Author's Note: Be warned that this story's updates will slow way, way down once I start seriously working on my Isara Jones story again. In the meantime, enjoy and please review!

Chapter 3: In Which A Soul Becomes a Ghost

Eyes still shut, I listened to the clatter of printing presses and prayed. Please let that have been a dream. Please don't let me be dead. Please, please have let me fall asleep on a graveyard shift in the presses and I drank too much coffee and had a crazy dream. I cracked one eye open. A gorgeous, tropical-looking bird with emerald and sapphire plumage was perched on my window sill. It opened its mouth and released a familiar clattering noise.

I almost swore, then wondered if that was allowed in heaven. Then I decided that I didn't care. "Damn it." After smacking the window pane a few times to scare away the bird, I rolled out of bed and got to my feet, feeling perfectly rested and not at all stiff. A steaming kettle was hung over the fire and the delicious scent of coffee had permeated the room.

Most of an hour and several cups of coffee later, I was still feeling annoyed. Yesterday I had just been depressed that I wasn't able to see my friends again, but today I was getting really good and angry about things. I stared at the list of questions I wanted answers to. They stared blankly back.

"Settling in OK?"

I jumped up and whipped around. Standing before me, perfectly out-of-place in my corner of heaven, was a man wearing a disheveled plaid shirt and a mullet. He had left my door open and a slight breeze ruffled his ridiculous hair. He held up an awkward hand, jostling his shoulder bag. "Hey. I'm Ash."

"What are you doing here?" I backed up to lean against my table, hand searching for a weapon of some kind to grab. Then I remembered that I was already dead.

"I'm dead too. Died in a fire most of a year ago. I've been, um… heaven jumping. I was actually looking for Albert Einstein." He glanced around. "I thought maybe he had just remodeled."

"Wait, you can do that?" I forgot my anxieties readily at the prospect of seeing other people again. I was already feeling cramped into my isolated world, however pristine it was.

"Well, I can. Because I'm a genius."

"Oh, well, if that's all."

The man- Ash- seemed less uncomfortable now and he entered the room and shut the door behind him. "Hey, you're new, right? Do you mind if I ask you some questions about the world below?"

I looked around me. It wasn't like there was anything he could do to me, and he might even be able to answer some of my own questions. I held up my list. "OK, fine. Let's do an information trade."

We were seated at my little wooden table, I with a cup of coffee and he with a glass of whiskey. I had my list of questions and he had a laptop which was running some kind of complex program.

"All right, you first." I nodded to him.

"Awesome." He took a gulp of his drink and squinted at me. "I'm going to list some people, and you tell me if you know them." I nodded again. "Sam and Dean Winchester." I shook my head. "Bobby Singer. Ellen and Jo Harvelle." None of the names rang any bells, and Ash slumped disappointedly. "Fine. Your turn."

I looked down at my list and picked an easy one first. I held up the mysterious book which I had discovered in the garden. "What language is this?"

"Enochian, the language of the angels. You can probably read it a little bit since you're here, but even now hearing it spoken will be pretty uncomfortable. I'm running a translation program for 'angel radio' here now." He pointed to the screen of his laptop, which I could now see was analyzing dozens of sound waves. "I can hear everything they're saying. My turn. Have you met any angels?"

I watched a curl of steam rise from my coffee. "Yeah. When I first got here, I was in a sort of entrance chamber thing. I met Joshua, and he explained that I was dead and a… a 'reaper' brought me here. Then he said that I still needed to decide whether to stay in heaven or return to earth as a spirit." Not for the first time, I wondered whether I should have gone back home. "Then Zachariah pulled him away and said that they had business to attend to."

Ash's eyes flew open wide and he leaned forward excitedly. "Tell me about this entrance chamber."

I shrugged and wrinkled my brow as I tried to remember the details. "It was big. Like,really big. Marble floor, stone walls, arched ceiling. It looked like it was lit with candlelight but there weren't any candles. The Bible was carved into the wall, words and illustrations-"

"English or Enochian?"

"English. And there were the stereotypical pearly gates, and lines of other dead people going through."

Ash jumped to his feet. "Perfect. That'll be the news hub." He pulled a piece of chalk from nowhere discernible and started scribbling some kind of symbol on the table.

"Hey, wait! Where are you going?" I stood too, expecting adrenaline to pump through my veins, but nothing came. Probably because I was dead.

"There are some people that I really care about down on the world below," he mumbled as he scuffed out part of his design and fixed a line, "and I want to hear how they're doing and what they're up to."

"Can I come with? I want to ask more questions." And find a way out, but I thought it best to keep that particular scheme to myself. My fingers twitched anxiously at the thought.

He barely glanced up. "What, you want to ask me? I can come back, you know."

I grabbed some sheets of paper (including my questions), the Enochian book, and a pen which conveniently appeared on the counter to my left. "Yeah, well, what can I say? I've always been a journalist at heart. I'm going to need some more sources."

"You're a journalist?"

I held out the sleeve of my news coat demonstratively. "I'm covered in ink. Where could I work but a newspaper?"

"Lots of places."

I blinked. "Touché. But if you're looking for information, I'm the person."

He hovered for a few seconds before giving in. "Fine. Follow me." And with that, Ash placed a hand on the symbol and disappeared.

"Yeah, this is definitely the place," I confirmed as soon as I finished picking myself up off the floor. I pointed to the wall opposite us. "That's where I talked to Joshua and Zachariah." Today the lines of souls were much shorter. The far right queue was made up of three angels. "There's Zachariah. I don't know the others." I watched as the group tightened in what was apparently a tense discussion. Zachariah's wings twitched angrily in a way which would almost be comical if the situation wasn't so serious. Ash and I glanced at each other and surreptitiously joined the line nearest to the angels.

"He has to learn that he can't serve Dean Winchester!" Zachariah explained. One of the other angels nodded.

"That's Uriel," Ash muttered to me. "Heaven isn't exactly what you'd call 'stable' right now. There's a bit of an apocalypse happening on Earth, and God is AWOL. That's why they're all freaking out."

Ignoring that ominous statement for the moment, I strained my ears to hear the rest of the conversation.

"Castiel has become overly fond of the mud monkeys. He is beginning to express sentiment. Surely he must be reminded that his duty to heaven is greater. You agree, Balthazar?"

The third angel shifted uncomfortably. "I'm sure Castiel's intentions are pure."

"Of course, and we all know where that leads."

"Name?" I jumped and realized that I had already reached the front of the line.

"Oh, uhhh…" The same man who had logged my name just the day before- at least, in my heaven it had been a day- glared at me.

"You again? How did you get out?"

I turned to get help from Ash, but he was gone. A barely-noticeable chalk symbol was partially smudged out on the floor. "Brilliant." I tried not to glance over to where Zachariah seemed to have taken notice of me. "I, um… got lost?"

"What is this? How many times is it possible for you to escape in one month?" Zachariah was now standing right in front of me.

I started. A month? No wonder I was already feeling so restless and lonely. And why was he talking like I had already gotten out once? With a glowing, increasingly-annoyed angel staring me in the face, I was feeling even more restless. Unfortunately, I said the first thing that popped into my head. "Yeah, I was looking for Albert Einstein."

Before I could get my butt celestially kicked (I was beginning to realize just how human angels were capable of being), a small explosion went off across the hall and the three angels went running towards it. I bit my lip for a minute, wondering if I shouldn't just try and follow Ash, but then made a dash for the sound as well.

Standing in front of a particularly ornate section of wall were two more angels. Well, one of them one standing. This one was a good nine feet tall and looked downright scary. He shook out his wings and they nearly broke the sound barrier as they flicked open to span about twenty-five feet. The other angel was writhing on the ground, wrapped in some sort of chain inscribed with Enochian characters. One wing protruded from the bindings at an angle at which it surely wasn't supposed to bend.

"Castiel," the huge angel announced before disappearing with an impressive flash.

The one which must have been Castiel squirmed a little more and lay still while his brothers surrounded him. A horrible sort of grating noise clawed at my ears and I winced and clapped my hands over them. Zachariah was laughing, and anger flared within me.

"Well, Castiel, I see Raphael has taught you a lesson already." Zachariah prodded at the broken wing with a foot, inducing a muffled keening noise from the figure on the floor. Castiel angled his head to look at Balthazar, who shrugged a little sadly. "Let's make sure you remember it." With that, Zachariah hooked a hand through the chain which bound Castiel and started dragging him towards the pearly gates.

I felt inexplicably like crying. Watching an angel get dragged away by his comrades was easily the saddest thing I had ever seen, and it somehow broke my faith in the world. I took a step to follow, stumbling more than anything. Then another. Then another, slightly faster. Tears slid down my cheeks and didn't turn into chocolate as they splashed to the marble floor.

"No," I mumbled. I was so broken, so done, because I had died for a bus full of kids and ended up in some messed-up heaven where I was trapped forever and angels fought and bickered and I couldn't even pet my dog because he wasn't dead. I didn't know what I wanted other than to get out of it all. The time that I had been dead suddenly seemed like the month that it had been, then years, then an eternity, and I was running after the angels and shouting my two demands over and over. "No! Stop it! Let me go! Stop!"

Zachariah's eyes flashed with warning as he turned to look at me but I didn't slow until my hands were shoving him aside. I screamed as they burned and sizzled but kept pushing. The angels, totally unaffected, stopped to converse, and I caught a few snatches over my own cries.

"She's gone insane. Again."

"We did the best we could with her."

"Let's send her downstairs."

"Fine, but not all the way. There's no need for that."

"What a shame. Such potential."

One of them snapped their fingers and everything went very bright then completely dark. The last thing that I saw before my ghostly form completely disintegrated was the sorrowful face of Castiel staring up at me from the floor.