A/N: Hi. So, I'm expermenting again. Everyone feel free to blame The Readers Muse for this. It was her idea. This is a crossover between TWD & Supernatural, my submission to the USS Caryl's "Mish-Mash" challenge. I don't anticipate this being more than 3-4 chapters, tops.

I should point out, this starts near the start of the 'Supernatural' series and will progress along as chapters go on.

The opinions portrayed of all matters regarding God and religion in general are entirely my own. If you want to have a discourse on these matters with me, feel free to find me on tumblr or PM me here.

My sincerest thanks to Muse for all of her encouragement and to Noxid Anamchara for her critique and fact-checking SPN knowledge with me.

For all the noise his brothers and sisters made, the fighting and the rage between them, Heaven had been fairly quiet. It was really the only thing he missed. Here, perched at the dingy bar in the crowded, smoky haze of Harvelle's Roadhouse, it had never seemed farther away.

This is what he'd left for, given up his place in Heaven to come here, full of a yearning to understand these creatures his Father had made and a desire to escape the growing chaos that churned above. 'As you love me, love them more.' That was their commandment, passed down through the ranks, archangel to seraphim to cherubim, and once the great war was done and the dust settled, he'd simply accepted it and moved on. Guarding the path to Purgatory was no small feat, but as time marched on he found himself thinking more and more about why Father would ask this of them. The few times he'd tried to bring it up with his brothers, he'd been derided, mocked, for daring to question an order. So he'd shut his mouth and kept his thoughts to himself until the idea, the passion for knowledge, consumed him. He'd left, slipping away quietly into the shadows without a word to anyone in his garrison and made his way here.

That no one had come after him was exhilarating and disheartening all at once.

He'd cloaked himself as best he could and set out to explore this great creation. He'd experienced the quiet grace of the sun rising in the morning, the clear call of birds in the trees and the cool, crisp rush of a flowing river. He'd learned that he liked to ride a motorcycle, the closest he could get to actually flying, and that even though he didn't need to eat or drink, he enjoyed the sweetly bitter taste of coffee. He'd seen the mark of Satan's hand all over this world, demons and monsters that he couldn't imagine God ever intended to exist, wreaking havoc on misguided souls. Most of all, he'd realized that human beings were selfish and self-destructive, flawed and violent. The decade he'd spent wandering the earth had given him little understanding of why he was supposed to love these things. How could he love something so innately broken?

No wonder demons flourished here. They had it easy.

He'd realized he'd made a mistake that was unfixable. He could never go home. He was stuck here, amongst these lost creatures.

So by day, he rode his motorcycle, streaking down long stretches of black pavement as far as the eye could see. At night, he drank. And he drank. And he drank, and with each sip of acrid booze that slipped past his lips, he felt himself becoming as lost as the mortals around him.

Tonight was no different. Sitting at the grimy bar with bad 70's country music caterwauling away in the background and nursing his second beer of the night as he listened to the chatter around him. Hunters, every one down to the last man, gathered within these walls to plan, reminisce, mourn and celebrate in one glorious hodgepodge of liquor and bad music from the clunky jukebox in the corner. Every night the ritual was repeated and every night, as he had for the past year, he sat at the bar and watched. Nobody bothered him here. With his knife and crossbow, his weathered leather jacket and the sour air that permeated from him, they simply assumed he was one of them.

"Fuckin' morons," he muttered into his glass.

"Me or somebody else?"

He jerked his head to see a woman had taken the empty stool next to him. A tiny, slender thing with a head of short cropped silver hair and eyes the clear light blue of a robin's egg.

"'M sorry," he said. "Didn't realize there was anybody close enough to hear me."

"It's all right." She carried with her the aura of grief and weariness that all hunters had, thick like a blanket wrapped around their shoulders, except hers didn't fit her right. It was too… fresh. Her shoulders hadn't bowed under the weight of it yet. Damn. She's new.

"Buy you a drink?" He surprised himself with the offer that tumbled from his lips. He rarely spoke to anyone during his nightly sojourns to this podunk little bar unless he was ordering another beer, and asking anyone to join him in his melancholy had never happened. Yet here he was, offering to buy a woman he'd known all of five seconds a drink, with all the subtext that went along with doing so. The lady in question was eyeing him with a delicately arched eyebrow.

"OK."

He supposed stranger things had happened. He just couldn't remember any at the moment. A raised finger had a stein of beer appear in front of her almost like magic, with a fresh glass for him at it's side. They both sipped at the amber liquid, the silence between them as awkward as a whore in church.

A burst of laughter from the far side of the room, sharp and flat with it's jaded irony, pulled their attention. They watched the drunken hunters boast and brag over the pool table with forced bravado. Farther in the shadows a cluster of men gathered around a round table covered in charts and maps. A somber trio, two men and a woman, perched at the other end of the bar, the woman dissolved in tears on the older man's shoulder while the younger drove his knife into the scarred bartop over and over again. In between all of them flitted the blonde curls of the younger Harvelle, busing tables and refilling drinks where she could.

"Is it always like this?" His companion said softly. "So…"

Grim? Gruesome? Depressing? Lonely?

"Yes."

She shuddered and pulled her cardigan, made from some loose knit knobbly fabric, tighter around her shoulders. She seemed fragile to him, too delicate for this place.

"You won't last a week," he said shortly. "Should give it up, go home." To his great surprise, she laughed into her beer, turning back to him with a sad smile.

"You think I'm a hunter?"

Well, when she put it that way...

"No," he said. Definitely not. She was still chuckling, taking a long swallow of ale and daintily wiping her mouth before she answered him.

"I'm not a hunter. I'm just a friend of Ellen's."

"I see." That was smart of her. Too many people tried to hunt, filled with the burning righteousness of revenge-fueled fire, and were lost almost instantly. Fools. All of them. But she still had that look of one who'd lost someone, maybe multiple someones, to something dark. "Why not?"

She sighed and bit her lip. He could almost hear the wheels turning in her head as she thought.

"My mother, she taught me that everything happens for a reason. That there was a divine power… God… directing all of us along our own paths. That if we had faith in Him and recognized His hand in all things, we'd end up right where we were supposed to."

God. If she only knew. He almost wanted to laugh at her.

"You really believe that?"

"No." She took a long swallow of her beer, her fingertips idly tracing patterns in the rivers of condensation on the glass. "After my daughter…"

Oh. His stomach clenched at the thought. What do you call someone who's lost a child? It took him a long moment to realize she was still speaking.

"I realized that everything just… happens. Everything happens. Everything happens, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something."

"So you don't believe in God?"

"No, I do."

"Ah, so you're one of those." He tried to wash down the bitterness inside of him with a swig of his beer. "Believin' there has to be somethin' good to balance out all the evil?"

She turned and gave him a long look, her eyes taking him in from the soles of his scuffed boots to the tip of his head, covered in long hanks of hair that hadn't seen a good wash in days. He wondered what she thought of him.

"It's about balance, but it's more than that. I believe… I believe that to have faith in God is to have faith in ourselves. God doesn't want to control us. He wants us to live. That to recognize that everything we're capable of... the good, the bad and everything in between… to look at ourselves and choose how we react to life, who we want to be and what we do here…" She laughed, her cheeks glowing pink in the faint light. "I'm not making any sense."

He can see it. For one brilliant, dizzying moment, he can see it and marvel in the simplicity of the idea. In all the millennia he could remember, he'd only ever made one decision on his own. It was one he regretted, yes, but it was still his. Just as she had clearly chosen not to take up hunting to avenge the loss of her daughter, but had instead decided to live, in her memory.

It's all a matter of choice.

"Yeah, you are."

Her eyes flick up to his and he's startled again at how clear and bright her eyes are. He'd read once an overly romanticised idea that eyes were window's to the soul. For the first time, he thinks he might understand what it means.

"Carol!"

They both turn at the call, seeing Ellen waving at her from the back door.

"That's me." His companion, Carol, rises to her feet, graceful despite the slight tremor in her hands and the blush that still tints her face. "Thank you for the drink…?"

He realized she was hoping he'd give her his name. He decided to give her the only one he really could.

"Daryl."