Author's Notes: Title for the chapter comes from the lyrics of "One More Astronaut", by I Mother Earth.

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Weightless and Almost Sane

The archangel perched on the rickety kitchen chair, ruggedly handsome face drawn up in broodment. He had fallen far from his once-noble role in the grand scheme of things, from a Bearer of the Word to an embittered, purposeless shell of a seraphime.

"I have not!" Balthazar scowled, fingers tightening on the pages in his hand. "I will not sit here and be insulted by a man who can't even spell 'seraphim'. And broodment isn't a word either, you illiterate hack."

The man he'd come to see, the man with all the answers, was still unconscious. Balthazar knew that every moment that passed increased the chances of drawing down the wrath of his Heavenly brother, that awesome, unknowable, immense and terrifying being who had been guarding Chuck since birth…

Looked like Raphael had been doing a little creative editing on the sly. "Awesome, unknowable, immense and terrifying" his luscious left cheek.

He wasn't here to hurt the prophet, only to obtain information, but Raphael was notoriously short-tempered when it came to his duty, and if he noticed Balthazar sitting in Chuck's kitchen, he might take exception.

His thin fingers tightened on the pages in his hand, excerpts from the prophet's next great work, sneering at them. He didn't think very highly of the Man with the Answers, which was clear from his derision over word choices and his muttered, "Illiterate hack."

Maybe part of his aversion to the work was how accurate it was. It was all laid out there in black and white, except where it had been smudged by fingerprints. The duties his brother still held, where he had turned his back. The sins his brothers had covered up for him, weighed like bricks on his soul.

Balthazar's jaw dropped. "I do—I have-I will - I bloody hate prophets," he muttered, balling that page up and tossing it onto the table. He debated burning the whole thing entirely, because anything that painted him in that ridiculous an image needed eradication. Right, he was trying to avoid drawing Raphael's attention. No personal Guy Fawkes for him, then.

"Bugger this." He stood from the rickety chair, and strode with purpose – with purpose, you shallow-minded fribble - Balthazar went into the living room, stepping cautiously around the detritus of a wasted life. Balthazar grimaced as he delicately lifted his foot over an army of whiskey bottles and wrinkled his nose as it came down on a discarded fast food wrapper with a greasy crinkle. Standards for prophets had fallen sharply since the last time he'd been the personal shoulder-angel of one.

Balthazar wondered if he should contact the producers of that hoarding show, and stage an intervention.

Screw it. The prophet wasn't under his care.

Chuck remained exactly where Balthazar had dumped him, mouth agape and eyes flickering rapidly under his closed eyelids. Balthazar's grimace was becoming a permanent fixture on his face, no doubt gouging permanent, hideous lines in his otherwise perfect complexion. He rubbed his thumb across the fingers of his right hand before sighing. Unless he wanted to dump a bucket of cold water over the bastard, and the Father only knew but Raphael might take that as an attack, there was only one way of waking the sorry, soggy sot.

With all the care of a man lifting a pair of someone else's soiled underwear, Balthazar gingerly reached out and tapped Chuck with his fingertips.

…man and angel burning together, each other's name a sigh on their lips, inhibitions stripped as bare as their skin…

"There are things I do not need to see!" he howled, yanking his hand from the prophet's forehead as if scalded, and Chuck jolted awake so ferociously he threw himself right off the couch. Balthazar reeled back, tripping over some bit of detritus or another. He flailed backwards into a pile of laundry that had for some reason been thrown in the middle of the floor.

There was a groan from the prophet, and Balthazar counted slowly to ten in every language he knew. Which was all of them. It didn't help. "What is seen," Chuck said hazily, pushing himself up on his hands and feeling around for his glasses, "cannot be unseen."

Balthazar struggled to free himself from the clinging, dirty clothes, but gave up halfway there and snapped himself back upright. His attachment to the idea of not drawing Raphael's attention was quickly losing ground. After all this, he might just end up smiting Chuck into a smear where he lay in his dirty, sad bathrobe.

Being smote in return would be oh so very worth it.

Driven beyond the end of his admittedly small well of patience, he reached down and hauled Chuck back to his feet, brushing his shoulders off with perfunctory flicks of his fingers. "Prophet, my time here is limited. I have neither the leisure nor the luxury of waiting on your power naps."

Chuck was a study in utter dejection and absolute misery. And fear. Oh, there was a healthy dose of fear in there too. Not even Paul on the road to Damascus could have missed the fear. It suddenly occurred to Balthazar that perhaps this sad little man really had no idea of what he was, and what his books represented. Maybe it wasn't the standards for prophets that had fallen. Maybe it was the standards for guardian angels that were in the shitter.

Balthazar rested his chin on his thumb, forefinger tapping the tip of his nose. "I don't really have the time for your awkward self-revelations either, Mr. Shurley," he said finally. "But what the hell. It's only the world coming to pieces as we stand here and chat."

Chuck looked down and shuffled his feet. "Sorry," he mumbled, rubbing at his head with the palm of his hand. "I'm obviously having some sort of a psychotic break. Characters coming to life and angels doing things angels never, ever do, and…"

No. No. He was not going to get dragged into this pathetic mudmonkey's sob story. He was on the clock, dammit. "That's all well and fine," he said with a strained smile, "but I'm really only here about the box."

"The box?" Chuck blinked at him owlishly. "The box." Then the haze cleared and he shook his head forcefully. "No, no, no. That's a bad idea. It's a very bad idea."

Balthazar's nerves began fraying all over again. He could tell, because his cheeks were hurting from how bright his smile got. "I live for bad ideas, darling. They're the most fun."

"No, you don't understand." With his hands fluttering in the air like drowning rabbits, he trotted towards the kitchen, snatching up the scattered pages as he went, discarding them almost as rapidly. He grabbed at another batch, peered at the top sheet, and came back. He thrust it at Balthazar. "Three nights ago, I woke up with a migraine, and this—" He gestured at it, then swiped that hand down his face, gnawing on his thumb. "This is what I wrote."

Balthazar arched an eyebrow, then took the pages from his hand.

"It seemed like a good idea at the time," Chuck continued to babble, as Balthazar read through the pages. "I mean, I'm not used to juggling so many characters around Sam and Dean. Shedding one here and there… comic book writers do it all the time!"

It was only two and a half single-spaced pages. Only several hundred words. But Father Almighty, what had been packed into that meager number. "It's not where I left it," he said, because out of all the things he could say, that was the least dangerous.

Chuck shook his head, almost vibrating it off his shoulders. "It was in Babylon for a while, but then the cult of Marduk took it out of the city before it was destroyed. It changed hands a few times, until it ended up in India. Then, it just vanished." He swallowed hard. "Until I saw where it was three days ago."

Balthazar stilled and glanced back down at the pages. "How accurate is this… literature?"

Chuck shook his head. "You tell me, Jegudiel. Are prophets ever wrong?"

"We need the box." Dammit, why was his voice shaking?

Chuck raised his head and, though there was still misery and fear and confusion painted in every line of his face, his gaze was steady and sure. "If you go after it," he said, "one of you will die."

"Which one of us?"

"I don't know," Chuck said softly and chewed on the knuckle of his thumb.

=0=

Dean was getting a little creeped by Castiel. For the last hundred miles, the angel had been staring at him, and Dean didn't think he'd blinked once in all that time. He'd tried to strike up conversation a few times, but Castiel's answers had been flat and monosyllabic. Was Ruby safe back there, with all the weapons? I've got my eye on her. Do you think we can really stop the Apocalypse, Cass? I don't know, Dean. Are you okay, Cass? You're acting weird. I'm fine, Dean.

Dean drummed his fingers on the rim of the steering wheel. The silence under the steady bass of Metallica was driving him up the frickin' wall. "Alright, man, you gotta say something, because this not-talking thing is killing me here."

Castiel's head swiveled. "I don't understand. I thought you valued the quiet of… road trips."

Dean shot him an incredulous look before returning his attention to the road. "This isn't a road trip, Cass. Those come with apple pie and Sam girling it up with long chats about his feelings and the excitement of a new job. They don't come with demons locked in the trunk, a brother God only knows where with a featherhead known for killing people in amusing and creative ways, and an Apocalypse hanging over our freaking heads."

"Then what would you call it?"

"I dunno, Cass. A necessary evil, maybe."

Cass's head swiveled away again. "You shouldn't disparage Gabriel," he said, changing the subject so randomly it threw Dean for a moment.

"What?"

"You shouldn't disparage Gabriel," Castiel repeated, staring out the window as the miles rolled on. "I know what you think of him. I know what cause he's given you to think such things. To be fair, I will admit that I thought them myself, and worse. Coward, runaway, traitor. A disappointment. A doubter. Fallen. But he is not these things, Dean. And you did not allow me to disparage your brother, though he drank of the blood of demons and utilized powers no man was meant to have. Therefore, you should not disparage Gabriel."

It was the longest lecture Castiel had given Dean to date. Normally, he kept things short, sweet and to the point, which was how Dean liked them. Sam was the big talker in the Winchester family whereas Dean thought talking only got in the way of the adrenaline-pumping exciting parts. Obviously, it was something Castiel felt very strongly about, so Dean swallowed his first instinct—to tell Castiel he didn't know what he was talking about—and just nodded. He really didn't want to spend the next few hours discussing the pint-sized sadist, but hell, whatever got Cass talking was fine by him. Sort of. "What changed your mind?"

Castiel was silent for a long time, so long Dean thought the conversation was over. Then, he answered with a question of his own. "What changed yours, in regards to Sam?"

Dean had asked himself the same question over and over again since he'd crawled out of a pine box and learned exactly what Sammy had gotten up to in his absence – both versions, including the one that Raphael had tried to blot from existence. He had no good answer, no sane and dependable reason. Except for: "He's my brother," Dean replied, and shrugged. "I just did."

Castiel nodded slowly. "As Gabriel is my brother. So I… just did."

Dean thought about it for a while, then nodded. "Alright," he said. "That's fair. I won't talk shit about the little shit."

"Dean…"

He raised a hand off the wheel in surrender. "Last time, I swear."

In the reflection bouncing off the windshield, Dean saw Cass smile faintly. "Thank you."

Silence fell again, but now Dean had a thread to stitch more conversation together. Even though he already knew the answer, he was going to ask anyway. "Got any more brothers or sisters?"

"Millions."

Ah, back to one-word answers. But Dean was nothing if not pushy and obnoxious, now that he'd gotten a taste of Cass's chatty side. "Tell me about them."

"To speak of them all would take up more time than your mortal lifespan allows."

"Just the favorites, then. And don't give me any crap about how you're an angel and you're not supposed to have favorites. Everyone has favorites. So tell me about them."

"Why?"

"Because I want to know. You had a…a… a garrison, right?" Castiel nodded. "So tell me about that. Tell me about the other angels you hung with up in Heaven."

Another moment where Dean thought Castiel would remain obstinate and silent, but slowly, he began talking. As the miles rolled away in road markers and highway signs, Castiel told Dean about Balthazar and Inias and Anna and Rachel and Uriel and Zachariah. He spoke of their amazement with humanity, the ennui, the tedium of watching humanity without any interaction whatsoever.

Truth be told, it was boring as hell, but Dean didn't focus on the words. He focused on the sound of Castiel's voice, deep and rhythmic. The sentiment of love and respect and fear and disappointment behind each of his stories. The wistful note he might not have meant to inject in his words, but did anyway. Dean shifted more comfortably in his seat, smiling and making appropriate-sounding noises at the proper intervals as Castiel talked the rest of the drive away.

=0=

Trees. Forbidding, dark, dense. Twilight in the sky. The scent of fire on the wind, thick with smoke. No birdsong, no animal sounds, no noise of any kind, except the wind hissing words he couldn't quite hear. The glade was small, hedged with massive redwoods, and Sam stood alone in the center of it.

His breath steamed into the air in a visible plume, and ice rimed the branches hanging in threatening, ominous forks overhead, but he didn't feel the cold. He was burning up, generating such impossible heat the air shimmered around him like pavement in summer. He spread his fingers before his eyes, marveling at the visible waves rising from his fingertips.

He should be afraid. The forest around him emanated malice and hostility; it was almost palpable, a taste on the tongue the flavor of lightning and pain. He could feel the forest's aura edging up against him, flowing over and around him, trying to seep into his bones, scar his soul. But it slid off him, unable to touch him.

His wrist burned.

Sam.

His name reverberated throughout the forest, echoing oddly in the silence. He looked around, straining to discern a direction, but couldn't. The echo called to something inside him, tugging irresistibly. He followed it, passing a tree close enough to brush it with his wrist. "Hello?" he called

Sam.

The voice was familiar, nagging at the back of his head, but he couldn't place it. Frustrated, he charged headlong through the trees, bouncing off them with his hands, using their trunks to propel himself forward, to catch himself from the roots and brush that tried to tangle his feet.

Without warning, he burst into a clearing and was suddenly elsewhere. His own face, twisted with rage and grief. His arms outstretched, clasping someone's shoulders, mouth turned into a bitter grimace. "Then what good are you?" he asked, and yanked his hands away.

It was only that flash, that tiny fragment of truth, and it was gone. Sam stood blinking in the clearing, which might have been the same one he started in. He took a step and something dug into the meat of his foot.

Sam.

It might have been his imagination, but it sounded like the voice was a little stronger. The name that belonged to that voice was on the tip of his tongue, dancing just out of reach. "I'm coming!" he called, and moved back into the trees.

He found clearing after clearing, stumbling into them half by chance. Each one was accompanied by a snippet of memory, a brief window into someone else's mind. A man against a chain-link fence, his face slowly sliding into another. Himself, sleeping. Dean and him in the car, viewed from the back seat, arguing about how to get the Colt and how to get Dean out of his contract. On and on, scene after scene, all a part of some greater whole that Sam was beginning to believe had been shattered and scattered here in the forest. And every time, the voice called him on, urged him further, as the burning in his wrist crept further and further up his arm.

Sam.

The fire scent was stronger now, unbearable and overpowering. The atmosphere of the forest grew more oppressive, with branches rattling and leaves snapping, but the voice calling to him rang strong and true, and Sam narrowed his focus down to following just that sound. Smoke caressed his shoulders, his skin so hot he knew he should be dead.

He stumbled into another clearing, and into the motel room he and Dean had rented the night before he died. And finally, he knew who had been calling to him.

Gabriel stood in the middle of the room, hands in his pockets, head cocked to the side, sardonic smile firmly in place. "You took your sweet-ass time, sasquatch," he said, and held out a hand.

"You didn't make it easy," Sam replied and, with a dawning smile of his own, strode forward two paces and clasped Gabriel's hand.

The burn screamed up his arm, and the world washed away in flames.

=0=

Sam blinked, long and slow. It took him a long time to remember his own name, let alone where he was supposed to be or why he was supposed to be there. It came back to him in snippets and flashes. Silver-white snow. A dim, distant sun in the sky. Pain, like nothing he'd ever felt before. A forest. Motels and cars and town streets. Gabriel.

Gabriel.

Sam jerked upright, immediately regretting it as pain shot through his back, his shoulders, his everything. Nausea rose in his throat, tasting like bile and lunch. He wasn't going to vomit, though. He was not going to be the first human to vomit on Pluto. He set his head between his knees and breathed through it, concentrating not on how he shouldn't be able to breathe at all, but on keeping it steady and even.

When he felt like he could raise his head without it spinning, he looked up and around for the erstwhile archangel. He didn't have to look far. Gabriel sprawled in the snow beside him, loose-limbed and unconscious, with one hand stretched toward Sam.

With the careful movements of a man three times his age, Sam reached out and gently shook Gabriel's shoulder. His voice didn't want to work the first couple of times, but he got it functioning after swalloign hard and coughing. "Hey," he rasped. "Gabriel. Wake up."

Gabriel stirred, lifting his head out of the snow and cracking an eye. "Don' wanna," he mumbled, and the eyelid slid down again.

Sam shook him a little harder, but had to stop when his vision threatened to go black. "You're my ride home," he said, and resorted to poking an arm, which was infinitely less intensive an activity than all-out shaking. "You have to get up."

Gabriel opened his eye again, stared balefully at Sam for a long moment. "Ow."

Sam could empathize. "Tell me about it."

Gabriel pushed up on his hands and knees, and flopped onto his backside. "Remind me to never do that again," he groaned, rubbing his temples with his fingers. "I have a migraine. Do you know how hard it is for angels to get migraines?"

"I'm guessing you can't just pop down to the drug store for some extra-strength Tylenol, huh?" Sam

"They don't sell angel-strength painkillers at CVS, kiddo. We're such an untapped market." He reached out and thumped a hand on Sam's shoulder. "You're a moron. I told you to keep your damned eyes shut. You're lucky they didn't flash-fry in their sockets. What were you thinking, pulling a stunt like that?"

"Wow Dean," Sam said dryly. "You look a lot shorter than usual." Gabriel swatted him again, and Sam flinched, even though it didn't really hurt. "Ow. I don't know. I just… had a feeling that it would be okay. Like a voice in my head, just for a moment, saying I could."

"Even in the supernatural world, hearing voices isn't a good sign."

"Did you just steal a line from Harry Potter?"

Gabriel's grin was sudden and bright. "Why yes, I did. Thank you for noticing. So?"

"So what?"

Gabriel huffed. "How did I look?"

If there was one way Sam could describe that confusing, exhilarating twist of terror and awe, wonder and fright, watching an archangel unleashed and screaming through the sky, it was by quoting Gibran: "Like eternity gazing at itself in a mirror."

Gabriel's smile softened. "Aw, Sam. You say the sweetest things." Before Sam could do more than turn red, he stood up with another heartfelt groan. "We should get back. Dean's already going to ram something hard and pointed into me for hauling your ass to Pluto as it is. If we're late for the demon interrogation, he'll Molotov me with holy fire too. It's harder to come back from that."

A flash of irrational jealousy and possessiveness flashed through Sam at the innuendo, and Gabriel looked startled. "Huh," he said. "Okay. No off-color comments about the brother. Ground rule number three. So… You ready to get offa this rock?"

"Yeah. Just…" He trailed off, looking around at the ice and snow and mountains and sky. He would never see it again, so he spent a few moments drinking in as much as he could. As terrifying a location as it was, it was also one of the most beautiful places Sam had ever seen, and he wanted to make sure he remembered it.

Gabriel's voice was wistful, fond. "Really sinks her cold, icy teeth into you, doesn't she?"

Sam nodded, memorizing the star patterns and reaching out to snag his backpack by the strap. Then, he turned his gaze to Gabriel. "I'm ready."

"I can always bring you back, if you wanted," Gabriel said, reaching down to catch Sam's hand and haul him onto his feet.

Sam shuddered and shouldered his pack. "No thanks. Once was amazing, but it'll have to be enough. Besides, there's enough crap on Earth to keep me busy. I don't need to go looking for trouble on other planets."