Author's Note:
Thanks to all of you for your patience! I'm doing my best to keep updating regularly, in spite of my job and life stuff, so thanks for sticking with me!
Thanks to SPN Mum, koolies, FireChildSlytherin5, Nyx Ro, jojospn, SnarryMoreidLover, and Pheonix Autumn for their reivews on chapter 35!
Chapter 36 - Lord Let Me Find Him
Mary did her best to look unafraid as Metatron appeared in front of her, one eyebrow raised. She was standing in front of her old home in Lawrence, her Heaven that she shared with John, before they had left for the Roadhouse.
"Mary Winchester, I presume." The angel greeted her.
"I want my husband back," Mary demanded. She knew Metatron wouldn't actually return John to her just because she asked him to, but that was part of the plan. She and Annie were supposed to distract the angel. They'd agreed to let Mary attract his attention, since it was her husband Metatron had locked up. She would be a bigger draw for Metatron than Annie would be. The other hunter was hiding in the house, ready to be backup if Mary needed her.
Metatron sighed. "I don't intend to harm him or Singer," he said, his tone irritated. "As soon as I'm convinced the garden is safe, I'll let them go. For now, all of you need to calm down and stop trying to disturb things you don't understand."
"You ejected all the angels from Heaven out of petty revenge," Mary snapped at him. "I can't say I like angels, from the limited experience I have with them, but based on what you did to Castiel alone..."
Metatron seemed surprised. "I gave Castiel a good life to enjoy," he said firmly. "He's chosen to spend it with your son, which was a bit of a surprise, but regardless, I did not harm him."
"You stole his grace!" Mary accused, eyes blazing. She'd never even met Castiel, but she felt the need to protect him as though he were her own son.
"For the greater good," Metatron allowed. "Heaven is better off now."
Mary almost laughed. "You really have no idea what you've done, do you? How much suffering you've caused to your own kind?"
Metatron narrowed his eyes at her. "The real question is how you know so much," he mused. "Most souls in Heaven have virtually no idea what's going on on the Earth."
"I'm not most souls," Mary snapped at him. "I'm the daughter of Sam Campbell, the wife of John Winchester, and the mother of Sam and Dean Winchester, and I will not stand for anything that hurts my family. That includes Castiel, and by extension, his family. How can you possibly justify what you've done to them?"
"I do not have to stand here and be lectured by a dead human," Metatron growled at her, irritated.
"So you aren't accountable for what you've done?" Mary raised her eyebrows skeptically. "You have no one to answer to for putting your family through hell?"
"No one is above me anymore!" Metatron yelled. "No belittling seraphs, no pompous archangels, and there is definitely no more God!"
As if to punctuate the statement, a peal of thunder crashed through the air, disturbing the otherwise idyllic sky.
"...what was that?" Mary asked after a moment of silence.
Metatron's expression was torn between an attempt at dismissal and actual fear. "Nothing," he bit out.
Before Mary could even attempt to stop him, the angel had vanished.
Annie came bolting out of the house behind Mary, looking confused. "What the hell?"
"I don't know," Mary murmured, staring up at the sky, which looked perfectly normal again. A pattern of lightning was meant to be a signal, but not that bizarre thunder clap. "I don't think that was Karen, though."
When Ellen and Bill opened the door of Metatron's office, Bobby and John were yelling at each other.
"If you'd been more careful, neither of us would have been caught!" John was ranting.
"If we'd flipped the damn lever together, Heaven would be open and we wouldn't have to worry about it!" Bobby snapped back.
"BOYS!" Ellen hollered at the top of her lungs, effectively ending conversation.
"Ellen?" They asked simultaneously, twisting until they both could see her and Bill in the doorway.
"Nice to see you too," Bill greeted them sarcastically.
John shot him an irritated look before turning to Ellen. "So, what, rescue mission?"
"That's the idea," Ellen nodded. "Mary and Annie are distracting Metatron while Ash, Pam, and Jo all went to flip the lever."
"What about Karen?" Bobby asked immediately.
"And Chuck," John added after doing a mental tally to figure out which name was missing.
"Karen's holding down the fort at the Roadhouse," Ellen informed them. "Ash taught her how to monitor the computer so she can keep everything secure. Chuck disappeared to go do field agent work or something. He said he thought he could be more help out in Heaven, but we haven't seen or heard from him since."
"Let's get you guys out of here," Bill suggested. "We can catch up when we aren't in the lion's den."
"Good luck," Bobby huffed. "We're secured with some kind of angel mojo."
"Great," Ellen huffed, moving forward to tug at Bobby's hands. "Wonderful. How do we get you out of here then?"
The four hunters were interrupted by a raging clap of thunder that shook the entire room, startling them all into silence.
After a beat, John was the one to mutter, "What the hell?"
"I don't know, but that wasn't Karen," Bill informed them gravely. "The signal is different."
"We need to get out of here," Bobby growled, moving as if to tug against his invisible bindings again. Instead, he toppled off the chair with the force of his movement. "What the...?"
John took that as his cue and stood up in one fluid motion, wobbling slightly with the suddenness of the motion. "So, what, magical angel mojo reducing thunder?" He snarked, raising an eyebrow.
"Let's go check on the others in the garden," Ellen suggested, glancing around warily. "Something's going on, and I want to find out what."
The garden according to Jo, Ash, and Pamela turned out to be a memorial rose garden in Nebraska that they'd all been to at some point. Jo had been there with her parents as a kid, almost young enough that she couldn't quite remember the garden. Ash had gone with some girl as a teenager, but he admitted that he couldn't actually remember her name. Pamela had passed through the garden on some kind of whirlwind young and wild road trip in her youth, but she was pretty sure she'd been drunk that day, because she didn't really remember it that well.
The three of them wandered around the garden for quite a while looking for any sign of the lever. All they could see were roses, which made sense, given that it was a rose garden, but it wasn't what they were looking for. Eventually, they located a funny circular floral display that had shiny silver discs rising out of it. The gigantic golden lever in the center of it was a dead giveaway, and Ash and Pamela immediately made a break for it.
Jo stood in front of the lever, keeping an eye out in all directions. There wasn't much to see besides roses, but she couldn't shake the feeling something was going to screw up this mission. She kept her mind occupied with the curious matter of how all three of them were able to see the garden the same way because of a place they'd all been at separate times in their lives. She and Ash had both lived in Nebraska, so it wasn't that much of a stretch, but the fact that Pamela had been there too was like some kind of cosmic fate or something. Not that Jo really believed in anything so superstitious, the supernatural was enough to believe in.
Behind Jo, Pamela and Ash were focused on the lever, but not actually moving it yet. "Get a move on, guys," Jo called out. It had taken them ages to even find the lever, given how many places it could have been hiding, and now that they had, Jo was afraid they were going to run out of time.
"We're working on it!" Ash hollered at her. "It's heavy!"
Jo rolled her eyes, but continued scanning the area. Something didn't feel right. This wasn't going to work.
Just as they were preparing to flip the gigantic lever, a massive peal of thunder shook the ground, startling all three of them. They froze, only for an instant, before Jo was yelling.
"NOW! HURRY!" Jo lunged forward to help them, determined that this time their mission wouldn't fail.
"What do you think you're doing?" An enraged voice bellowed from behind them.
Jo whirled around, prepared to fight the small funny looking man who had just appeared to challenge them. "Stay back," she warned.
"Get out of my garden," Metatron snarled at her. "You cannot finish this misguided mission of yours."
Ignoring him, Pamela and Ash continued to heave at the lever, trying to flip it over. Didn't it figure that the archangels got the existential sciency lever on Earth, but the one in Heaven for the humans had to be freaking heavy?
"STOP!" Metatron bellowed, disappearing and reappearing next to Ash, gripping him by his hair and throwing him back, the man landing on the ground in a heap a few feet away.
"Ash!" Jo ran forward to check on him, panicked.
Pamela backed away slowly holding her hands up. "Stay back, little man," she warned him.
"Little man?" Metatron repeated, amused. "I am infinitely more powerful than you could have ever dreamed to be on Earth, psychic."
Satisfied that Ash was fine, if out cold, Jo joined Pamela at the lever, creating a line of defense. "Maybe," she sniffed. "But we're a team. You're alone."
"As if that could truly be an advantage here," Metatron scoffed. "Heaven is my playground, not yours."
"Meet Ash," Jo chuckled. "Making Heaven his playground since before you even showed your sorry face here." Technically Metatron had been in Heaven long before Ash, but he'd also been gone for the whole time Ash had been in Heaven, so it was still a true statement.
"JO!" Ellen called from the distance, leading the charge of hunters into the garden. As soon as John and Bobby entered, the entire visage of the garden shifted, causing everyone to stumble.
Ash sat up slowly, looking woozy. "Why's the garden shorting out?" He asked, puzzled.
The image Jo, Ash, Pamela, Ellen, and Bill could all see of the garden was jarring with the one Bobby and John saw, causing both images to clash alternately with each other. The floral display with the discs where the lever was suddenly began to get wet, a pool of water appearing around them as the lever slowly became submerged. Steps like the ones in the water garden Bobby and John had seen before began to randomly appear throughout the rose garden, knocking people off balance where they stood.
"All of you! OUT!" Metatron bellowed, waving a hand toward the newcomers, slamming them all into one of the steps that had just appeared. He failed to knock them out, but they were all winded.
"Mom! Dad!" Jo cried out, torn between standing her ground and checking on her parents.
"Get. Out. Of. My. Garden!" Metatron hissed, turning his fury back on the women defying him.
"Funny, that's just what I was going to say." The new voice sounded like it was coming from a loudspeaker with no actual source. Immediately everyone was looking to see where the identifiable voice was coming from, but there was no newcomer to be seen.
Metatron had visibly paled, but was staring at the sky with his best determined face. "No disembodied voice is going to attempt to take charge over me," He growled at the sky, attempting to be intimidating.
"No wayward child of mine is going to continue to hurt those he should protect," the voice informed him gravely.
"No way," Bobby and John breathed in unison.
"What?" Ellen hissed, staring at the scene unfolded before them. "Who's talking?"
"I think..." Bobby trailed off, adjusting his hat unconsciously. "Dammit, I think that's God."