The French Mistake 2: J-Squared's Odyssey

February, 2011

Sam and Dean had never seen Balthazar act like this before.

By angel standards he was already kind of unusual; most of them seemed either robots with cosmic sticks up their collective asses (like Cas had been for the first year or so they'd known him) or psychotic power-crazed winged dicks hellbent on letting their little Apocalypse play out on Earth, and to hell with what those jumped-up apes in clothes thought, like…well, like pretty much every other angel apart from Cas.

Balthazar had been different. Oh sure, he'd had that air of danger about him that all angels had, that feeling that if you crossed them or if they felt bored by you in any way, whether you were Jeffrey Dahmer or Mother Teresa, you'd be left cradling your intestines in your hands like jigsaw pieces. But he'd had an air of selfish hedonism about him that they'd only ever seen from Gabriel in his Trickster days.

All of that cocksureness was gone now. Balthazar was worried. He was pacing around Bobby Singer's kitchen like an expectant father, grabbing things seemingly at random from Bobby's eclectic collection of occult ingredients.

"You expect us to just believe you?" Sam said.

Balthazar barely looked up. "Oh, don't," he replied airily, but his tone betrayed the worry he was feeling, which only served to worry the Winchester brothers more. It took a lot to rattle a being as powerful as Balthazar. "You'll go where I throw you either way."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Dean snapped.


Something was coming.

Bobby Singer knew the signs well enough by now. He knew the difference between a regular ol' thunderstorm and one that was anything but, and this one definitely fell into the latter category. As his truck pulled up the driveway to his home, a huge bolt of lightning lit up the skies around for miles. The flash of light served to illuminate the figures of Sam and Dean through his ground floor windows…and standing with them-

"The hell?" Bobby growled. Balthazar. He hadn't met the piece of crap in person, but he recognised him from Sam's description. This so-called 'angel of the Lord' had been the one to suggest to Sam not too long past that in order for Sam's body to reject the return of his soul, he needed to 'scar his vessel' – and that meant trying to murder his father, or in Sam's case, a father figure.

It was, in a weird way, a compliment. But when there's a soulless hunter after your hide with the strength and skill of Sam Winchester, Bobby reflected, you don't stop to shout hooray that he'd chosen you. He'd forgiven Sam, because the boy hadn't been in his right mind – hell, he'd lacked a soul for the love of Mike – who in hell knew what that did to a guy?

Forgiving Balthazar, however…well, that wasn't on Bobby Singer's to-do list.

He searched in the truck for a moment and grunted in satisfaction as his fingers closed around the object he'd been seeking. The skies chose that moment to sizzle with lightning once more, and the angel blade in Bobby's hands gleamed in the darkness.

Bobby exited the truck and made for the house. I'm comin', boys.


Sam hefted the keys Balthazar had just thrown him. "What am I supposed to do with this?"

"Run with it," Balthazar replied – and with that, he was blown clear across the room.

A new figure had appeared. A thin man, with an intense expresson. Dean didn't take much satisfaction from the fact that this guy fitted squarely into the "psychotic dickbag angel" category he'd patented earlier.

"Virgil," Balthazar said.

This was clearly who he had been dreading. Dean looked around for something to fight with. They had an angel blade somewhere in the house – if he could only reach it. From the look on this Virgil's face, though, he might never get the chance. This Virgil was not a chitchat type of guy. He had the sort of eyes last seen circling sailors around the wreck of the USS Indianapolis.

Sam knew it, too. He and Dean locked eyes for a moment, preparing for a fight that probably wasn't gonna go well. Virgil stalked toward them.

"I said, run!" Balthazar cried, and shoved them through the window.


"Sam! Dean!"

Bobby had abandoned his path toward the front door when the figures of the two boys had come crashing unceremoniously through the living room window. He ran to them, automatically checking for airway obstruction, movement, running through the old drills in his mind.

"Boys, talk to me! You alright?" he barked, the angel blade still tightly clutched in his hand. He was expecting Balthazar to come leaping through the window after Sam and Dean at any moment, and he needed to be ready to put himself between that dirtbag and his boys when that happened.

And then…Dean spoke.

Except, it didn't sound like Dean. At all.

"Oh, my God," the prone body of Dean said, in a voice that was all kinds of wrong. It was too high, too reedy. "I have glass IN MY HAND! There is ACTUAL GLASS IN MY HAND! Can we get someone over here?!"

Reaching down, Bobby grabbed Dean by the shoulder and hauled him onto his back so he could get a look, ostensibly to check the damage, but also just to make sure (and this was crazy, but hell) that it actually was Dean.

It was.

Dean was holding up his hand. Sure enough, there was a sliver of glass protruding from it. It wasn't exactly a papercut, but Bobby Singer had seen Dean Winchester get shot and whine about a tenth as much as this.

He didn't have time for this. Balthazar would be pressing the attack any moment – in fact Bobby was vaguely astonished that the angel hadn't done so already. "You'll live," he huffed, and half-dragged, half-helped Dean to his feet. "Git up!"

Dean looked at him, properly looked, for what seemed to be the first time. He blinked, confused.

"Jim?" he said.

Bobby was starting to seriously worry now. He kept glancing at the house, waiting for Balthazar to appear. The angel had done something, that much was clear. "Jim?" Bobby repeated. "Who the hell's Jim, Dean? Get a grip, willya?"

"What the hell was that?"

It was Sam talking now. He had gotten to his feet, woozily. He didn't appear to be bleeding, but he was every bit as confused as Dean. Sam looked from Bobby, to Dean, to the house, and – this worried Bobby – to the skies above. "How are we outside?" Sam said.

"You got thrown through a window, Sam!" Bobby snapped. "Being outside tends to ensue!"

Sam looked at him.

"Jim?" he said.

Any response Bobby had to that was put on hold when an angel emerged from the house. To Bobby's surprise, however, it wasn't Balthazar; it was someone he had never seen before, even if he was giving off angel-vibes up the wazoo. Bobby stepped between the newcomer and Sam and Dean, brandishing the angel blade with a confidence he didn't feel. Even outnumbered three to one, this guy looked like a stone-cold killer. Where the hell was Cas when you needed him?

"I don't know what holy mojo you whammied these two with," Bobby snarled, "but you better back the hell off, fly-boy. Y'hear?"

The angel tilted his head to the side, like a predatory bird examining three particularly unpleasant rodents it had been forced to lower itself to eating. Bobby readied himself as best he could, hoping against hope that Sam and Dean would snap out of this and pull off some of that fabled Winchester miracle-working.

"They're not here," the angel said, matter-of-factly. He turned upward and addressed the tumultuous skies above directly. "Where did you hide them, Balthazar? You think this is clever? You think I won't find them?!"

There was a noise like thousands of birds bursting into flight at once…and the angel was gone.

Bobby allowed himself to breathe again. He had no idea what the hell was going on, but he knew he had somehow just avoided a confrontation that he hadn't had a hope in hell of seeing through alive, so he was more than willing to chalk that one in the 'win' column and move on.

"Now," he said, turning to face Sam and Dean, "what the hell did they hit you two with?"

Dean wasn't looking at him. In fact, Dean was currently whirling around and around, as if trying to look at everything around him all at once.

"BOB!" he hollered. "BOB! BOB! WHERE ARE YOU! WHAT'S GOING ON? BOB!"

He's gone blind, Bobby thought.

He ran to the boy, grabbed him by the shoulders. "Dean!" he said, physically shaking the younger man as if trying to snap him out of it. "I'm here!"

"BOB!"

Dean was looking straight at him. He wasn't blind, Bobby realised, feeling a little foolish for even thinking so. "Don't call me Bob, Dean," he snapped, starting to get a little irritated with this irrational crap, angel-mojo or no angel-mojo, "I hate 'Bob', and you know that. And would you stop with the hollerin'? I'm right here!"

Dean shook him off, eyes wide with what Bobby realised was half-anger, half-terror. "Jim," Dean said, "this isn't funny anymore, dammit! Where is Bob?!"

"Bob who?" Bobby asked, giving up.

"Bob Singer!"

"Right damn here, Dean!"

"WOULD YOU STOP CALLING ME DEAN!"

There was a silence.

What have they done to you boys, Bobby thought. His mind raced. This wasn't his first rodeo. Neither 'Dean' nor 'Sam' – it was logical to assume whatever had hit 'Dean' had hit 'Sam' too, especially because both had called him 'Jim' – seemed hostile, at least for now. So that ruled out shapeshifters or ghouls or demonic possession, unless they were being especially crafty. The appearance of Balthazar and Christopher Walken Wannabe Angel couldn't be a coincidence, so it had to be connected with whatever was wrong with Dean and Sam. Memory spell? Mind transference? Soul siphon?

"Look," Sam was talking again. "Let's everyone just calm down, alright? This is obviously some sort of prank."

As Bobby watched, agape, Sam began to applaud sarcastically at thin air.

"Very funny, Sera! Very funny, guys!" Sam called into the night.

"Oh cram it, Jared!" Dean snapped.

"Jared?" Bobby said softly, to himself. Had to be code of some sort.

"This look like a prank to you, huh?" Dean was continuing, holding his injured hand up to Sam's face. This is BLOOD! Look! REAL BLOOD! I am INJURED here!"

Bobby Singer looked at his two boys, who had single-handedly saved the world more than once, who had stopped the Biblical Apocalypse, who had stood and fought near every damn type of monster you could name.

"What the hell is going on?" he said.