safety purposes, but nothing had come up as dangerous and they had put the job of actually identifying and sorting everything off for another day (a day which obviously hadn't come yet). The room was still a mess, with wooden countertops covered in bits and bobs of all sorts – nails, screws, wood shavings, rocks, a few necklace chains. It honestly looked like the workroom for a jeweler who moonlighted as a carpenter, the counters and drawers beneath them handmade and well-worn.

Sam didn't really expect to find anything of interest in the room. They hadn't the first time, after all. But there was still a low humming tune in the back of his mind and as he moved into the room, he found himself drawn to the lower drawer of one of the counters. The door stuck as he opened it and only tugging on it harshly a few times had it sliding open with a reluctant squeal. It was filled with folded handkerchiefs and yellowed scraps of paper on which an untidy hand had scrawled what might have been runes… or doodles… or maybe there was an uncapped pen loose in the drawer somewhere.

He grabbed the edge of what he'd thought was a handkerchief only to realize it was the corner of a small bag when something tumbled out of the opening with a clatter.

It was… it looked like a stone, sort of. Oval-shaped, with odd holes at various points across it. It was polished black but had an odd shine to it, glittering light stars in a pitch sky, or eyes out of the dark. The shape reminded Sam of something, though he couldn't place what it was. He took a step back from the open drawer, a thought in his mind to turn and leave the room, to run, to get away—

Hello

His mouth was desert-dry when he opened it, his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth.

You came

Cas's name caught in his throat when he tried to call out and his lips only trembled on a whimper he couldn't voice. The odd shine of the stone had shifted, expanding into a mist that swirled about the stone, like a cloud. Sam tried to call out for Raphael but he was equally muted by terror. He wanted—

He wanted to pick it up, he realized. He wanted to pick up the stone.

He wanted to hold it in his hand. It was the perfect size, after all.

The perfect size just for him.

You found me

Sam choked on the dryness of his throat, felt the tears as they rolled down his cheeks, felt the burning in his head as something, something dug dirty fingers into his mind and whispered

Pick me up

It was like it was made for him. Like it had been waiting for him. Like it had been waiting for

Pick me up

so long and he needed to pick it up. It had been waiting.

Pick me up

It had been waiting just for him.

Samuel

It was made just for him.

Sam

It was for him.

Pick me up

It was his.

Pick

But…

Me

No…

Up

Please no.

Sammy.

Pick me up.

Sam let out single, strangled sob that died the moment it tumbled off his lips.

He picked up the stone.