She was groggy when she awoke, and it took her a second to recognize where she was. The dark walls of the panic room were gone, replaced by the flowered wallpaper of the guest bedroom. There was a moment of blissful ignorance before everything from yesterday – was it yesterday? – came crashing down on her. A stray tear escaped before she quickly brushed it away and sat up.

Making sure she was alone, she carefully slipped off her shirt and stretched out her wings. They seemed to glow in the light from the window, even through the bandages that were wrapped over about seventy percent of her wings. She carefully reached out to touch one of the golden tips of her feathers, remembering waking up that one morning a couple years ago, stretching out her wings just as she had done today, only to have Gabriel walk in on her.

She immediately shrieked at him to get out, quickly covering herself with her nightshirt, her wings disappearing from his sight. He had immediately protested, pleading with her to take them out again.

"Gabriel, I'm not wearing a shirt! And it's not like you haven't seen them a hundred times before," she had said, referring to her wings.

He had said something about how God meant for his creations to be naked, and yada-yada-yada. In the end, she had stretched out her wings again, letting her archangel's eyes roam over the feathers. He stood there for what felt like an eternity before she finally got impatient and snapped at him, demanding to know what was going on. He showed her the tips of her wings, and her eyes grew wide at the tiny specks of gold that had begun to crawl up her feathers. The very tip of each feather had turned a solid gold, as though someone had just barely brushed the edges of her wings in paint while she slept.

Before she knew what was going on, Gabriel had taken his shirt off and his middle wing mirrored hers, flattening itself against her feathers so it created a gold border around her. It was only then that she realized the gold on her wing was the same shade as Gabriel's wings.

Her heart skipped as she stared at how the colors complimented each other. "What does that mean?" she had asked him.

"It means we're best friends." He reached up to tuck as strand of hair behind her ear, his chest pressed against her back. She could see familiar gleam in his eye, and she was immediately on guard for one of his crazy ideas.

His hand was lingering by her head, playing with a stray strand of hair. "Can I…can I do something?"

When she spoke, her voice was quiet, as this was oddly intimate to her. "You know what I'll kick your ass for and what I won't. Just be careful."

He reached over to his wing, carefully choosing three of his most pliable and pristine feathers before forcefully ripping them from his wing. "Gabriel, what are you doing?!" she had exclaimed, turning to face his idiotic grin.

Instead of replying, he pulled the three feathers together, overlapping and attaching them, but not quite making a single feather. It was more like an invisible string had tied them, ensuring that they were in a single line and that they stayed together, while each feather swept out from the center. He pulled back the strand of hair from her face, his eyes raking over that section of her hair. Apparently choosing a spot he pressed the base of the topmost feather to her scalp before it gently formed with her skin, acting as a strand of hair. It was in the perfect spot on her head where she could conceal it if she chose to, or show the world that Gabriel was hers and she was his.

She looked up at him in awe, unable to find the words. Before he could stop her, she yanked out one of her favorite feathers, suppressing a wince, and held it out to him. She couldn't do the whole angle mojo thing, but she hoped this would be enough.

He stared at her for a moment, understanding but not quite believing. Gingerly taking the perfect feather from her open hand, he trailed a gentle finger over it, admiring how it shone in the light. To her utter astonishment, he pressed the feather into the inside of his wing, bonding it to himself. Whenever he opened his wings, everyone would know.

She smiled up at him, her face conveying what her words couldn't. To her delight, he smiled right back, pulling her into a tight hug.

Now, Emily flopped back on the bed, her wings beneath her. There was a sick feeling in her stomach like she was missing an organ. She prayed that someone could sweep her into a hug and fix this.

But there was no gentle knock on her door, no one's arms to fall into, no perfect angel to make it right. She had to do this herself. The first day of the rest of her life.

Part of her scolded herself for being so dramatic, but it was the truth. She always had him to rely on. Now he was gone.

She sighed, sitting up again and pulling on a pair of jeans, desperately trying to ignore the emptiness in her gut. When she pulled her wings back into her skin, the tattoo that replaced them was broken and bandaged. She couldn't help but sigh again, pulling on of Dean's old shirts over her head.

As she carefully made her way downstairs, tightly gripping the banister, she could hear muffled voices in the kitchen, but she was unable to make out what they were saying. When her foot hit the last step, the voices immediately stopped, and she rounded to corner to see Balthazar standing alone in the kitchen, staring at her.

"Who were you talking to?" she asked groggily.

"No one," he said, pulling a glass of water from thin air and handing it to her. "You need to drink."

"Not thirsty," she lied, glancing around the room. "Where is everybody?"

He complied with her change of subject, saying "They went to meet a-a woman – doctor? – about Purgatory."

She hesitated. "Oh."

Balthazar was silent for a moment, an unnatural, awkward silence falling between them. "How…how are you doing?" he finally asked.

"Good," she said too quickly, then, "good," as if to convince herself.

"Emily," he took a step forward only to have her shy away and move to the living room, pretending that something had caught her interest. She refused to look at him because she already knew the heartbroken look that would be written across his face, not matter how hard he tried to hide it.

The impala suddenly rumbled into the driveway, breaking some of the tension between the two. Her original intention was to quickly glance at Balthazar, gauging his reaction to the car; however, as soon as her eyes met his, she couldn't look away. It was like watching a train wreck, the way his eyes showed every arduous year he's been alive and all the sorrow and loss that had come with living for millennia.

"I'm sorry," she muttered, her heart breaking at his expression.

"Emily, I–"

The door swung open, and Balthazar choked back his words, taking a long drink from the glass of water he had conjured for her.

Bobby came in first, immediately followed by Dean, cradling an unconscious Sam in his arms.

"Sammy?" she called out desperately, only to have Bobby hold her back as Dean carried his brother downstairs to the panic room. "What the hell happened?"

"Castiel happened," Bobby growled, a barely checked rage in his eyes.