The Sams ran the Castiels' interviews with an enthusiasm that might have freaked out lesser beings. There was Cas E mid morning, who looked over their chart with an academic interest that was starting to be familiar. She dragged a finger along the time lines, following the branches of her history, until her finger paused at one of their dots like stops along a subway map. And the Sams had sucked as much information from her as possible, scrambling to draw a branching time line and fill in events as she told them. They got off track talking about abandoned nuclear power plants and if the sites existed in the other universes (they did) and if they could use them as hideouts as well. They busted out maps of the US and circled locations, scribbling notes.

They hadn't finished their interview when the next Cas appeared around lunch. Guy Cas this time. They had to get more ties. The one for new guy Cas was one of Sam A's fake FBI ties, with black and white and gray diagonal stripes. It was wider than what they usually saw on him, making him look thinner, draining away the little color from his face, making his eyes a faded gray. One of Bobby's ugly hounds-tooth green ones that looked like it might be made of burlap went to new girl Cas. It hung loose around her neck, unbound by her low, unbuttoned shirt collar.

Then Cas D popped back in to get them even further off track with a conversation about how Cas E kept herself shielded. The three angels in the room got into the metaphysical aspects of it pretty fast, with the Sams asking, "But can you still hear angel radio?" and "Does it cut you off from Heaven?" And then they all wanted to see the tattoo she had next to her navel, which she had no problem at all showing them, flipping her tie out of the way, and pulling up her dress shirt nearly to her bra and slipping her skirt down another half inch. Sam A bit the bullet and got close enough to copy down the Enochian, trying to look professional while clearing his throat. Cas D just reached out in interest and caressed it with two fingers, like it might rub off. Cas E didn't even blink.

They were just about to start their next interview with the next Castiel, when Dean and Cas and Cas G showed up and...

"Whoa," Sam A said.

Sam C looked like his brain might explode.

The angel's eyes were a brighter green than Dean's, reminding Sam of the few times Dean had tried to schmooze a principal to get Sam out of trouble by pulling out his nice green button down that made his eyes pop. The angel looked younger than Dean. Not by much, but still. He had a few less wrinkles around his eyes, hair just a bit shorter. It made sense if Castiel had possessed him a few years ago, freezing Dean's body in time.

And the guy had to have to worst skin Sam had ever seen on an angel. They were usually an eerie kind of perfect. But a Dean-suit...just looked like Dean, freckles and stubble and everything.

"Are...um..."

Nope. Sam had nothing. The Cas that looked like Dean grimaced, which...wow...that was freaking weird, and decided to go talk to someone else.

"Holy shit," Sam C hissed. "Are they both in there?"

"How did—I mean, how did he get Dean to agree to that?" Sam A asked.

Dean threw up his hands. "Who cares? He's here and he's game. Quit gawking at him or he'll leave and we'll have to go out again, and this time I'm sending one of you because I've got one more jump in me and I'm saving it for the trip home." He stormed off, muttering something about his intestines.

Other Dean poked his head in as soon as he could be the only Dean in the room. "Just so you all know, we're calling that one 'Handsome Cas'." He nodded soundly, his word becoming law, and then disappeared again.

Sam took a deep breath, then pulled up a smile for the next Castiel on the docket. Cas F. So far he'd been quiet and politely interested, relaxed as he leaned back against Bobby's desk, reminding Sam of his own Cas on a good day. Which honestly, hadn't happened for a while, so this kind of flashback was nice.

"Alright. You're up."

Cas F hesitated, that relaxed posture tightening into something Sam found even more familiar. Like the weight of the world had settled back onto his shoulders. The angel swallowed. "I believe my 'time line' may be 'the bad one'."

Sam C scoffed.

"No judgment," Sam promised. "We've all done and seen stuff. And...we understand, okay?"

"And that's the cool part of all this," Sam A said. "We can make it better. Pool our resources. Maybe give you an idea of what to do with the cards you're dealt."

Cas F nodded, leaning forward. "Castiel said you had answers for me."

"Great!" Sam beamed.

Castiel pushed himself from the desk and marched up to the chart, scanning it before pointing at spot on Sam's time line in the blank section of "Sam is soulless." "This is where our realities diverge."

They hadn't written much of anything in that year and a half, leaving it blank over picking at the wall, so the spot Castiel had noted was in a blank stretch sometime in October. Sam's interest piqued. This was it. Someone who might know how he got out of hell, who might know why Cas was super-charged, who might fill in the gaps.

Sam A moved in to mark the spot. "Alright, what happened?" he asked.

Castiel stared at the chart instead of making eye contact. "They were after a vampire nest. Dean became a vampire."

All the Sams stilled. Castiel looked up, directly at Sam. "I believe in your universe he wasn't turned. Or he was cured."

Sam's stomach dropped. His throat was dry. "And...in yours..."

"He drank before they could administer the cure." His tone was professional, detached, but under it there was the echo of something broken.

Sam A was the first to recover, nudging Sam's knee and sketching in the new time line. "No judgments," he murmured.

"Right. Yeah," Sam said. "I don't really remember that. But. Yeah. I know it happened." And hopefully no more would be said about it.

Castiel frowned. "You don't remember?"

"No. I was soulless."

The angel's face cleared. "You remember nothing?"

"Just flashes. Probably like your Sam."

Castiel shook his head. "'My Sam' is still without a soul."

Sam A's pencil had frozen. His eyes were huge.

Sam slapped his arm. "No judgments."

But it did make him feel better about his own past.

"Castiel said you knew how to retrieve it. Can you tell me? And he won't remember anything?"

Sam C took over explaining the deal with Death and how Dean had made the deal in most of the realities. But his Cas had done it for him, and in Reality D, Sam had done it to get Dean's soul out. Maybe vampire Dean could do it? Or maybe Castiel could talk to Death himself. Either way, he should talk to C.C. or either of the Deans.

Castiel nodded eagerly, his eyes sharp and earnest. There was a desperation there Sam hadn't noticed before. Maybe because it was always there in his own Cas' eyes and it was so familiar he'd taken it for granted.

"And do you know a cure for vampire-ism?" he asked.

"Uh. No. Just the one," Sam said.

"Back up," Sam A said. "There's a cure for vampire-ism?" Sam C nodded next to him, his hair flopping in his enthusiasm. Sam A grabbed for a notebook, and then they got off track again, which got Castiel into impatient, exasperated mode, which was also way too familiar.

"Maybe one of the other Castiels knows," Sam offered.

"Or maybe when this ritual gets you supercharged, you can burn the vampire out of him. Like a smiting, but controlled? Or like a healing-smiting combo? I don't know. Seems like something you should be able to do if you've got the juice," Sam C suggested.

"So your Sam is walking around soulless?"

"Yes." Cas looked guilty.

"Do you know how he got out of hell?"

Cas blinked, a pucker developing between his eyebrows. "Our universes diverged after your escape from hell. So I imagined you escaped the same way."

"And that would be?"

"You don't know?"

"That's...why I'm asking?"

Cas considered him for a long moment, then settled on "I don't know either."

Smooth move, Sam Winchester. Way to show your hand too soon.

Sam A bitch faced at him, then attacked the problem head on. "Look. Did you pull Sam out of hell or not?"

The angel took on that cagey look he got when he was about to book it. His eyes darted between the Sams, then skipped away, his head rocking back and forth like he was stretching his neck.

"I'd call that a yes," Sam C said.

Cas narrowed his eyes. "Why don't you ask your Castiel this?"

"He won't answer. Dean was supposed to work on him today, but I bet he didn't."

Cas snorted his agreement.

"Why would you even keep something like that a secret?" Sam C asked. "Getting me out of hell is a good thing. Why are you treating it like the worst thing ever?"

"And why lie about it?" Sam asked. "Dude, that's the part that makes no sense. That's the part that has us pissed."

Cas sighed, closing his eyes. "And you find it productive to interrogate me about my mistakes."

He had a point there. This was kinda low.

"We told you how to get your Sam's soul back," Sam A said. "We're just asking for an exchange of information."

"And we won't tell your...your Winchesters," Sam C added. "So it's like a consequence free confession."

"But you're also asking me to confess the sins of my brother. Your Castiel. This would have consequences for him."

The hope in Sam's heart stilled its fluttering, then sunk quietly back into the dark. It was over.

He looked down at his hands, and murmured, "I deserve to know what happened to me."

A tense silence fell over the room. Sam didn't want to look up and see anyone's pity or concern, their irritation with Cas. It was over. He could accept defeat.

He cleared his throat and broke the silence. "Have you told your Sam that you rescued him?"

"No."

"You should." He rubbed his eyebrow and sighed. "Fine. Let's just fill in what we can, and ask the other Casses if they know anything about vampires."

Cas blinked in honest surprise. "You're still going to help me?"

"Of course."

"We have to help Dean if we can," Sam A said, still bitter about Cas' unhelpful attitude.

"And if someone knows how to cure vampires, that would be really handy for everyone," Sam C added.

"And we still need your help with the ritual."

"You've been around soulless Sam too long."

Sam nodded, then picked up the pencil that Sam A had dropped and hovered it over the chart. "Okay. So Dean became a vampire. Then what happened?"

Cas was quiet so long that Sam turned back to him, only to find the angel looking at him in awe.

Then he started speaking. "I dragged Sam out of hell, straight to Cicero, Illinois and Lisa Braeden's front door. Sam turned the other direction and walked away." He shook his head. "I couldn't...I couldn't face them after that. It would hurt Dean if he knew. Sam had turned his back...It was the first of my many spectacular failures."

Sam stared at him.

Cas sighed again. "You're right. You deserve to know, and I have been around Soulless Sam for too long. I'd forgotten that you're a decent man, and that I no longer deserve your respect."

"Cas—"

He held up a hand. "If I tell you, you can't turn your back on him. Promise me, Sam."

"Okay?"

Cas looked skeptical. "It may help to know that my plan to defeat Raphael is arguably much worse than Castiel's, so he's not as bad as he could be."

"And what's your plan?"

Cas almost looked smug. "Dean calls it 'hopped up on angel juice: all the added vitamins and minerals a growing monster needs,' although that's not terribly accurate."

"...Angel...Juice?"

Cas pulled at the collar of his shirt, pulling it down enough to show the purple smudge of a bruise where his neck met his shoulder. The mark was healed over and broken and healed over and broken and healing even now.

"Better than demon blood."

Here's a list of things Dean would rather do that talk to Fake Dean:

Jump off a bridge. Into cold water. Filled with slimy fish. That bite.

Help the Sams with their increasingly confusing time line tree, and deal with them snapping that he was doing it wrong.

Go on a beer run. Or a whiskey run. Or a tequila run. Where he would have to track down shot glasses and buy limes, and then cut the limes into wedges, and then dig into the rock salt.

Help the Castiels tie their color coded ties (which doesn't sound like it would be as much of a production as it ended up being.)

Hide.

Go home.

Regretfully, Dean found himself cornered in the kitchen by Fake Dean, neither of them knowing how to start a conversation, or even if they should make the attempt. They could both just leave in opposite directions and pretend that they hadn't seen each other, but as massive as their combined denial was, neither of them could really pretend such an action would be anything other than cowardice, and that wasn't gonna fly.

Thankfully, Nuclear Powered Bat Cave Cas was there too. She was doing her best silent statue impersonation, just staying out of the way by the oven and staring at both of them. Her tie looked ridiculous, but in a way that was kind of awesome, like she'd just partied way too hard and woken up with a hangover and some dude's tie. The general, unspoken consensus was to just keep calling her Cas E, but run it together in a single breath until it sounded like "Cassie." Dean did not approve, and he was seriously considering making an executive decision to re-nickname her Secret Cas or Super Cas because of the fortress of solitude thing. Both options were infinitely better, and not even Sam would be able to argue with that.

Fake Dean opened the fridge and pulled out a beer from Dean's beer/whiskey/tequila/limes run. The cases of beer now filled the lower half of the fridge, with the bag of lettuce and the bag of flax seed and the sideways box of orange juice and the tupperwares full of leftovers all crammed in so tight on the top shelf that they blocked the refrigerator light.

Fake Dean popped the cap with his ring and took a swig, clenching his jaw as he took in Dean. They faced each other from across the kitchen, both bracing themselves.

"So," Fake Dean started, shifting his weight from foot to foot as he grabed for a discussion topic, "has Cas gone with you on the annual trip to Vegas?"

That seemed innocuous enough. Dean didn't know what he'd expected—from small talk about the weather to agreements that Sam was the best to a lengthy, awkward, soul searching discussion about "treating Cas right" or yet another lecture about "stopping Cas from whatever he was up to."

Dean scratched the side of his head. "No."

"Then you don't know about Cas and poker."

"Why? She good at it?"

Fake Dean grinned, looking downright evil, sneaking a look at Super Cas to see if she could back him up on this. He ticked the points off on his fingers. "She's got the world's best poker face. She's a calculator for probabilities. She counts cards. And she reads minds." He tipped his beer in salute, like obviously this was a piece of information that Dean should take and run with. You're welcome. "Since then we've been running this racket: we go to a bar and sit at a table. She has like three shots. Then I deal and start explaining the rules. I don't know if she knows that it's a racket and just doesn't care about how it's dishonest, or if she has no idea and just thinks that I think she's forgotten the rules and she's humoring me, or if she thinks this is how all poker games start—like I said, amazing poker face, there's no way to tell with her—but she just lets me explain them to her like she's a drunk eight-year-old. And she asks these questions about the illustrations on the face cards or 'Why is it a jack and not some other nobility?' or 'Why are they called clubs when they look like clovers?' or 'Who decided which suits should be black and which should be red?' You know. Cas questions. The ones that make her look clueless and kinda drunk, but you also know she seriously wants you to go to the library and look up the history of playing cards."

Super Cas made a noise in the back of her throat between a scoff, a growl, and a hum of agreement.

"So, of course," Fake Dean continued, "some fools hear all of this and come up and want to help teach her and buy her three more shots. Smiling and everything. Sometimes it take 'em a while to figure out they're being had. We make out like bandits."

Dean couldn't help his snort of laughter. "That's a good racket. But somehow, I don't think it'd work as well for us. People don't usually want to buy Cas drinks and teach him how to play card games."

Fake Dean conceded with a shrug. "Got a point there. Just go to a casino then."

"He's good with those games where you guess the number of jelly beans in a jar and get a free taco. And claw games. He won Sam a teddy bear once."

"Tried ski-ball yet? We were at this boardwalk carnival thing and she spent most of the night camped out in front of it. Glared down a group of eight-year olds waiting for their turn. Then she carried around this big cloud of tickets that didn't fit in her pockets. The scuffle we got in with the witch we were hunting crumpled them all up, and she was pissed. Hadn't seen her that mad since she told Crowley to fuck off."

"My Cas killed Crowley." And, yeah, it may be bragging a bit, but whatever, Cas smoked that sucker, and it was cool.

Fake Dean looked suitably impressed. "Like smitted?" He held up a hand in imitation of pressing his palm to someone's forehead.

"Like burned his bones."

"Nice. You should tell us where he found 'em and we can do the same."

"I got no clue where he found them. You gotta ask him."

"I will." He took another drink, muttering against the lip of the bottle. "Crowley. Crazy sonuvabitch."

Dean rolled his eyes. "God. With that Purgatory thing? What was he thinking?"

"And trying to get Cas in on it?" Fake Dean huffed, incredulous. Cas E sighed. "What an asshole."

Dean's smile turned confused, but he kept it in place and stilted to fight off the weird coldness that crept down his spine. "Yeah. Such a dick."

"I mean, could you believe that?"

"Did...so he asked your Cas to help him find alphas? And you?" he asked Cassie.

She nodded slowly, cautiously.

Fake Dean frowned. "Alphas? What, like alphas alphas? Those exist?"

"Well, yeah."

"Huh!"

"...Wait, so he didn't have you finding alphas for him?"

"What? Why would I do that? Like, work for Crowley? Are you nuts?"

Dean bristled. "It was a shitty time. We didn't have much choice. I'm not talking about it."

Fake Dean held up a hand as a peace offering. It didn't really help settle him. "Well, here his plan wasn't about alphas. It was getting Cas to make a deal with him. Help him get to Purgatory so they could swallow everyone there and juice themselves up on monster souls."

Cassie said, "That's not exactly how it would have worked."

"Whatever. He really wanted her help. Offered her a crazy number of souls from hell as a down payment. I didn't think Crowley'd go through with trying to find it on his own."

"Wasn't all on his own," Dean said. "He dragged us into it. And a bunch of other hunters and he had his demon lackeys."

"But he didn't have Cas. When she turned him down here, he gave up. Haven't heard much from him since."

"Well he didn't give up where I come from."

Fake Dean lifted his beer again, but paused with it halfway to his mouth. They stared at each other, the same something gnawing on both their edges. Green eyes meeting green eyes. The same suspicion and confusion and denial crossing their faces.

Dean spoke slowly, tasting each word as its own unit so they wouldn't fit together and make sense. "A 'crazy number of souls from hell' would have made her more powerful than she is now."

Fake Dean shifted, matching the cadence of his voice. "He'd have to be desperate to agree to that."

The world narrowed down to a single point of tile on the floor.

"Dude, I'm sure he wouldn't...I mean, that's just..."

"Dean—" Cassie asked.

Dean's fingers clenched so tight on the edge of the counter that they ached.

Fake Dean grasped for something, anything to say. "You said that he killed the guy, right? So even if he did make the deal, it's void now. He turned it around."

Dean replayed conversations. The last few days. The last few weeks. The last six months. That shadow behind everything Cas did or said, the one that smelled like lies unless you pretended it didn't. Cas hadn't come to him, hadn't trusted him, because Dean hadn't been there for him. He'd abandoned the guy to navigate free will on his own, to lead people when he'd never done anything but follow. And for what? So Dean could play house and get his heart trampled on, because he could never be normal, and he didn't have what it took to support the people he cared about.

"Hey. You okay?"

The words were muffled. Distant. Unreal.

The footsteps were muffled too, and maybe Dean knew they were coming or maybe an hour passed without Dean knowing anything.

"Dean?"

He snapped up to find Sam in the kitchen, concerned and flushed.

"Are...are you okay?"

Dean blinked. Fake Dean was poised just behind the table, ready to burst out of his skin, or jump and grab a first aid kit or a gun or anything. Cassie was almost at his elbow, ready to knock him out if he got hysterical.

Dean shot them a brief warning look and instinctively forced the fakest everything's-alright-smiles on his face. "Yeah, Sammy. Everything's fine. You need some more pencil lead?"

"Uh. No. We just. We talked to Cas F. And...are you sure you're alright?"

"I'm great."

"Okay?" Sam's gaze (obnoxiously) swept to Fake Dean for confirmation, who weirdly enough had Dean's back and gave him a blank stare back. "So we talked to Cas F."

"Vampire Cas."

Sam cringed. "Yeah. Anyway. Before the vampire thing...he had this other plan. And I'm almost positive it's the same plan our Cas has."

Dean found himself shaking his head, his shoulders sinking, and maybe he could sink all the way into the floor. "So help me, the next words out of your mouth better be 'sinking luxury cruise liner'."

Sam's forehead erupted in confused wrinkles. "What?"

Cassie moved, taking two steps to get in Dean's face and grip his arm. She forced his eyes to hers. They looked so much like Cas'. It was so hard to hold them. After staring at her a moment, she decided something and turned to Sam. "When is the ritual?"

"Tomorrow at sunrise?"

"Then we have time."

She looked back at Dean and squeezed his arm once. "We'll fix this," she assured him. Then she snapped at Fake Dean, "Get the basement ready. Keep Castiel occupied elsewhere." Then she vanished.