A/N: To avoid any confusion, I'd like to explain that the original character Ae is a cherub. Imagine: tiny, innocent, ethereal. Ae is a neutral gender, or no gender, however you'd like to think they'd be. As such, I will be using they/them pronouns to describe Ae, because he/she obviously don't apply and they/them seems more appropriate than it and more natural than ze/hir. If this is still confusing, I'm sorry, but Ae is just not a character that falls into the usual male and female. If you have any suggestions, I'll be happy to take them :)

i.

He wasn't expecting it. Then again, most people don't. When consistently, constantly left with no one but himself to blame, no one but himself to appeal to, he'd become rather used to the state of being alone. Except... he never was. And neither are you.

Ae came to Dean in a dream many years ago. He couldn't remember exactly when, but the faint watermark of the heavenly presence tingled at the back of his mind. The dream could have been when he was first born — or maybe before that, or maybe decades after. Anyhow, the presence, as Ae only could have been described, had been with Dean so eternally long that he'd almost forgotten it had existed, like the way nearsighted people sometimes stop realizing the world around them is blurred.

Dean had been through too much pain in his life, seen too many deaths, caused too many deaths. There might have been a time when he believed someone would come to save him, but forever of missed chances later, his hope of a savior was all but dead.

Ae had told him, though. They'd said, softly, in that dream so long ago, that if Dean ever needed a shoulder, a hand, a heart, an ear, all he had to do was call. They supposed they knew why he never did.

Now, as Dean sank into the creaky bed of the Super Eight Motel, Ae considered that maybe he'd forgotten. Forgotten, or somehow refused to believe, that they'd even existed. It hurt a little, to be honest. So they flew to the motel, drifted lightly onto the mattress, and touched a soft hand on Dean Winchester's shoulder.

He yelled. They yelled.

A gun was drawn, pointing both at Ae and not at Ae — but that was to be expected. Ae pointed back, with an empty hand of two fingers aimed at Dean.

But he barely noticed, because right then his mind was racing, like he was connecting the dots, his brain cells firing like he would at the sudden remembrance of a birthmark he'd forgotten was there.

His eyes were softening, his gun dropping, and Ae batted their wide eyes, gazing serenely over his situation.

"You're..." he stared. "You're real?" His voice was gruff and deep, grating and lovely, just as Ae imagined it would be. They'd been with him throughout the years, yes, but sensing his voice and his thoughts through the ether of immaterial space was much different than hearing the actual, physical sound waves. They were a little bit in love, a little bit in awe.

"Of course I'm real," Ae said. "But you're real?!"

They weren't sure how their voice sounded. Maybe it was cute and high and melodic. That would be perfect, honestly. Or did they even have a voice, a physical one, or did their intended dialogue just float through the fabric of space-time until it registered in Dean's head?

"You're asking me that?" Dean retorted. "But you're a... a—" He flailed his arms about.

They copied his movements in curiosity. It wasn't often that they got to take on their physical form. They wondered if there was a mirror nearby. "A cherub! I wonder 'cause I think therefore I am, Dean, so of course I know I exist. Just hard to believe you're really real!"

They ran to him, or floated, or flew, and wrapped their tiny arms around him in a hug. "You're, like, my favorite person to watch!"

He stiffened a bit, which they understood wholly, but didn't seem too wary. Just as they'd hung around him forever, he'd felt their aura his entire life too. So he must have known, at some level, who they were, and that they really meant nothing but goodness.

"Stalker much? Are you implying you watch other people, too?"

"You're my favorite," they chirped, their wings, or their buoyancy, or their pixie dust hovering them in ecstatic circles around Dean's neck as they hung on with their hug.

He asked then, although he should have known, "Why are you here?"

They pecked his cheek, which felt rough and flushed and clean. "Because you're not happy, Deanie, and I thought you'd forgotten about me."

"I... kind of did."

"But I told you," they said, in almost a whine, smushing their cheek against his, "I'll always be here for you when you need me. But you never called." They sniffed. "I, I don't like it when, when—" Tears streamed down their cheeks, their lower lip trembling. "When my favorite friends don't need me, and—" They were bawling now, chest heaving, wings or pixie dust or magic hair flying haywire, arms squeezing tight.

Eyes widening, Dean patted their head awkwardly, unsure what to do. "There, there," he said.

Their eyes dried, or they'd never been crying, or the tears turned invisible. "Deanie. I'm here 'cause you're hurting. You're hurting so much and I just can't bear it anymore." They slid down from around his neck and plopped, or sank, or levitated, on the quilts. They picked up one of his hands and cradled it. "What's wrong?"

"It's my brother," Dean said. "He's going to die and it's all my fault."

They leaned their head on his arm and started humming. "Trust me, because I'm a cherub. Sam'll be okay in the end, and so will you. Trust me, because I'm a cherub; it's never all your fault. It's okay to not worry about blame for a little bit."

For an hour, or a day, or half a second longer, they comforted him until they were sure he wouldn't

start crying. Crying, not as they did, but as he reinvented it, as moping and drowning and fighting.

When his soul slept, they left, off the mattress, out the motel, but with him the whole time and longer.

ii.

Ae had never been very good with time, with the passing of it or the counting of it or the living in it. They weren't quite sure how long it had been since they last spoke to Dean — it must have been a century, nearly, or had it only been a moment? — but they'd yearned and yearned for him to reach out, to call for help. Because Dean needed them. He needed them in his times of darkness, in his times of joy. He needed them as a friend when he had no one, and he needed them when he had everyone but still felt alone. Comfort was their specialty and it was no shame on anyone to call for help when it was needed.

But still Dean didn't call.

They'd watched his mother die, then his father, then his brother, twice or three times, then everyone else he'd once loved. They'd watched him die, too many times to count, or maybe they had counted and they'd just forgotten.

But Dean was too proud, too sensible, too delicately strong to ask anyone for help, not even from a cherub who existed for no other reason.

Then Castiel died. They weren't really sure if he had, given the nature of angels. Angels were field they were quite knowledgable in (or maybe they'd just guessed, or maybe they hadn't thought about it at all). But Dean was convinced, and for the first time in lifetimes, he thought he couldn't go on. He was curled in layers of sheets, a headset hung tentatively over his ears. His hands were clasped, his eyes closed, his heart open.

And they came. Flying through the rain, the walls, the pain, they nestled into the curve of his knees and his chest. "Deanie," they said, their voice soft as cotton. (Or maybe it had been shrill, or booming, or silent.) "What's wrong?"

They knew what was wrong, of course they did, but it always helped to ask.

A tear rolled down his cheek, then two, then three. They knew what he was thinking and they let him think it. Then they said: "It's not your fault."

"I had a responsibility. To protect him." There was his voice again, sweeter than home, filling their lungs with air.

"Firefighters don't thwart arsonists," they said, but as soon as the words were out of their mouth, they wondered whether they were true. "Some things you just can't prevent."

They wiped the tears from his skin with their barely-there fingers. "It's okay to cry, Deanie. Tears aren't weakness. I cry all the time." They traced their fingers up and down his arms, through his hair, down his chin.

His green eyes followed Ae. They wondered whether they looked like a little dancer or a lumpy gnome. It took a while (an eternity or seconds?), but the tears came, first welling up like the drops were afraid to fall, then tip-toeing, gliding like molasses over the pores and bumps of Dean's perfect skin. His shoulders were heaving, his breaths shallow.

They tucked their head under his chin and let him hold onto them like a teddy bear. As he drifted away from consciousness, they drifted away from physical existence.

iii.

They never stopped wanting to help him, maybe because they loved to, or because they couldn't stand watching him flounder. So they often took breaks from their regularly scheduled nonexistence to drop him hints and clues, to fill up his gas tank, to lower the cost of double-double bacon burgers. His confusion and giddy smiles warmed them up from their invisible toes to their (hopefully) fluffy hair.

Yet, the eternal problem persisted. Dean never called. It was his masculine ego, they knew, both endearingly charming and despairing. It tore them from the inside out, like they lost a little bit of their grace each time he plugged up his feelings. So they struggled, their heart leaping and sinking with Dean as he saved and destroyed the world, all until they realized that sometimes people deliberately refuse to ask for help even when they would die for it. Until they realized that Dean still didn't think they actually cared. That they might have more to do than to babysit him. Which was outrageously untrue.

So when Castiel (who was still alive, a-ha!) turned out to not be Castiel and only Lucifer in disguise (oh, how Ae hated that fallen angel), they finally recognized the signs of a Dean who felt too insignificant to ask for help.

He sat at the edge of his bed in the Men of Letters bunker, his face stone, his eyes bemoaned. Ae flew through the bunker, onto the mattress, into Dean's sadness. Their miniature arms wrapped around his neck and shoulders, their chin buried in his collarbone.

He sucked in a small breath, his sigh a sound of the loveliest relief. "I didn't call..."

"You don't have to," they said. "Love comes even when you think it won't. Especially then."

"Will Cas be alright? Will the world?"

"Sure," they said. "But that doesn't matter. You will be okay, Deanie. And that's the most important thing to me."

A/N: Now that you've read that, I'd like to share that this one-shot (or at least, Ae's life in it) is not over yet. I plan on making as many crossovers as I can write, with Ae comforting characters in need all across the multiverses. I'm planning on doing Scott McCall next, but if you have suggestions for who you'd like to see stop suffering, just let me know!