Jack had only been gone about twenty minutes, and he'd eaten at the fastfood place up the street with Sam and Dean. He thought it was a McDonald's but he didn't remember tasting anything. He'd left because Cas asked him for some time alone with Mac, not because he cared about eating something from outside. Hospital food was fine with him.

After about three bites he started to get the impression that Dean and Sam were more interested in just keeping him away from whatever Cas was up to than they were in feeding him. He inhaled what was left of his … burger, he was pretty sure … Crumpled up the paper and gotten to his feet.

"How about some ice cream?" Dean offered, rising to stand next to Jack.

"I'm good guys, thanks. I'm gonna get back. Once Cas has Mac all sorted out, we're going to have to figure out something to tell the doctor … We should probably talk it over before … Why do you guys both look like someone ran over your puppy?"

Same got up too. "Fixing Mac up might be a little more complicated than fixing your hands."

Jack nodded. "Yeah, I'm sure that thing messed with his head pretty good. I mean, I can see how rough it's had him feeling for myself. Mac's spent less time in a hospital for a bullet wound before, and the blood loss was pretty close to as bad. But Cas can heal him, right? That's what he said."

Dean could hear the near pleading in Jack's voice and he did want to make him feel better, but Sam had told Dean was Cas had said when he finally managed to summon him. This was not as easy as a laying on of hands, sharing a sliver of his grace.

Jack took their silence for what it was. "What aren't you two telling me?"

"Why don't you sit back down and we'll go through everything," Sam said, hoping his calm tone would have some effect on Jack. Cas didn't need a distraction from what he had to do right now.

"I don't think so. I think I'm gonna go on back and see if Mac needs anything."

Jack turned and headed out the door. Dean took a step, like he might try to stop him. Sam just shook his head. "Let him go, man. This is either gonna be okay or it won't. Maybe Jack should be there either way."

0-0-0

Jack's heart was beating too fast when he walked back into Mac's room. He was trying to tell himself that it was the pace he'd set hotfooting it back here when he realized he might not really know what was going on, but he knew that wasn't the case. It was fear, plain and simple. He was afraid for Mac, if only because of how evasive Sam and Dean had been in their answers.

Jack was stopped short by the sight of Cas sitting next to Mac's bed. It was a simple enough tableau; Mac was sleeping peacefully, and Cas was simply sitting there, holding one of his hands. But there was a faint glow about Cas that made him more visible in the dim room. That was enough to stop Jack and remind him that Cas was an angel. The deeply worried frown Cas was wearing was what really stopped him though.

Jack made his feet move again, slowly and quietly, settling into the chair next to Cas, looking at Mac's face, rather than at the angel.

"Is he alright?" Jack asked softly.

Cas's frown deepened. "I do not know."

"Why isn't he just better, why can't you just fix this, like you did for me?"

"You know why already, Jack," Cas said gently. "But I am trying to help him fix it himself, in a way."

"Cas, you might think you're explain' yerself, but it's not actually helping."

Cas nodded. "He would not let me make him forget, would not let me just build a wall in his mind between him and the things La Llorona did."

Jack nodded. He could see Mac rejecting that idea out of hand. Jack knew he was still bothered by the fact that he couldn't recall everything about his time as Murdoc's captive. It worried him a lot, kept him from sleeping well, too often. But there was a tentativeness in Cas's tone that worried Jack even more than he already had been.

"So what's the alternative?" he asked carefully.

"I am acting as a bridge … To Heaven. I am allowing him to see his mother."

"And that'll fix things?" Jack asked, hoping Cas would just agree and that this wasn't some new danger Mac was facing all alone.

Cas did nod. "It could." He paused, seeing if Jack would say anything else. When he didn't, something compelled Cas to be honest with him anyway. "It could also destroy his mind just as surely as La Llorona tried to."

Jack stood up abruptly. "What the hell are you doing it for then?"

Cas looked at Jack with something Jack first took as pity, but then saw how it was much more truly compassion. "The alternative was to leave him as he was, to see if perhaps he could recover on his own. I will tell you what I told him. He could. He very well could get back to something like normal on his own. But it would take a very long time. And it would not be possible for him to continue the life he is accustomed to. He'd have to leave his job, and truly give himself time and peace to come back, assuming that is possible at all. He did not want that. And the prognosis for a full recovery from those sorts of spiritual wounds is not good, Jack."

Jack was frowning deeply, shifting from one foot to the other with nervous tension. "So what's happening to him now?" Jack asked. Something was clearly happening. He could see Mac's eyes moving beneath his lids, then a crease in his forehead, then a single tear slipping from the corner of his eye.

"He is with his mother. For him to cope with the things in his mind, with the horror, he must have something good of equal or greater power. I don't know what that looks like. The energy just to allow his mind to travel there is almost too much for me to give, so I cannot see what is happening. He may only be able to see her, or he may be able to interact and feel the light of Heaven. He may just be there in some corner of her vast and endless personal Heaven all alone. I can't know. But I know it has worked to heal other humans. And that it is his best chance." Cas paused. "But, there is a risk that he may not …" Cas stopped at the look in Jack's eyes. "There is a risk."

Slowly Jack nodded. Accepting that Mac was on his own, that he might not come back (that's what Cas was trying to tell him, he thought, but he didn't want to hear those words out loud) was about the hardest thing Jack had ever had to swallow. It was almost worse than the times he'd known Mac was hurt badly, was in danger of dying. Because Jack knew just exactly what kind of dangerous labyrinth Mac could turn his own mind into.

He sighed.

Then he picked up the chair he'd been sitting in and carried it around to the other side of the bed. He reached out and took Mac's other hand. He'd done this before. Just hung on and willed Mac to come back from an edge no one seemed to think he would. He'd done it after Lake Como, certainly.

Cas was looking at him kindly. Finally, Jack spoke. "He'll come back, Cas. Better than ever. You just hold on. And so will I."

0-0-0

When Mac first opened his eyes, he felt a sinking disappointment.

He was still in a hospital room.

Then he blinked a few times and realized he was standing against the wall by the door. The room was painted a soft pink, bordered with white ducks. If that wasn't enough to make him recognize it as the maternity ward of the hospital in Mission City, the view of the mountains out the window would have.

In a chair under the window, looking altogether done in and in desperate need of a shave, sprawled his father, a much younger version than the last one he'd seen. In the bed, a woman who looked for all the world like a well-rested angel as far as he could tell.

"Mom," he whispered, feeling tears heat his eyes, but not particularly caring.

She glanced up and for a second her bright blue eyes locked with his.

Then it was like it had never happened. Her attention returned to the lumpy bundle in her arms. He recognized the blanket that swaddled the small form; pale yellow with little green bears. A tiny, fussy sound started coming from the little bundle.

All of Heaven's power to show her the things that made her happiest, and she was in a hospital room, holding her only child, all alone with him in the quiet. Mac started chewing his lip.

The fussing got a little louder and she tucked little Angus closer to her chest and started singing softly. The sounds of the distantly familiar lullaby, caused the lump that had been forming in Mac's throat to tighten almost unbearably. He closed his eyes, feeling the hot tears squeeze out.

He took a shuddering breath and opened them, only to find himself in his childhood backyard.

He was startled into an almost immediate laugh when he heard his mother's voice again. "Angus, don't you dare!"

A little blond boy of maybe three went pelting across the green grass toward huge mud puddle near the back gate, almost tripping over the cuffs of his too-long overalls.

"Angus!"

The little guy stopped for a split second and threw a devilish grin at the woman chasing after him. He let her almost catch up, then took off at a toddler's sprint toward the puddle. He pounced into the middle of it, slipped, and fell in the slippery mud right onto his backside, splashing his mother's jeans and white shirt, not to mention her little boy looked up at her as mud dripped down both their faces and their hair.

"Dirt!" he announced.

She nodded, laughing. "Yes, a lot of dirt. Are you ever going to learn how to stay out of trouble, Angus?" she asked, fondness clear all the way across the yard to where Mac was standing.

The little fellow shook his head earnestly, "Nope! Dirt!"

She laughed again and best to pick him up, balancing him on her hip as he stood. "And now, bath," she chuckled, heading toward the house.

"No, no, no, no!" he insisted, shaking his head so rapidly, muddy drops sprayed everywhere. "Dirt! Dirt!" He reached a grubby hand back toward the direction of the satisfyingly deep and messy puddle. His face looked ready to crumple into tears.

"How about bubbles instead?" his mother asked, laughter still in her voice.

"Apple bubbles?" he asked, angling to see her dirty face.

"Apple bubbles," she affirmed, opening their back door.

Mac was certain she looked at him again. He raised his hand, almost in a wave, then stopped and just watched them go inside, hearing her voice fade into the distance as she convinced little Angus that his apple bubble bath was an acceptable substitute to more playing in the mud.

Mac felt the lump in his throat ease a little. Such a simple thing, a little boy determined to play in the mud, but it made her happy. Happy enough that it was part of her Heaven. He smiled a little when he thought that although he didn't remember this specific occasion, he must have made her happy like that quite often. He had really liked the mud.

It seemed his whole childhood passed by in a few short blinks, the good parts of it anyway. And as he watched it, he noticed that his mother had started to look ill long before he'd ever realized it as a child. It had mostly been hidden behind her bright laughter, her ability to enjoy every little piece of his shenanigans, even when they did things like discolor the whole kitchen. Mac shook his head. He'd learned about the dangers of over pressurizing a homemade volcano rather young.

It felt like much too little time had passed before he saw his five year old self sitting in a hard plastic chair in a hospital hallway. His face was red and he was sniffling, but he wasn't crying at the moment. Across the hall, leaning against the wall with his hands in his pockets, Mac frowned. Why would this moment of all things be in his mother's Heaven? Then he saw why.

Transparent and surrounded by a faint but lovely pinkish glow, the figure of his mother, looking young, and well, and not sick at all, sat down next to the devastated and forgotten little boy whose eyes were searching up and down the busy hallway, hoping his father or grandfather would come out of the room and take him away from here. He just wanted to go home where he could cry without people looking at him.

The faintly glowing form put her gossamer arms around the little boy and held him. From his place across the hall, Mac swallowed hard. She'd been there. She'd stayed to say goodbye, he thought. And he sort of remembered feeling that, feeling her there with him. He'd told his father about it later, but he'd barked that it was just his imagination. Mac hadn't argued with him. And he never told him about that feeling again, but Mac remembered having it more than once.

He watched those memories unfold in front of him now, like a movie. His tears were flowing freely now, but it was no longer because of the deeply cut laid to waste feeling he'd had since he last woke up in the hospital before Cas came and offered him this. It was the simple ache of how much he had missed her, and of seeing that her Heaven included the times she'd still been in his life, still watched him even though he couldn't know it.

He saw her smiling at them when he made friends with Bozer.

She sat clapping her hands at Christmases and birthdays as he opened gifts.

She covered her mouth like she had a terrible case of the giggles the day Penny Parker threw up on his shoes in biology lab.

She'd sat with him again on the porch steps after his father had left, after his grandfather had tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to make him feel better. Mac bit his lip, realizing he was actually smiling as her ghostly hands kept him from nearly cutting off his thumb with his brand-new-to-him Swiss Army Knife.

She'd stood next to his grandfather at his high school graduation.

She'd watched with smiling approval as he dazzled his friends and professors at MIT.

She'd given a proud, solemn nod when he'd sworn the oath of enlistment.

He watched her sit beside his younger self as he lay in his bunk, trying to hide his grief over Alfred Pena's death from the rest of his squad.

He laughed with her at the cocky swaggering fight he'd had with Jack when they first met. He couldn't miss her approving expression as Jack warmed up to the job of protecting her boy.

She had followed him everywhere. All those times he would have sworn he smelled her perfume, heard her gentle laughter … All those times he'd heard his father's voice telling him it was just his overactive imagination … She had been there. He closed his eyes, overwhelmed with gratitude that he actually hadn't grown up without a mother at all. After a moment, he opened them again, absently wiping tears from his face.

He found himself in a garden, decorated with chairs and flowers. He was standing in the middle of a blindingly golden day, clearly at a celebration of some sort. He felt a hand on his elbow, smelled the soft scent of her familiar lightly floral perfume. He turned and found his mother, still looking like she had when little Angus had jumped in that mud puddle, standing there beaming at him.

"Um … I wasn't sure you could see me," he managed, just to have something to say, since everything felt inadequate anyway.

"I always see you, Angus …" She gave him a mischievous grin. "I mean Mac, of course."

"I don't mind if you call me Angus," he offered quietly.

She took his hand and started leading him away. "You're your own man now, my love. I'll call you whatever you like." She paused. "Is it true you don't like to be called by your name because it makes you miss me? Did I go and ruin a lovely thing like your name by leaving you?"

He felt himself blush a little. "Don't feel bad about that … You couldn't help it … It's not really that anyway … I mean, okay, it sort of is, but also … I just like Mac. People called Dad MacGyver, too, and …"

"And you're still very angry with him, aren't you, Mac?"

He shrugged. "Sometimes … Do you know where he is?"

She nodded, then waved a hand like it wasn't important. "It may or may not serve you well to find him, Mac. I'll leave it up to you to decide whether or not to pursue that." She tugged his hand, moving him along.

"Where are we going? What's happening here? If there's a party I don't remember and it's going to make you smile like you have been every time you've remembered a party, I kind of don't want to miss it."

She laughed. "This celebration isn't for you to see."

"Why not?" he asked, vaguely disappointed, but also pleased because it seemed where ever he was going, she was going with him.

"Because for you, this hasn't happened yet. Can't have you peeking at the future, now can I? That's like sneaking into the attic to look for your Christmas presents."

He laughed again, blushing in earnest this time. "You knew I did that?"

"Of course I did, baby. You are much too like me for you to have ever kept a good secret from me. It's probably a good thing I've just been watching over you. I'd have known you were a spy the second I saw you in a tux for the first time."

He smiled almost shyly. "I never could keep a secret from you anyway."

When he saw where she was walking him toward he stopped, bracing his feet even as she tugged at his hand. It was a door, in the middle of the green grass, just standing there, waiting to be opened.

"C'mon now, Angus, I told you you can't see anymore here. It's time for you to go back."

He felt the urge to cry returning, not the sort of happy tears he'd been shedding for a while, but the ones that carried pain, and hopeless loneliness in them. "I don't think I want to."

"That's what your friend Cas was worried about when he offered that you come here."

Mac shrugged. "Yeah, I know, but …"

"Do you really think refusing to live your life because it's had some pain in it is a fitting culmination to it?"

There was a hint of reproach in her words now. The sort of tone she used to use if he'd managed to hurt himself doing something reckless.

He sighed. "No, but …"

She raised an eyebrow at him, inviting him to finish the thought he'd just swallowed whole.

"It's been nice not feeling alone. Nice having a family again."

"You always have a family, Angus. And they would be awfully put out if you didn't go home to them."

"I know … I do …"

"But?" She smiled at him. "Would you really want to explain yourself to Jack Dalton when he finds his way here someday?"

Mac snickered at the expression he could picture on Jack's face, of the lecturing tone he could all but hear. "Jack doesn't think he could ever get into Heaven. He says so all the time. And he actually believed in this place before all this."

She frowned at him, "Where else would a man with a heart like Jack Dalton wind up?"

"I've wondered that myself."

She pulled him into an embrace, quite suddenly. He hadn't been prepared for it. He found it strange to hug his mother and be taller than she was.

"Your time here has healed what that creature did to you," she said into his shoulder. Then she released him, reaching out her hand for the doorknob.

Mac smiled at her, but it was a sad smile, resigned. "You're going to make me leave, aren't you?"

She shook her head. "I'm going to open this door. Whether you walk through it or not is up to you."

He sighed heavily.

"Don't you want to go back? Catch up with these memories of mine so you can see what this big party is all about?"

He nodded slowly. "I do, but …"

She leaned closer to him then, dropping her voice into a whisper.

"I'm not supposed to tell, but I'll see you again. You'll be back, a long time from now if you play your cards right. And then we can walk in this memory together completely and laugh about how badly you wanted to know what it was."

He laughed. She never could keep a secret from him either.

"Will I remember this?"

She shook her head. "Probably not much of it, my love. It's too much. But it will drive out some of the other things that hurt to remember. And sometimes, in that place between awake and asleep, you'll see it, and you'll know I'm there with you, even if it's just for a minute."

She opened the door.

Mac peered through it, seeing exactly what he expected, a darkened hospital room. He was lying in the bed, his eyes closed, with Cas on one side of him, staring intently into his sleeping face, and Jack on the other, one hand holding his, his forehead resting on the bed next to their hands, mumbling under his breath. Mac smiled a little at the thought that much as he was having a talk with his mom about his present circumstances, Jack was probably trying to make a deal with his dad to fix it for him.

He knew what he had to do. He made up his mind to hug her one last time, determined that when he did he would hold onto that, make it a memory he could keep.

He blinked though and found himself gasping, eyes fluttering open, back in the bed he'd been viewing from a distance a mere second before.

Jack heard the change in his breathing and his head snapped up. He couldn't keep the ridiculously pleased grin off his face, "Hey, bud. How ya doin'?"

Mac blinked rapidly a couple of times, trying to get back the thought of where he'd just been, what he'd just been doing. It was important and he couldn't quite … He had to answer Jack though, ease some of the anxiety hiding behind the smile and darkening his kind eyes. "Okay, I think," he said quietly.

"How do you feel really, Angus?" Cas asked carefully, prodding for a more specific answer.

"Like I could sleep for a week, and maybe not have nightmares this time," he said honestly. Then he thought about it for a minute. "But you were going to do your angel healing thing. Did you … Can we go now?"

Cas smiled down at him. "Sleep first. You need it. And then yes, I suspect by morning an army of angels couldn't keep you here."

"'Kay," Mac mumbled agreeably, closing his eyes again. Sleep, real restful, no-nightmare sleep sounded great, even if it was still in a hospital bed. He wondered why he was sure he'd be able to sleep this time.

He heard both of them get up, Jack following Cas to the door, talking too quietly for him to hear. He felt vaguely worried that Jack might leave. He knew he told him often enough that he didn't need to always stay, but tonight he felt like he sort of wanted the company.

He felt the barest graze of a warm hand cupping his face. He opened his eyes. There was no one there. Jack was still standing in the doorway though. That was good. He closed his eyes again. This time he smelled a strange familiar perfume.

As he drifted off, he felt himself smiling sleepily.

He couldn't have said why, but he felt more peaceful than he had in a very long time.