"Right, now, Cas." Dean paused outside the TARDIS, turning to face the Angel. "Don't... Don't freak out." Castiel frowned, as Amy and Sam swiftly stepped into the blue box before him. "Just, trust me on this, we know what we're doing." The lie slipped easily from Dean's mouth.
"Dean, I don't understand." He wasn't sure why, but something in Dean's voice made the Angel feel uneasy.
"That man, who was on the phone, he, uh... well Cas, he's an alien." Dean still didn't like the feel of the word on his lips, and, frankly, it made him feel a bit more than just his normal level of crazy.
"An alien? Do you mean like a foreigner?" Cas tilted his head to the side with an inquisitive look on his face.
"Uh, yeah. Yeah, sort of. Definitely not from this country. Just, promise me something?"
"Of course." The speed of Cas' response to Dean's request for fidelity made the hunter shift a bit uneasily for some reason.
"Don't," Dean paused. Don't what? Don't lie to me like that again? Don't leave me and Sam to clear up your mess? The Winchester sighed, "Don't smite anyone." He muttered in a resigned tone.
Castiel nodded, looking bemused. "Dean," he said, looking cautiously at the blue box. "That box, it doesn't feel... right." The wavelengths coming from it were unlike anything Cas had ever experienced. It was indescribable, impossible, something so small shouldn't be able to produce so much energy. His friend smiled, there was something odd about that too, more of a grimace than Dean's usual (if somewhat rare) smile.
"Let's just go inside."
"Dean, I really don't think four people can fit inside there..." But Dean had already disappeared inside. Castiel quelled his doubts, after all, it seemed that trusting Dean always led to a much better outcome than when Castiel tried to take care of things on his own.
The first thing Castiel registered after stepping into the box was a bright green light in his face, accompanied by a high pitched whirring and peculiar ripples of
energy cascading over his entire body.
"Doc, what the hell are you doing?" Came Dean's voice, it seemed, to Cas, further away than was possible in the confined space. The green light vanished, and the man wielding it became clear. His brow was furrowed as he stared intently at the copper tube in his hand, turning it over and over as he examined it.
"Nope, Pond, it's okay, he's not one of them!" The man called over his shoulder. "Sorry," he said, turning back to face Castiel, "just making sure you're not a homicidal statue."
"I don't understand..." He wasn't just talking about the strange man. Now that Cas could see properly, he realised the interior of the small blue box. Only it wasn't a small blue box. It was cavernous, bigger than Bobby's house and panic room put together.
"Nobody does," Sam smiled sympathetically, crossing from a large table-like thing in the middle of the room. "Uh, Castiel, this is John, Sherlock, Rory, Amy and the Doctor." He gestured at each person in turn.
"Sam, I don't understand, this box it's-" Castiel turned in a slow circle, his eyes taking in the TARDIS.
"Bigger on the inside, yeah." The one with the large nose- Rory, finished Cas' sentence for him. "Don't worry, you get used to it."
"Dean," This was getting too much, "we need to talk about what is out there."
"Couldn't agree more!" The odd man with the green light chirped, spinning around with his arms in the air. He skipped over from the console to Castiel, massively
breaching the Angel's personal space and taking the phrase "nose to nose" to a whole new level. "So, you, what do you know?"
"Uh... uh, not a lot. There's something not right here, it's not leaving a lot of clues, though. Just... things aren't right." Castiel's replied, frustrated.
"Hm. You know about as much as I do. Well that's useless, you're useless. Dean, Sam got anything for me?" As quickly as The Doctor had approached Castiel he left him standing, bewildered by the console and approached the two hunters.
"Got anything for you?" The question had inexplicably pissed Dean off again. "Isn't that what we're in here for? So that you can track down this fucking wraith and have done with it?"
"Well," the Doctor looked slightly stroppy. "You're no help either. Did anyone find anything interesting?" The Doctor's exasperated tone did nothing to help with Dean's angry disposition.
"Um..." Rory began, somewhat dubiously, "a body."
"A body?" The Winchesters spoke in unison, taking everyone by surprise.
"No, no, no." The Doctor dismissed Rory's point with a flap of his hand. "I'm not looking for a body in a graveyard, there's lots of those. I'm looking for a thing."
"A thing." Sam repeated incredulously.
"Yes, yes, a thing-like thing. It was a very, uh," he searched for the word, "thingy thing."
"Glad we've cleared that up" John muttered to Amy, who smiled. 'You get used to it,' she mouthed back.
"Ugh." The Doctor let out a yell of frustration. "Humans! You're so useless!" His outburst earned him an eyeroll from Amy and a smirk from Sherlock.
"Doctor, you haven't actually told us what you want us to look for," Amy pointed out. "All we know is that it's a thing, and it's bad."
"Okay. Okay, uh, uh, people have been going missing." The sentence came out disjointed, as the Timelord searched for the right words. "Only, they're not missing. They're ending up in well, they're ending up all over the place. The past, the future, different planets, different galaxies."
"Yes!" Castiel's outburst drew everyone's attention, making him feel slightly sheepish, "I... uh... some of the angels have been reporting that the humans in their
charge are vanishing."
"Could it be the weeping angels?" Rory asked from the other side of the TARDIS, his words eliciting a strange tilt of Castiel's head.
"I did think that, but no, sending people into the past, yes, we know that angels can do that, but it takes enormous amounts of energy to send something ahead of time, let alone across the universe. They'd starve themselves doing so." The Doctor's hands flapped wildly in front of him as he dismissed the idea as impossible.
"So we don't know what we're looking for?" The Doctor looked at Amelia with solemn eyes and shook his head.
"Whatever it was... it was here, recently. That's when I met Dean and Sam, the Thing was chasing me."
"And what, it just so happened that all three of you failed to see it?" Sherlock lowered his hands, that had been steepled against his lips, and frowned haughtily at the Doctor and the Winchesters from his precarious perch on the TARDIS railings.
"We were a bit preoccupied, what with running away from the fucking thing." Dean really was in a foul mood, and the tall, thin man with the superior expression on
his fox-like face was really beginning to get under his skin.
"Doctor, I don't understand..." Sam, like everyone else, just ignored Dean, "if this is a time machine, why don't you just go back and rescue everyone?"
"There's too much chance of crossing my own time stream. Besides, it's better to leave them there for now, we don't know what moving them back might do..." The Timelord's voice trailed off and he looked around. "Where's Sherlock?"
"Here," the Detective appeared, inexplicably, from underneath the console. Rory started a little, put off by how seamlessly Sherlock had moved across the TARDIS, without detection, and ended up right by his feet.
"Uh, what are you doing?" John asked, concerned and all too aware of what happened when Sherlock was let loose near any kind of technology.
"Thinking." Sherlock clipped.
"Thinking." The Doctor repeated, frowning at Sherlock. Like John, he was apprehensive about Sherlock's proximity to the console. But unlike John, the Doctor hadn't much of a clue as to how to deal with Sherlock, and was completely lost when John let out a tired sigh and asked,
"In your mind palace?"
"Mind palace?" Dean scoffed at John, "is that British for brain? Or is it all you, Fancypants?"
Sherlock regarded the hunter cooly. "Fancypants. Well, Dean, top marks for originality, but typically, dully wrong. I was in fact wondering, firstly, the exact nature of your relationship with Castiel. The unhealthy relationship you share with your brother is one thing, but this... this reeks of late night encounters." Dean face flushed a decidedly red colour as he pressed his lips into a thin line, and moved his hand to his gun. Only Sam's hand on his arm stopped him from an outburst, and possibly a shooting. But Sherlock's gaze already turned towards the Doctor, completely oblivious to Dean's anger. "Secondly, Doctor, going off of face value appearance I'd estimate your age at somewhere in your late twenties. But then your eyes. No, you're old, impossibly old, and you've seen things, wars and deaths and violence on all accounts. You've seen so much of it, you've become desensitised, but not enough that you've become entirely numb. And finally... Rory. Has anyone else noticed that he's been sweating? No? The temperature in here's mild, cool even, yet there's Rory, looking like he's in a sauna. Can't be a fever, we've been with him all evening and he's not so much as coughed. so what is it? Something happened, didn't it? In the graveyard, something must have happened but what?"
"The Wraith." Sam muttered. Despite his quiet tone, his voice rang clear throughout the TARDIS. Sherlock really knew how to silence a room.
"Rory?" Amy's voice was worried. "Rory, are you okay?"
"I-I'm fine." He replied, voice sounding equally as worried.
"No you're not, look at you. Pupils dilated, sweating and hallucinating."
"Sherlock, how could you possibly know if he's hallucinating?" John challenged.
"Look at him, really look, every few seconds he squeeze his eyes shut and digs his nails into his palms. He's anchoring himself to reality, but it's getting less and less effective."
"But," Sam glanced at Dean, confused. "Wraith poison doesn't act that fast."
"Well apparently it does." Sherlock snapped. "What's the cure?"
"Gank the Wraith." Dean said.
"Right. Let's do that then." John said, Sam nodding in agreement. "Doctor, can you do that thing with the scanner again?"
"Uh," the Time Lord was obviously conflicted. He glanced towards Amy and Rory, clinging on to each other's hands. "Yes. Yes of course." He skipped over to the main console, twiddling with this and pulling that, and muttering something about calibration that nobody, save Sherlock, could understand. "Amy," he said, voice calm, "take Rory to the library. Somewhere a bit less stimulating. Might help."
"Won't."
Dean, Sam, John and Amy all spoke at the same time. "Shut up, Sherlock."

"Rory." Amy sat next to her husband on the floor of the vast library. "Rory, stay with me, come on."
"I'm fine." He muttered through gritted teeth, clutching at his head. "Fine."
"Good. But you won't be that way for long." Amy grinned. She stood up, chuckled, and kicked Rory in the gut. He didn't know what hit him, the air vanished from his lungs and he fell to his side, coughing.
"Nice kick, Pond!" The Doctor commended, appearing from behind a bookcase. He joined Amy, wrapping his arms around her waist. She smiled up at him, standing on her tiptoes, and bringing her mouth to his. The Doctor reacted instantly, holding her cheek in his hand and kissing back feverishly.
"No..." Rory gasped. "No!"

"Amy," the Doctor looked grim, speaking into the mouthpiece of the phone. "Amy, how is he?"
"Doctor..." His insides went cold at the sound of her sobbing.
"It's okay, Pond. He'll be okay, you have to trust me."
Sam watched the Doctor as he leant his head against a television screen, attached to the long column that ran through the centre of the console, and whispered down the phone to Amy. He noticed Dean staring at the Time Lord too, and knew they were both thinking of the same thing. Of Jo, holding in her guts as they hunted down the Devil and got nowhere for it. To the brothers, the Doctor was synonymous with Bobby at that time, trying to help as best as he could from afar.
"Cas," Dean laid a hand on Castiel's shoulder, his tone solemn. "Can you do anything?"
The Angel seemed confused by the request. "No..." his tone distracted. "I-I have to get back to my garrison. I need to find out what's going on." And with that, he was gone, leaving Dean's hand hanging in the air.
"Well he's about as useful as an empty tank of gas." Dean muttered, inwardly cursing the angel and hoping he could hear it. "Hey, uh, Doc?" Watson and the Doctor both looked up. "Alien Doc." Dean clarified. "We're gonna head out now, okay? Tell Amy to sit tight."
"Dean," he was stopped by John. "We'll come with. Can't hurt, having a couple of extra pairs of hands, right?" There was a moment of tense hesitation between the two, as Dean weighed up his trust of Sherlock with a gun against Amy and Rory's need. "All right." He concluded, leading the way out of the TARDIS, and leaving the main console room empty, save for the Doctor, still on the phone, consoling Amy as Rory's sanity deteriorated before her eyes.