Thirty-three
"We're, uh, cool, right?" Gabriel asked, days later, back at the bunker. With Rowena's help, Sam and Dean had been able to track the Archangel down and he'd agreed to finally help them all with Mary and Jack the boys had helped him with his own issues first. Now, he, Castiel and Brooke were all standing around rather awkwardly in the room they'd lent to Gabriel to help him recuperate after a large expenditure of his Grace.
His question probably referred to the last time he'd been here, in which he and Brooke had connected. He glanced between her and Castiel with wary eyes.
"Yeah, we're cool," Brooke said, and then waited.
Castiel said nothing.
Brooke mentally nudged him. I thought you were past this, and now we're closer than ever. Give your brother some slack. He didn't mean to connect to me.
I know, Castiel replied, grumpily. Aloud, he said, "We're cool." Cool was a strange word to come out of his mouth.
"Good," Gabriel said, and flopped down onto his bed. "So, uh, I'm gonna take a nap, or whatever it is we do when we're not sleeping."
"Right," Castiel replied. "We'll, uh, leave you to it, then."
He and Brooke left Gabriel's room.
###
Rowena was about to open the portal to Apocalypse World, and Brooke was… terrified. She wasn't terrified of stepping through, of dealing with whatever was on the other side. She'd been a Hunter her entire life. She could handle a pissed off Archangel and his cronies, or whatever was over there. She was terrified that they would go through, spend hours searching for Jack and Mary, and find them… dead.
Always before now, the one she had worried the most about had been Castiel. Now… Now she was a mother—adoptive or not—and now she knew what it felt like to worry for a child, to fear for a child's life. Worrying about her husband over the years had been bad enough, but now…
She stood silently, twisting her wedding ring around and around on her finger, taking shallow, shaky breaths through her nose.
Castiel placed a comforting hand on her shoulder and she turned into him automatically, hiding her face against his chest, as if the Bad, Scary Thing wouldn't be able to see her if she couldn't see it. The problem was that the Bad, Scary Thing was inside her own head, so there was no getting away from it.
Jack is young, Castiel murmured to her, petting her hair as he always did when she was upset like this. He is young and naïve. But he is also strong, and brave, and I believe that he is alive—he and Mary. And we will find them and bring them home. We have to.
Brooke nodded, swallowed, stood up straight, and tried to find her center. She reached down and snatched Castiel's hand in her own, squeezing hard, until her own fingers went numb, because she knew that he was an angel and he could take it.
Castiel was about to say more to her, a thought percolating in his mind, but just then, Gabriel came into the room.
"Here it is!" he said, holding up a vial of his Grace. "The final ingredient—a fresh serving of Archangel Grace." He put the vial down on the table.
They all stared at it. It was a… paltry amount, filling up less than half of the vial.
Rowena slowly reached down and picked it up, shaking the vial between her fingers. "This is what you call a serving?"
"That is the jet fuel of divine emissions," he replied. "It'll more than enough to get the job done."
Brooke made a face, an image coming, unbidden to her mind of some other kind of emission coming out of Gabriel.
Castiel stared down at her.
Brooke glanced up at him, smirked, and began to imagine Castiel stroking himself with great passion, as spurts of—
Enough, he begged, his eyes wide, pupils dilated.
You're too easy, Brooke teased.
You made me this way, he growled.
After we find Jack, Brooke said. Then we'll celebrate. We'll have cause.
A few minutes later, the portal was open, floating in the air inside the library of the bunker, like an orange lightning strike frozen in place.
"Okay, everyone ready?" Castiel asked.
"Yeah, all right," Sam replied.
"Let's do this," Dean said.
Castiel glanced down at Brooke.
She nodded.
They stepped toward the portal—which began to crackle, and fizzle out. They watched as the straight line began to tilt and curl like wet noodle before shrinking and then disappearing entirely.
Brooke closed her eyes and sighed.
After a moment of silence—as if mourning the dead portal—Dean said, "O-kay."
Disappointment clear in his tone, Castiel muttered, "Well, that was fast."
"Very, very fast," Sam agreed.
"One could even say premature," Rowena chipped in.
Brooke would have thought it was funny, if she wasn't too busy being worried about Jack and Mary.
"Um…" Gabriel said, awkwardly. "I thought it would be enough."
"All right, great," Sam said. "What do we do now?"
Brooke suddenly looked up at Castiel. No.
"Hell if I know," Dean snapped.
"You do know," Castiel said, aloud.
"Cass, no," Brooke repeated.
"Brooke," Castiel reprimanded, touching her face. "We all know. We need Archangel Grace. Gabriel's obviously running a little low, and we don't know long it'll take him to recover. So, that leaves exactly one source on Earth."
"No," Sam said.
"I don't like it either," Cass continued, his voice raising in frustration, "but there is no other way. We need Lucifer."
###
"Obviously, I wanna get Mom and Jack back," Sam said, some time later as he, Dean, Castiel and Brooke holed up in the kitchen, away from Rowena and Gabriel. "It's all I want. It's all I can think about. But we've been down this road before. Teaming up with Lucifer—
"We're not teaming up with him," Dean argued.
"We just need his Grace," Castiel agreed.
"Oh, 'just,'" Sam said, annoyed.
"We've trapped his ass before," Dean said.
"Yes, and every time, it ends up the same way, with the Devil being on the loose again!"
Brooke sighed heavily, her arms crossed over her chest. "I'm with Sam on this one," she muttered.
Castiel looked at her with something like betrayal in his eyes.
"Don't give me that look," she snapped. "Lucifer fucking killed you, if you'll recall. And then I almost died."
"I know that," he said, quietly. "I'm not taking your reluctance lightly—either of yours. But he is already out there, and we've been ignoring it and avoiding dealing with him because we're afraid. We let Lucifer out of the Cage, and he has never stopped being our responsibility."
Brooke continued to reluctantly listen as Castiel and Dean argued with her and Sam about the fact that Lucifer was their only option right now. However, a few minutes later, she found herself strangely distracted by something going on in a different part of the bunker. Confused as to this odd sensation lifting Castiel's Grace in her blood, she turned, checking for Gabriel's form through the walls and—
"Oh, God," she complained, and went to her husband, resting her forehead against his chest.
"What?" he asked, concerned.
Gabriel and Rowena are having sex.
Castiel's head shot up and he looked around the kitchen, as if they were having sex right here.
"What's goin' on?" Sam asked.
"Nothing that either of you wanna know about," Brooke said, continuing to rest her forehead against Castiel's chest. "God, Cass, distract me, would you. I can sense angels through walls, if you'll recall."
"Um, right," Castiel said. "I'd—I'd teleport you out of here if I still had my wings."
"Well, that's not helpful, but thanks," Brooke replied.
"What the hell are you two talking about?" Dean snapped.
Brooke rolled her eyes, lifting her head. "Gabriel and Rowena are doing the dirty."
"What?" Sam said.
"Gross," Dean said, at the same time.
"Yeah," Brooke agreed. "So, uh, let's just… stay in here… for a while. Right?"
"Wait, where are they?" Sam asked.
"The library," Brooke replied, flatly. "Behind one of the bookshelves."
"Okay, all right," Castiel spoke up, annoyed, and pressed both hands to the sides of Brooke's head, as if muffling her ears.
She felt him doing something to her with his Grace, and, after a moment, Gabriel's presence through the walls was dulled until he became much easier to ignore. By contrast, Castiel's own Light shone brighter, somehow, and Brooke stared up into his face, enamored. He smiled at her.
"Wait, guys," Sam said, excited all of a sudden. "I have an idea!"
###
I should really cut Gabriel and Rowena some slack, Brooke thought later, as she and the others waited for the two of them to return with Lucifer in tow. Sam and Dean have to deal with us being touchy-feely with each other all the time.
Sam and Dean don't have to watch us have sex, Castiel argued.
It's not Gabriel's fault I can see him through walls.
Castiel grunted noncommittally.
Brooke's mind wandered back to the plan that Sam had come up with. Rowena and Gabriel would drug and trap Lucifer and bring him back here, to the bunker. Then, they would continuously extract his Grace in order to keep the portal to the Apocalypse World open for as long as they wanted. It was a risky plan—anything having to do with Lucifer was risky—but it was the only plan they had.
Brooke thought she had spent enough time preparing herself for Lucifer's arrival. She'd dealt with terrible situations plenty of times before this, after all. And yet, when Rowena and Gabriel arrived at the bunker, holding a drugged Lucifer between themselves, Brooke froze, staring up at him. He was unconscious, but, somehow, that didn't help matters. Looking at him immediately brought back the memory of Castiel's death, the severing of his mental connection to her. She remembered falling to the ground, disoriented and in great pain, in the house where Jack was being born. She remembered wishing she were dead. She remembered all those dreadful days and nights as she lay, slowly dying, trying to sleep without Castiel's presence, her mind so small without him there.
Castiel felt the disturbance in his wife's mind and went to her as she watched Lucifer being dragged down the bunker stairs and into the library. He pulled her to him and let her hide her face against his chest, and he ran his fingers through her hair and murmured calming words in Enochian until her mind stilled.
"Sorry, Cass," she whispered. "I think I'm finally getting to a point where I just can't deal with this shit anymore. I just… want to go one day without having to worry that someone is going to murder everyone I love."
"I know," he replied. "I hope we'll… I hope we'll get to live normal lives, someday."
…
"He's awake," Rowena said quietly, as she mixed the ingredients for the spell to open the portal.
Everyone perked up and stared at Lucifer, his hands bound behind him with magic, kneeling on the ground, held up also by magic. He was blinking stupidly, still drugged.
"Oh, hey, Sam," he said, pleasantly, his eyes landing on the younger Winchester first.
Sam frowned at him.
Lucifer looked around, noting Dean, Castiel, Brooke, Gabriel, and Rowena. "Oh, look at this. All the people I love to torture in the same room. What's the occasion, guys?"
Rowena came forward with the bowl and placed it down in front of Lucifer.
"Ah," he said. "Okay, I think I see what's going on. You're planning a trip to save Mother Mary and you need my Grace. Is that about it?"
Castiel approached him, gripping his hair tightly and yanking his head back. "Good guess," he growled, and opened his throat with an angel blade—a short line, but deep, so that the Grace flowed heavily from his throat. Castiel released his hair with force, shoving his head down to ensure that the Grace flowed into the bowl. He returned to Brooke's side as she watched Lucifer bleeding his Grace. She relished the sight.
When the flow of Grace had slowed, Lucifer lifted his head and looked at Gabriel and Rowena. "Okay, you coulda done this back at the bar," he said. "Coulda drained me, killed me. What's this really about? Humiliation? Revenge?"
"Ah, those are just bonuses," Sam said, with a smile. "See, we got a lotta work to do back in Apocalypse World, but not a whole lot of time to do it. So, I realized something. I realized we could use you."
Rowena knelt down beside Lucifer, then, and spoke the spell that would open the portal. It rent the air, and Brooke noticed that the rip in space and time was brighter and wider this time.
"Use you not to just crack the door open," Sam continued, "but to keep it open. So, we're gonna drain you. We're gonna keep on draining you."
"Like a stuck pig," Dean added, pulling his backpack onto his shoulder.
"Grace on tap," Gabriel said, smiling. "Sorry, bro."
Lucifer made a face at him.
"And then," Sam said, "when we get back… then we'll kill you."
Lucifer, as ever, seemed unconcerned. He shrugged. "Cool."
Sam glanced at Rowena. "You gonna be okay back here?"
"Aye," she said, smiling. "Someone needs to keep an eye on the Devil. Go. Save your mum."
And Jack, Brooke added, silently.
And Jack, Castiel agreed.
"You ready?" Gabriel asked, glancing at Sam.
Since this had been Sam's idea, somehow he'd become the leader of this group. He turned to the portal. "Ready," he said, and stepped through.
Castiel and Brooke went next—
—They were released into Apocalypse World quite un-gently. Brooke found herself flung forward and down a hill, tripping over herself and whatever happened to be underfoot. She rolled the rest of the way, but was uninjured when she finally stopped, and picked herself up easily. She looked around to find her husband…
… and there he lay, on his back, supporting himself on his elbows, legs spread, with Gabriel's face in his crotch.
Brooke blinked, registering acute social discomfort coming from Castiel's mind as he stared down at the back of Gabriel's head.
Gabriel lifted his head, looked around, then seemed to realize where he was, staring down at Castiel's crotch. Then his eyes lifted and he stared at Castiel.
Castiel stared back at him, his lips pursed.
Gabriel's eyes trailed back down, then up again.
Castiel swallowed, a stirring in his nether regions having come unbidden to him.
Brooke raised an eyebrow at him, smirking.
"Oh, boy," Gabriel said, and quickly picked himself up. "Yeah… Well, that was… fun. I could've used a heads-up about this landing site."
Castiel approached his wife with his eyes firmly on the ground. "Are you all right?" he murmured.
She laughed. "Are you?" Feeling gay things about Gabriel? Well, that's okay. Better Gabriel than Dean.
Castiel looked up at her, then, his eyes wide.
I'm joking, she assured him, and leaned forward to kiss him. Remind me to bury my face in your crotch when we're home again.
"All right, well," Dean began, "Charlie—the other Charlie—said that Mary and Jack have an outpost in Dayton."
"Okay," Sam said. "Let's get our bearings and head that way. Cass, where are we?"
"Uh…" Castiel closed his eyes, sensing the Earth, spreading his consciousness outward from himself. "Kentucky. Northeast Kentucky. Or, what used to be Kentucky."
Brooke stared at him. I forgot you could do that, she said, impressed.
He smiled.
Dean looked around, and then pointed. "Which means that's north. Okay, so Dayton's that way. Roughly. Two days by foot, but… that way. After you. Let's go." He ushered them all to get moving.
###
They'd been walking for a while, talking amongst themselves to stave off the monotony of it. It had started to rain, as well, which Brooke did not mind yet, though she knew she would mind later, when she was soaked through and had to keep walking.
So, question, she thought.
Castiel glanced at her.
So, you, and a lot of other angels I've met, all call each other brothers and sisters. Yet, there have been at least two angels that I remember, or that I know of, who wanted to bang you at some point: Hester—who ended up trying to kill you, and Hannah. But… you're siblings, or you consider yourselves to be siblings. So, do angels just… not have a concept of incest, or what?
Castiel blinked in surprise.
I mean, no judgment. Angels aren't humans. You're not exactly bound to the same rules, but I always found it kinda odd.
I… Castiel began, thinking over her question. I don't think I ever thought of that. Generally, although we both know there have been exceptions to the rule, angels don't feel sexual urges, or any kind of romantic love. Even familial love, in the way humans feel it, is quite muted in angels. I believe the concept of siblings came to us when God was still in Heaven. He was our Father—He is our Father—and since all of us are the same species, that makes us siblings, technically.
And yet, Brooke said, sometimes you lust for one another.
I think it's different in angels, Castiel said. When we're not on Earth, we don't have physical bodies. We cannot procreate. It is only when we take human vessels that sex is even possible. A lot of the human stigma around incest is the risk of unhealthy children, as well as an entirely separate understanding of what it means, socially, to be siblings. The human family dynamic is not the same as it is in angels. So, no, I suppose we don't have a concept of incest.
Brooke nodded slowly, taking in this information. Interesting, she said, and meant it.
He smiled a little. I enjoy your questions about angels. You have the strangest questions.
Brooke laughed. You always have weird questions about humans, so I guess we're even.
…
A little while later, Castiel and Brooke caught up to where Gabriel was walking, and they fell in step with him.
"Have you thought about what's next after we get back to Earth?" Castiel asked his brother.
"Uh, yeah, not so much," Gabriel replied, "seeing as we still gotta find Jack and Mary. Ah, not to mention survive Michael and his super angel army."
"Right," Castiel said, awkwardly.
"Although," Gabriel said, a moment later, sounding a bit more cheerful, "I did tick off some, uh, bucket list items, recently. Got some revenge. Had sex with a 300-year-old redhead."—Brooke made a face.—"But what's next for me? I don't really know."
Castiel nodded, trying to figure out how to word his proposal. "This world is, um… it's obviously glutted with angels, but, back home in our world, you know, it's—it's just Naomi and a handful of others."
Gabriel looked at him, curiously.
"They're trying to keep the lights on, but… Heaven's dying, Gabriel."
"Are you serious?" the Archangel asked.
"Very."
"And you think I could fix it?" He scoffed. "I skipped out Heaven, Castiel. They wouldn't want me back. As far as they're concerned, I'm a screwup. Hell, as far I'm concerned, I'm a screwup."
"Well," Castiel said, slowly, "Heaven's been run into the ground by upstanding angels. Perhaps a screwup is just the change we need."
Brooke knew that Castiel was partly thinking of himself, all those years ago when he'd tried to become God, and she took his hand.
Gabriel fell silent, thinking on what he'd said.
Not thirty seconds later, a scream tore through the air—the high-pitched shriek of a woman. A man's yell followed soon afterwards.
Brooke stopped, a chill running down her spine. Castiel and Gabriel also stopped, looking around. Sam and Dean came rushing forward, brandishing guns and looking around, trying to pinpoint the sound.
"Not our world, not our problem," Gabriel told them. "Right?"
Sam and Dean ignored him and went charging up a nearby hill. A monster was attacking two people. Its head was bald, and its ears were pointed. Brooke could not see its face clearly—at least, not until Sam cuts its head off and it fell over. She stared down into its strange, wrinkled face, and studied its long teeth that overcrowded its mouth.
"The hell was that thing?" Dean asked, as he and Sam helped the man and the woman up.
"What do you mean?" the woman asked. "A vampire."
"It's not like any vamp we've ever seen," Sam replied.
"Who are you?" she asked.
Sam introduced them all, pointing at each person as he said their names.
"We're not from around here," Dean piped up. He nodded at the dead vampire. "Tell me, what makes a bloodsucker look like that?"
"Starvation," the man spoke up. "When Michael's armies started to wipe out the humans, they didn't think about monsters or what happened to 'em when their food source dried up. Turns out, not eating makes them wild. Nothin' but pure, stupid appetite."
There was a pause, in which all of them stared down at the vampire's severed head and Brooke hoped that she never came across a vampire that looked like that back in her own world.
"Which way you headed?" the woman asked, after a moment.
"North," Dean said, clearly unwilling to tell these strangers where, exactly, they were going.
"To Dayton?" she asked.
Dean looked surprised, and nodded.
She smiled, glancing at her man. "We were going that way, too. We heard the rebels, Jack and Mary, set up a satellite colony there, an outpost."
A thrill ran through Brooke's body at the sound of Jack's name. Her boy. Her son. She reached down and squeezed Castiel's hand, and he squeezed back. She looked at Sam and Dean, who looked back at her, also catching Cass' eye, as well as each other's.
"Wait," Sam spoke up, "what do you mean you were going that way?"
The woman sighed, glancing at her man again. "Me, Floyd, the rest of our group, we were crossing north through the Morehead Tunnel…" She cut herself off for a moment, her face clouding until Brooke was afraid she might start crying. "Stumbled into a whole nest of those things." She motioned towards the vampire.
"Nine of us went in," Floyd said. "Only me and Maggie came out."
Brooke closed her eyes and sighed.
"This tunnel, is it the only way north?" Dean asked.
"There's a mountain pass, but it's a long way around," Maggie said. "Tunnel's the quickest route."
"If the long way is the safe way…" Gabriel said.
"No," Sam replied. "We're already two days out from Dayton as it is. We don't have time for a detour."
Brooke had to agree.
###
"All right," Sam said, as they stood before the tunnel entrance a while later. "Here's the plan. Stay close. Keep walkin'. Anything moves, kill it."
"Let's do this," Dean said.
They weren't more than ten feet into the tunnel before Floyd tripped over something in the dark—flashlights could only do so much—and yelled out.
Maggie screamed, a blood-curdling sound, staring around wildly, looking for—Brooke assumed—the vampire that had, in her mind, attacked Floyd. When she realized that there was no vampire, she bent over with her hands on her knees, panting.
"Sorry," Floyd said. "Tripped."
Brooke put a hand over her heart, grimacing. This poor chick's scared out of her goddamn mind, she thought to Cass. Should we really be making them do this?
We don't have a choice, Castiel said, though he didn't sound very happy about it.
We always have a choice, Brooke told him, but continued moving down the tunnel.
They came across their first vampire not too long afterwards. It was crouched over a half-eaten body, with raw meat in its hands, chowing down. Sam dispatched of it, quickly and they kept moving, carefully avoiding tripping over the bodies of the fallen humans scattered about.
Another vampire ambushed them a minute or so later, going after Maggie, but Dean killed it without incident. Still, it set Brooke's teeth on edge and she continuously looked over her shoulder despite knowing that Gabriel had their backs.
A little while later, they came to a more open part of the tunnel, with a break in the ceiling that let sunlight in, as well as a dank pool water in the dirt below. There were multiple offshoots here, but Dean quickly found the one they needed. Unfortunately, the passage was blocked.
Castiel and Gabriel silently volunteered to move the rocks that needed to be moved. As angels, they would tire less easily, and would be able to move anything too heavy for a mortal.
Brooke stayed with the others, in the center of the tunnel, keeping watch.
That was when the vampires attacked. They came swiftly. The first two or three were easily killed, but there were far more of them than Brooke could have suspected, and they overwhelmed her and the others. Two of them were on her, holding her arms, so she activated the Grace in her blood and kicked and fought until one arm was free, but they had knocked the machete from her hand.
Maggie was screaming bloody murder again. Floyd was yelling now, too. Dean had three on him, pinning him to a wall, and Sam—
—Sam had blood gushing out of a terrible bite wound in his neck. Whatever vampire had bit him had torn a large chunk from his throat and blood was now spurting from his neck like a fountain.
"SAM!" she screamed, and the Grace surged ever higher in her blood, until she tore her arms from the vampires' grips—one popping from its socket. She screamed again, in pain, and charged down the tunnel after the vampire who was dragging Sam away.
Castiel had been fighting his own vampires from now, and attempting to keep them off Gabriel as he continued to shift the rocks out of their way, but now he sprinted after his wife.
"Sam!" she screamed again, as she barreled through the darkness after the younger Winchester. She could smell blood—so much blood—and she slipped on the rocky floor underneath her and fell heavily. Her hands came up wet, slick with blood. Sam's blood.
Castiel lifted her bodily to her feet and dragged her backwards—
—she could hear chewing. "Sam!"
"No!" Castiel said, pulling her away.
Dean suddenly appeared, and Castiel released Brooke to grab at him instead. "Dean. He's gone!"
"No!" Dean yelled, and attempted to move past the angel.
Castiel gripped him tightly, his clothes, his pack, anything to keep him in place. "Dean!" He yanked the older brother back and looked him in the eye. "We don't have time. Dean, we can't save him."
Echoing through the tunnel, invading Brooke's ears, she could still hear chewing.
###
Brooke stumbled along beside Castiel. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she was aware that she was in shock. Sam had died so suddenly… Everything around her was muted and muffled and… meaningless. She was numb. Dean had been deathly quiet since it had happened, and that had been… however long ago it had been. The only one talking was Maggie. Maggie, who had been unable to shut up since Sam had died. Because Floyd had died, too.
Brooke had no idea how long it had been since anything had happened. She'd lost track of time, of place. They had come here to rescue people, and now Sam was dead. Brooke could not get the sound of chewing out of her head. Disturbed, she rolled her shoulders—Castiel had healed her dislocated arm.
"Brooke?" Castiel said.
She looked up, dazed, and realized that she had stopped walking. Again.
Castiel looked at her with sad, deadened eyes, and reached out with two fingers, touching her forehead. He used his angel powers to do something for her that he had done only a handful of times before. He numbed her emotions—and not the same kind of numbing she already felt. He removed her emotional shock, but he also removed her ability to care about what had happened to Sam, about what had ever happened to anyone, ever, or what would ever happen to anyone. She became robotic, an empty soldier on a mission: Find Jack and Mary, and safely escort them home.
She stared at Castiel as he removed his fingers from her forehead, then adjusted her grip on the machete in her hand and moved past him without a word.
He was no longer her husband. Now he was simply Castiel, a fellow soldier on a mission.
###
Brooke had been marching along silently for some time, hyper-focused on finding Jack and Mary, when she stopped, suddenly. Some ways behind her, Castiel had just grunted in pain. She did not care about him in pain, but since he'd made the noise, she had become aware of the pain in her own body, like something was clawing at her, attempting to pull her backwards. She looked up, and noticed the angel warding signs that were nailed into the trees all around them. Behind her, Castiel grunted again, louder this time. Through her connection to his Grace, she could feel the pain surging through his body; it hurt more the more he pushed against the warding, the farther in he went.
"I—I—I can't," he said, finally, stopping in his tracks. "This… this warding is too strong."
Brooke did not have time to stop for him. She had a mission. She kept walking. She was, of course, somewhat affected by the warding, since there was angel Grace in her blood. But she able to push through it, to ignore the pain.
"Brooke, stop," Dean ordered.
She stopped, but did not turn around—not at first, anyway. A few seconds later, though, she felt a change in the air, in her body, in Castiel. She glanced up and around and saw that Gabriel was destroying the angel warding signs. She watched as they the Enochian sigils burned away, until all that was left were the ashy imprints on the wooden boards.
She took a step forward, to keep going.
Multiple men with guns ran out from behind the trees.
"Whoa," Castiel said, spreading his hands. "Whoa, whoa, whoa. We're not here to fight. We're just looking for…"
Mary Winchester appeared from out of the trees, coming to stand beside one of her soldiers.
"… Mary," Castiel said.
"Castiel," she replied, faintly. "Brooke," she added, her eyes landing on the woman.
Brooke gave her a single nod, and then glanced behind her towards the trees. Surely, Jack had to be nearby. Once they found him, they could return home, as the mission dictated. Behind her, Mary and Dean were now embracing, but Brooke did not care.
"Dean, where's Sam?" Mary asked.
Brooke said nothing, still looking for Jack, but she did not see his face among the soldiers. Impatiently, she waited, unmoved by Dean's tears, and Mary's, which followed soon after.
###
The camp was in a somber mood, but Brooke remained emotionless and robotic, even when Jack came out to see them. He smiled, at first, until he saw the strange, blank expression on Brooke's face, and tears in everyone else's eyes.
In quiet tones, Castiel explained what had happened. It sucked all the happiness out of the boy.
Brooke's eyes followed Jack as he paced back and forth in agitation.
"No, he can't be dead," Jack muttered. "He can't be dead."
Castiel came forward and placed a hand on his shoulder. Grief poured from him like fog rolling down a mountain, but Brooke was impervious to it. "Jack, I—
Jack knocked his hand from his shoulder. "Couldn't you bring him back?" he demanded, loudly.
Castiel stammered ineffectually.
"Why didn't you bring him back?" This accusation was aimed at Gabriel, who was sitting on a log near their feet, picking at the grass.
"I'm not strong enough," Gabriel murmured, looking devastated.
"Jack," Castiel said, gritting his teeth to keep himself together, "if we could've, we would've. I'm so sorry."
"And—and what did you do to Brooke?" Jack snapped, pointing at her. "She's… all wrong!"
Brooke blinked calmly at Jack, unaffected.
"I…" Castiel sighed, running a hand over his face and looking at his wife. "She wasn't taking it well, so I… I muted her emotions."
Jack stared at him, horrified.
"It'll go away on its own," Castiel assured him. "She'll be normal again in a while."
Just then, alarm bells began sounding at the edges of the camp. Everyone stopped whatever they were doing to look around and try to figure out what was going on.
And from one of the entrances, coming out from the shadows, was Sam, alive and whole. The wound on his neck was healed, though there was dried blood caked on his skin.
"Sam," Jack whispered, overjoyed, and Brooke felt Castiel's joy well up inside him, as well.
She merely stood there, staring at Sam. The mission had been to find Jack and Mary. Sam coming back was an added bonus, but unnecessary. "Good," she said, flatly. "We can go home now."
Behind Sam, a moment later, emerged another figure: Lucifer. He looked around, hands in his pockets. His eyes landed on Jack and he said, "Hello, son."
Just as emotionless as before, Brooke gave herself a new mission: to destroy this threat. Without thought for her own safety, or of Castiel, she walked toward the Devil, pulling her angel blade from her inside coat pocket.