Mac came back to himself slowly, roused by the sounds of soft conversation and the quiet click of a keyboard from not very far away. His head was pounding. Like bad concussion or vicious migraine pounding. He couldn't for the life of him remember hitting his head or lying down with a headache though.

And he was lying down. The mattress was overly firm and the pillow thin. He had a brief moment where he wondered what the hell he was doing at Medical. He didn't remember anything. Wait, no … he remembered getting off the plane at the Brownsville Airport and picking up their beige rental sedan that Jack had bitched incessantly about as they made the short drive out to the small town of Los Reyes.

He even remembered pulling up outside a seedy bar and thinking that maybe he was a little hungry but there was no way in hell he was going to eat anything cooked inside that place. After that - nothing. But, he shifted a little on the bed and neither the pillow nor the mattress made the tell-tale crinkling noise that would tell him this was a hospital bed.

He wanted to open his eyes and orient himself, but the thudding in his temples was too insistent at the moment. He flexed his feet and discovered he was still wearing his shoes. That was probably a good sign. He took in the rest of his body. Still dressed. Okay, awesome. Then he realized someone was sitting on the bed next to him. And it wasn't Jack, because as he became more fully conscious, he processed that one of the quiet voices nearby was his partner.

No matter how much his head hurt, it was time. Mac pried his eyes open. The face looking down at him was familiar somehow. Bright pale blue eyes, tousled short brown hair, face badly in need of a shave, a kind smile. Mac felt his heartrate increasing but couldn't figure out why.

Then the man spoke.

"Hello, Angus MacGyver. It is good to see you awake. Your friend, Jack Dalton, has been very concerned."

The husky voice and odd speech patter brought everything back in a tidal wave of memory.

Mac gasped, almost choking on the breath and pushed himself up to sitting, backing away from the man by digging with his feet until his back was pressed against the headboard. His eyes were widening entirely against his wishes and he could feel himself pulling in ragged panicked breaths. Finally, through a supreme act of will, he just squeezed his eyes shut against both the pounding in his head and the reality he was not interested in accepting.

He heard Jack's voice get closer. "Hey, Cas." The familiar way Jack used the name made Mac cringe. Jack was part of this thing, this impossibility. "Give us a minute, wouldja?"

"Of course," Cas said, sounding entirely agreeable. Mac could actually hear the concern for him in this man's – this angel's (his brain supplied helpfully and he found the thought less painful than it had been a moment before) voice. "He is in pain. I will be nearby."

Mac felt the angel move off the bed and Jack's familiar weight settle onto it next to him. Jack put his hands on Mac shoulders and Mac felt his solid presence. His breath immediately slowed. "Hey, bud. You're okay, man. This is a lot, I know, kid, but you're okay. I'm okay. We're still just here to help people just like we always are and …"

Mac felt the corner of his mouth lift, even though it sent a stabbing pain shooting through his head. Jack sounded about as worried and helicoptery as he ever got. "I'm okay, Jack," he said quietly. "I just need a minute."

Jack took his hands away to give Mac a little of the physical space he knew his partner needed, but didn't get off the bed. He was half worried the kid was just going to pass out again. For a guy that was as concrete and practical as Mac could be, this had to feel like he couldn't cram it into his ginormous brain.

Mac understood so much about the world that most people never even wrapped the tiniest portion of their brain around, Jack figured his head had to be a lot more full than the average. Now it had to make room for the existence of a whole other world that Mac didn't know the rules of.

Mac opened his eyes again, if only to reassure Jack. Jack smiled at him in that tentative way he had when he knew Mac was hurt and he was just trying to keep his own shit together long enough to get him help. "Sorry I checked out on you, partner," Mac said, managing not to sound as shaky as the headache had him feeling.

"I more than understand, kid," Jack said, his smile relaxing into a real one, one that looked a little wry. "When I found out that all this stuff wasn't just makebeleive, I …"

"Took off into the woods to puke his guts for a while and then come running back when he realized the stuff that was going bump in the night was probably hiding in those woods," Dean supplied coming over and leaning against the wall near the bed.

Mac looked surprised. "You?"

"Hell yeah, me," Jack replied. "I wasn't afraid of anything, by God, and I was already a soldier, faced down things I thought were a lot scarier than some picture in a book that somebody must've faked."

Mac nodded for him to go on, eyes locked on his face, not even glancing when he felt Sam settle onto the foot of the bed in this dim motel room. "And?"

"And I was home on leave. First time I'd gotten to come home, and when I walked into the kitchen at the ranch there was that little shit eatin' the cookies my mom had made," he tipped his head toward Dean. "And his dad and mine were in the office talkin' up a storm. Our little buddy Dean, who I hadn't seen since he was a little kid all surly and almost a teenager tells me that our neighbors have been loosin' cattle to a Chupacabra."

"Seriously?" Mac asked, starting to rub his forehead.

"Seriously," Sam answered. "Dean has never been known for his subtlety."

Mac had to snicker at the glare Dean threw his brother just then. It was a familiar look of humorous betrayal he and Jack shared often. "What about you?" Mac asked.

"Oh, our Sammy is pretty subtle," Dean answered with a slight edge to his voice. "Usually because he's hiding something really important that he ought to tell me but doesn't want me to worry about."

"Sound familiar?" Jack asked with a mock-glare.

"Subtle I may be," Sam said, and a shared eyeroll with Mac. "But I wasn't there at the time. Too young they said. Still practically a baby they said. I was staying with our dad's friend Bobby."

"Anyhow," Jack continued. "I took back my damned plate of cookies and went and dumped my gear in my old room. Then my Mama came and said the guys wanted to talk to me. She looked so sorry about it too. She knew I was beat since she'd picked me up at the airport and I'd slept all the way home, but it wasn't the sort of request you said no to. You know?"

Mac just nodded.

"And then they told me why there was most of the Winchester family in my house instead of my extended family for the expected welcome home party. John, that's their dad; he had pictures of the thing killin' cattle. And my dad knew him from the war, wasn't just family. They trusted each other. I never doubted for a second those pictures were real."

"That's when the lunch refunding started," Dean tacked on.

"Yup," Jack agreed with not hesitation. "I wasn't ever the superstitious type. I'd never been afraid of the dark or monsters or any of that other stuff that freaks kids out. Mostly I spent my childhood afraid of bein' bored, because everything else was just a story."

Mac grinned a little at that. The Jack he knew was superstitious as hell and when it wasn't just a regular old bad guy or bomb or something, he had a tendency to jump at shadows. Then he frowned. "That's why you're … Like the Bermuda Triangle … And Bigfoot … And ghosts and all that. You're not being a wuss or a conspiracy theorist. You're not even being dramatic. You're actually afraid of that stuff …" Mac looked down at his hands. "Because you know it's real."

Jack shrugged. "Yeah."

Mac looked back up into his partner's eyes. "Why haven't you ever said anything? Why just let me be a jerk to you about it?"

"You've never really been a jerk about it, Mac," Jack assured him. "And even if I'd tried to tell you … Would you have believed me?"

Mac shook his head, hand straying up to his right temple and massaging absently. "No. Almost definitely not."

"Okay. How're you doing with this now?" Jack asked carefully.

Mac shook his aching head. "I'm … I mean, you've shown me evidence. Even if I'm uncomfortable with the conclusions that evidence leads me to draw, I don't have much choice but to accept it."

Jack patted him on the leg. "Can I do anything to help right now?"

"Where's our stuff?" Mac asked.

"Out in the car. I can run and grab it. What do you need?" Jack asked.

"Aspirin? And maybe a protein bar?" Mac asked tentatively.

Sam got up. "Hang on a minute. Why don't Mac and I take a walk while you guys catch up. The convenience store up the block has sandwiches and salads and fruit and hardboiled eggs and everything in their case. Better dinner than rations for someone who's just had a bad shock, right?"

He said it to everyone, but he was looking at Mac.

Mac nodded. "The food sounds good. But I don't think I wanna walk very far with this headache if I don't have to. It's one of the worst I've ever had … And we get blown up a lot."

He grinned at Jack then and Jack laughed, feeling a whole lot better about Mac's involvement that he had when he'd been very heatedly whispering to Dean that he didn't mind getting dragged into family business, but they had no business involving his young partner, too.

Sam looked almost tentative. "There's a better solution than aspirin, but I don't want you to freak out," he said, almost squinting at Mac.

Mac was shooing Jack off the bed and swinging his legs over the side so he could rest his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands for a moment. "Such as?"

"Hey, Cas," Sam called softly.

There was no sound but, the feeling in the room shifted. Mac glanced up and the kind, slightly shy looking man – angel – was back, standing near the foot of the bed next to Sam.

"Hello, again," he said gently, reading the situation a little better than he had earlier. "Sam has called me to help with your headache."

It was pretty obvious to Mac that either the angel was reading Sam's thoughts, or they'd talked before he'd come to. Of course, the angel knew he had a headache so the odds of it just being a discussion seemed slim. Mac frowned deeply, but he nodded. "I … um … okay?"

It came out as a question, and he hadn't meant to let it, but he no longer felt panicked by even the idea that this normal looking person could be an angel and found that even the idea of letting him touch him or work some kind of magic on him (or however the hell angels did anything) didn't even really bother him at the moment.

In fact, if the angel could make this headache go away, he thought maybe they'd be friends for life. Well, none of that was strictly true. He was still quietly freaking out a little. But it was more like the freaking out he felt when he was faced with a complicated bomb to diffuse. It was uncomfortable and unpleasant, but he could control it, ignore it, and continue to act as rationally as he needed to. For a while at least.

Cas approached slowly, reading his thoughts for sure if the subtle changes in his expression were any indication. "You are one of the good ones," Cas pronounced. "I like you."

"Um … thanks?" Mac responded, mentally cursing how everything that was coming out of his mouth sounded uncertain at the moment.

Cas sat down next to him. "The enormity of this pain is caused by how hard it is for you to accept a reality you do not have a framework for." Mac nodded. That actually summed up the feeling behind the pain pretty well. "I can improve how you feel, but until your mind constructs the new pathways for this sort of information, you may continue to struggle with it periodically. And new information may aggravate this."

Mac nodded again. From a neurological standpoint, that made perfect sense.

Cas went on, "You soul must expand to encompass the new person you will become because of this increased burden."

Now that sounded like the sort of bullshit chaplains and shrinks had been saying to him for years, but Mac kept his mouth shut, biting back the reply that he wasn't sure he believed in souls.

Cas chuckled softly, and Mac could feel Sam and Dean's amusement as well. "These thoughts are why you will continue to struggle, Angus MacGyver. But I will do my best to help you."

Mac almost flinched away when Castiel reached out, but Jack's steady hand suddenly on his shoulder, and his own determination to assimilate this experience, kept him still. He barely registered that he'd been touched when his headache was gone. Somehow that made the experience a little easier to deal with.

He opened his eyes and showed Cas a very genuine smile. "Thanks."

"You are very welcome, Angus MacGyver. I get more practice healing humans than I generally care for."

He gave Dean a very pointed look that made Mac nearly crack up.

"If these guys are anything like their cousin, I'm sure that's true," he said. "And hey, please call me Mac. All my friends do."

Cas beamed and turned to Sam. "Take this young one and feed him before he faints again. I like him awake."

Sam shrugged and looked to Mac. "You up to it?"

"Yeah, definitely."

"Alright. Let's go so you don't disappoint Cas by needing another nap."

After they left, Cas sat down at the table with Dean and Jack. "Apologize to Jack Dalton," he said to Dean very seriously.

"What the hell for?" Dean asked, tone already offended before he even knew the reasoning.

"How would you feel if someone purposely endangered Sam?"

"What's that have to do with anything? Sam's my brother and …"

Cas interrupted. "Exactly."

Jack grinned at Castiel. "I was reserving judgement about you, but I think I like you already."