"Gonna have to take on passengers on Angel," Dean announced, maybe a bit too loudly but he was never quite sure if Sam had heard him or not, and because he tried to be as loud as possible whenever it was him and Sam because sneaking up on Sam, whether it was intentional or not, how been a bad idea even before his brain got all ripped up and put back together again.

After... well, Dean had only made that mistake once. However, Sam had been doing better lately, so his fingers were crossed.

"Mkay," Sam just said. He was hanging off of his bed upside down, looking perfectly comfortable and reading a book on some branch of science that Dean couldn't even pronounce.

"You gonna be alright with strangers on board?" he asked carefully, and Sam shot him a little smile.

"You'll take care of it," he said confidently. "If anything bad happens. You will."

Dean's heart swelled a little bit at Sam's words, and tried not to show it, even if it was useless because Sam always seem to know what he was thinking these days, and he seemed to this time too, because he grinned and muttered 'no chick-flick moments' under his breath and Dean rolled his eyes and wasn't fooling anyone.

"Bitch."

"Jerk."

~o~

Sam took refuge in his cabin when they landed on Angel, an insignificant planet in the eyes of the Alliance and therefore a breeding ground for crime and corruption. Criminals, thieves and gangsters were drawn to it like flies to rotting flesh. Their kind of people. Sam wasn't as good at being around large crowds of people if he could help it, now. He called it an overload, and while Dean didn't pretend to understand how his brother's brain worked Sam did, so if he said he couldn't handle something Dean fully believed him.

However, that did mean Dean was now stuck pawning off all the cargo, restocking on supplies, tracking down a new job, and picking up passengers. The last one, luckily, turned out to be the easiest, because when he came walking back up to Baby with his pockets a little heavier and the coordinates of an old wreck still stocked with goods in his mind, there was already someone standing there, a stranger with blue eyes that had seen too many miles and a dirty tan trench coat.

"Y'need something, stranger?" Dean asked in a friendly tone, one hand on the butt of the Colt that hung heavy on his hip.

"I'm looking for passage," the man said in a gravelly and emotionless voice that sent uneasy chills down Dean's spine.

"Where to? We're headed to Jericho to do some business."

"That's fine," the man said immediately, and something clicked in Dean's mind. Someone on a planet like this, eager to get away but not caring where except away?

"You gonna bring the Alliance down on us?" he asked suspiciously.

The man looked thoughtful for a moment. "I have a marked interest in avoiding them, but I suspect you do too. I can pay," he stated, pulling a bag out of his pocket. Dean bounced it in his hand for a moment and its considerable weight convinced him.

"Alright," he said. "I'm Dean, and this lovely lady here is Baby. Welcome aboard."

"I am Castiel."

~o~

Sam didn't get to meet Castiel until dinner. Dean had laid out the rules for their passenger and shown him around, helped him take his belongings to his cabin, where he had stayed until the dinner bell rang. When Sam laid eyes on him, he stiffened for a fraction of a second, in such a way that no one who didn't know him as well as Dean did would even notice, but he did and he made a mental note to ask Sam later what he had seen and whether their passenger ought to leave the fast and cold way.

But, as he found out later, it wasn't what Sam had seen that was the problem. It was what he hadn't seen.

"I can't read him," Sam said, his voice very small and scared. "Dean, I can't read him. That's never happened before."

Dean frowned. "Well, you haven't tried much. There's probably folk just can't be read. I'll keep an eye on him, though. Two if I can spare them. Okay?"

Sam nodded yes, but from then on avoided their passenger as much as he could, which meant he was basically a ghost for the next week, until they stopped off at Constance to refuel and restock. This basically meant that Dean and Castiel got to enjoy each other's company a bit too much for that time, and that meant they got to talking as much as two men running from their pasts could, and that meant they became... well, not friends, but acquaintances, at least.

~o~

Cas (and at some point he had become Cas) wanted to stay on the ship, but Dean managed to get him to come off and go on the supply run with him, because honestly he was so sick and tired of doing it alone. It went well and they even got a discount on some overpriced protein bars thanks to Cas's awesomely intimidating death glare. He resolved to bring the guy along on these kinds of things more often before remembering he was getting off on Jericho.

And that was good. Yes.

On the way back to the ship, Dean was laughing and had even managed to coax a smile out of Cas's stony face only to be stopped abruptly as the other man suddenly drew up short, the box of protein falling out of his hands to be replaced by a four-sided silver blade that slid like liquid out of his sleeve. Dean's heart jumped into his throat because he'd seen too many corpses with those square holes in their backs.

People killed by Operatives. He was reaching for his gun and thinking shoulda spaced the son of a bitch when I had the chance, now he's gonna kill me and drag Sammy back to that hellhole stupid stupid stupid when it occurred to him, by degrees, that Cas wasn't pointing the blade at him. He wasn't even looking at him. His too-blue gaze was focused on another figure that had seemingly appeared out of nowhere, a tall bald man with dark skin and a menacing smirk holding a matching silver sword.

"Castiel!" the man called, his tones spiked with venom. "It's... good to see you again."

"What do you want, Uriel?" Cas asked with clenched teeth.

"Oh, I thought it was pretty clear. I want you to come come to Heaven with me, alive is a preference but not necessary if only so Michael can kill you himself. But who knows? Maybe he'll be merciful. After all, you did track down our wayward psychic."

"No!" Dean shouted, bringing his gun up and training it on the man- the Operative. "You people don't get to touch him ever again!"

Uriel gave a rich chuckle, deep in his throat, and barely flinched when Dean's shot perforated his shoulder.

"Ouch," he said. "Too bad, really. I was considering letting you live. But you'll never stop being a thorn in our side, will you?"

At some point, the majority of Uriel's attention had shifted over to Dean, and now as he hefted his silver sword and prepared to strike what would doubtless be a killing blow, Cas made his move. He lunched forward and Uriel's sword stopped Cas's an inch from his heart. Uriel bared his teeth in something that could be mistaken for a smile, at a distance, and slashed back, drawing a thin line of blood across Cas's cheek as the other barely jumped back in time to avoid losing half of his head.

Cas replied with a feint and a parry, a stab towards Uriel's gut that was deflected and returned in kind. They danced, moving faster than any normal man could move, silver blades flashing in the sun. Dean felt useless. He couldn't even get a shot off for fear of hurting Cas, and fuck, what was he thinking? The guy was an Operative.

Then a bullet entered perfectly through one side of Uriel's head and out the other, and as he slowly crumpled to the ground with a comically shocked expression frozen on his face, Sam, standing behind them with a gun in his hands, opened his eyes.

~o~

Dean wasn't sure what made him bring Cas back on board Baby, the same way he wasn't sure when Castiel had become Cas and Cas had become his friend, but he did, and if they ran afoul of an Alliance patrol on the way to Jericho and it was only Cas's fancy flying that got them out of it, well, that didn't hurt either.

Either way, Cas was flying the ship when they took off from Jericho.