Bobby Singer, John Winchester, and Ellen Harvelle weren't what you'd call activists. Sure, they were all for equality, but they wouldn't actively try to do anything about inequality unless they witnessed it directly. Which was why it was so shocking to people when they went out of their way to treat their angels with respect. Angels were a semi-humanoid species that had hit the market maybe ten years ago, having been cooked up in labs and sold as pets. Once they started breeding on their own, they became more and more prevalent, showing up all over the place, most people treated angels as animals, to be used as they saw fit, and many even bought them as sex slaves. The truth was, angels were as intelligent as humans and could easily learn to speak, to interact socially and to function independently in human society. Of course most people chose to ignore that fact.

Mary Winchester had been one of the few people who saw that façade. She had been unable to have children, and when her adoption request was denied, she was devastated. Her husband John knew he had to do something, so he bought her an angel, but he could only afford a very difficult fledgling, which is what young angels were called, who was discounted because he refused to part from his brother, who was too young to really be away from his mother and would need extra care. Mary of course immediately recognized that the little one was just a baby, and she took to the children like glue and named the older one Dean, after her mother, Deanna and the younger one Samuel, after her father. At first, John was skeptical, but as the angels grew and began to call Mary "Mama," and say John's name, he began to see that these really were children, and he began to teach the boys what he could, and love them like sons.

The family had three years of domestic bliss, during which Mary homeschooled the boys and taught them basic reading and math. In any event, it was too good to last. One night, a demon snuck into the house and forced Sam to drink his blood, because the first angles had been constructed from Supernatural stock, and the blood of an angel that drank demon's blood would be powerful and a valuable commodity for his schemes. Mary Winchester caught him in the act, and he killed her and set her on fire, but not before she had the chance to scream and warn John, in the next room, who got a glimpse of her dead body, stuck to the ceiling, before managed to wake Dean, throw Sam into Deans arms and tell them both to run. She then caught on fire and he ran out as her body went up in flames, never forgetting the glimpse he caught of the yellow eyed demon who killed her.

That even left John and the boys homeless, and drove John to seek revenge by becoming a hunter of strange supernatural creatures that preyed on humans. And he trained the boys as hunters too, and dragged them around from cheap motel to cheap motel, teaching them to shoot and fight and protect themselves. He taught them how to lie and steal and figured out how to bind Dean's wings so he could pass as human if need be and taught Dean to be self-reliant and take care of Sam. He himself learned all he could about what happened when angels hit puberty and how to treat injured wings and cut wing-wholes into thrift store clothing and how to avoid getting the boys into trouble with the law for little things humans wouldn't think twice about.

In his new life as a hunter, John met others like him, who fought creatures of the dark, and Bobby Singer was one of them. Bobby lived in a small town called Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and ran a scrap yard on the edge of town, which meant that he'd never seen an angel before John brought the boys to meet him. It was probably for the best, because then he saw how the boys were, the way they followed John's orders grumbling and how he got them to go what he wanted with a combination of sweet talking, guilt-tripping and strictness, the same tone used by all the parents he'd observed over the years. He noticed how they asked permission before raiding his kitchen and how they'd shared a jar of peanut butter with spoons and how they'd started squabbling when Sam called Dean out on his table manners. In short, he observed them being boys, and not being animals.

And while John treated his boys like soldiers, Uncle Bobby, as they came to call him, treated them like kids, and taught them things like how to play baseball and how to cook scrambled eggs. He was the one who gave Sam his first dictionary and started him on the path of reading for fun. He showed them old movies he liked taught them about history and art. John was less than thrilled at this, but the boys thrived, and grew to love their Uncle Bobby very much.

As the boys grew older, they spent less time with their Uncle Bobby and more time with their father, because they were able to hunt with their father serving as back-up and eyes in the sky. This meant that they were with him when he burst into the home of Kate Milligan, to find the werewolf they were hunting munching on her heart. Since they didn't have any silver bullets on them, Dean and Sam grabbed the creature from behind, while John ran it through with a silver knife, straight to the heart. It was only then that they heard a muffled sobbing coming from under the table. Dean dropped the body and bent down to see who was crying, and John and Sam quickly followed his example. Kneeling there, tears streaming down his cheeks was a young angel, a few years younger than Sam, who was barely even old enough to hunt. John's parental instinct kicked in, and he reached under the table to pull the child forward, as gently as he could, and cradle the child in his arms, being careful of his wings.

The little boy sobs into John's shoulder. "Please don't take me to the pound!"

John began to stroke the boy's hair. "Why would I do that?"

The boy hiccupped. "When Derek was mad at Mistress, he used to say that he'd take me to the pound, and I'd end up in a tiny cage with no food and then Mistress always said, 'over my dead body,' and now…" he looked down at the corpse on the floor and burst into tears again.

John sighed. "I know it's hard, but…I'm not Derek, and I won't let you go to the pound."

The little boy looked up at him and sniffed. "You won't?"

John shook his head. "I promise. What's your name?"

"Adam." He sniffed again.

John patted his head. "Welcome to the family Adam."

With that exchange, the third Winchester boy had joined the family. He was smaller and less assertive then his brothers, and didn't do as well at combat training, although he had a knack for doing bandages, which John nurtured into a talent for first aid, because it was useful to have somebody around who was good at that sort of thing when they were in a line of work like hunting. Sam had also taken it upon himself to teach Adam how to read, both so he could research, and so that he wouldn't be bored when they left him in the hotel room or in the car while they hunted. Adam was the only Winchester who could see how strange it was that they were treated like humans by John, although he never said much of anything about it. He tried to stay out of any argument that the other boys had with their father or each other, and they were often annoyed with him for not taking sides. When Adam went through his first heat, John cursed the fact that he was Omega, but kept him away from Sam and Dean at their insistence, for the sake of everyone involved. Adam's heats became just one more obstacle to work through in their lives on the road. They all made sure he didn't end up sleeping with Sam or Dean though, because they were brothers, and it was not even worth considering.

The boys grew into men, but couldn't leave their father's side, because they were not legally considered solvent and would probably be rounded up and returned, if not sold off to the highest bidder or put up for adoption, unless they were willing to live off in the woods somewhere. In any event, the three of them saw no reason to leave, until they had a close encounter with Azezel and a truck smashed into the Impala while they were fleeing. John and Dean, in the front seat, were badly injured, while Sam and Adam, in the back seat, were pretty much fine. When rescue crews found them, they took John to a hospital, Dean to a veterinary clinic, and the other two boys to a local shelter. When John found out that Dean died and he lived, he made a deal with Azezel to switch their places. The same day he found out John was dead, Dean broke out of the clinic, busted his siblings out of the shelter, went back to the wrecked Impala to salvage as much as they could, then hotwired a car and drove straight to their Uncle Bobby's house.

Bobby Singer was surprised, to say the least, when the two Winchester boys, who he hadn't seen in years, showed up at his door, with a new brother, and news that their father was dead. Still, he did what any good uncle would do; he took the three young men into his home, and even managed to have the Impala brought to his scrap yard, where he lent Dean the tools to fix her up. He figured that having the boys in his house, his only dealings with angels would be with them, and he'd helped raise two of them, and knew how the third one was raised. Then of course, the Roadhouse burned down, and everything changed.

The Roadhouse was a bar owned by a woman named Ellen Harvelle. Her husband had been a hunter, when he was still alive, and he had worked out of her bar. Once he was dead, she kept the tradition going, and the Roadhouse was a well-known gathering place for hunters to meet up and swap information and stories. John Winchester had been there quite often over the years, and had brought his boys along on a few occasions. There was a policy at the Roadhouse that angels were welcome, as long as they were dressed. The reason for this was simple: the only waitress was an angel herself. When Ellen's husband was alive, they had one son, and called him Ashland, or Ash for short. Ellen's well-meaning great-aunt had sent them an angel right around the time of his birth, and they'd taken the fledgling in as well, and called her Joanna, or Jo for short. Ellen had seen the similarities between the two of them, and had been unable to raise Jo as a mere animal. So Ash and Jo had grown up as siblings, and learned and played together, and, when they got old enough and Ash wasn't away at MIT, worked together at the Roadhouse.

The road house was suspected to have been burned down by the demon Crowley, who was at odds with the demon Azezel, but nobody knew for sure; all Ellen knew was that whatever had burned it down wasn't human. Luckily, she had been running an errand at the time, and had been out of the bar. Jo and Ash were working, but Jo had managed to fly them both out. Nobody else who was in the Roadhouse at the time survived. As soon as Ellen had ascertained that both Jo and Ash were alright, she called Bobby, who was a good friend of both her and her husband, and had been very good to them when they first married. When Bobby heard that they had nowhere else to go, because Ellen, Ash and Jo had kept a small apartment above the Roadhouse, he suggested that they come stay at his house in South Dakota. So Ellen packed everyone up and they left.

Jo got along alright with Sam and Adam, and a little more than alright with Dean, although her mother warned her that she should be careful in that department. In any event, they thought that four angels and three humans would be the total number of people living at Singer's Auto, which didn't count the young hunter Garth, who was there every other day asking for advice, or his angel traveling companion Anna, who was always with him. Unfortunately, that was not going to happen.

The trouble seemed to be, once they started thinking of angels as people, they couldn't just let bad things happen to them. An angel named Castiel who was abandoned in the rain, and stood for hours without anyone helping him, for example, had to be brought in, and allowed to stay, once they found out how abusive his owner was. Or Gabriel, who'd been kicked out of his home/job as a delivery boy when he his puberty, and his owner found out he was an Omega who went into heat, and came to Bobby because he's delivered there before and knew Bobby wouldn't kick him out right away. And once they gained a reputation as people who would take in angels in trouble, many people stared sending them abandoned angels, such as Balthazar, who's owner had been an old woman who doted on Balthazar and left everything to him when she died, only to have it taken away by her estranged niece in court and being cast out. He'd wandered until the police found him, and one of the officers had heard, through the grape-vine, that Bobby Singer had taken Gabriel in, so they went to his door, and Balthazar stayed. And after he moved in, there was Samandriel, a fledgling found out back of the Weiner Hut in town, who refused to say anything other than "Samandriel" for the first week after they brought him in, or Ezekiel, who'd fallen from a great height with his wings bound, and was brought back from the brink of death by Becky, a perky veterinarian who ran a clinic a few towns over, and had heard that Bobby would take desperate cases. Ezekiel refuses to say anything about where he'd come from and how he'd ended up as he did, but was very polite otherwise.

Of course the more angels they took in, the more problems they had. And not just the usual problems one would expect, such as overcrowding, and feathers everywhere, and problems with finding food money, and arguments, and sex, and all the related awkwardness. Oh no. There was also Gordon Walker, head of the Angel Liberation Front, that, while having laudable goals, tended to use extreme tactics and was not adverse to letting angels die "for the cause". Gordon was being used as a pawn by Crowley, who was a demon who was trying to stop Azezel from doing something and setting the Devil himself free. And because the F.B.I agent Michael Novack thought Bobby and Ellen were somehow involved with him, he and his attack angel Lucifer were sniffing around, constantly watching every move they made, so even if Bobby and Ellen didn't consider themselves activists, they were being targeted like them. And, on top of that, there were more demon attacks than ever, and a limited number of human hunters to pick up the slack.

A/N-This is just an overview of what will be a series of interconnected oneshots and plot relevant portions. I guess I could jump right in and tell it as I go, but this intro is supposed to create a mental timeline for readers. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it.