"… told me to stay away from her. And then she left."

His leveled gaze surrendered to the heavy memory, lowering only for a second before lifting again to his acquaintance sitting across from him to see if they were still listening. It was a Friday night in Manhattan and those out tonight were too busy to grant Castiel and the Cat Lady a second glance, as they shared but did not use a chessboard in Washington Square Park. She looked as scraggly and raggedy and deranged as ever, yet genuinely provided her full attention. Her cats roamed all over her and the bench she sat on and she acknowledged them the way one would a gentle gust of wind.

Tonight, he had been wandering aimlessly through the city, hoping to find a grounds for lingering here but failing, when he'd heard an unintelligible snarl for his attention. That's when he found the Cat Lady, playing chess with no one, and she had thrashed a hand toward the seat opposite her, indicating him to sit. Of a mind to take any appeal for a purpose in the city, he sat down.

Castiel knew of every language ever existed, but her method of communication basically consisted of garbled wailing through spasms in her mouth, so it was a challenge to follow any verbal input she contributed to their "conversation". By some means, he derived a question from it eventually. It asked for his dilemmas, which surprised him for two reasons. One was how she managed to latch onto his trouble; two was how readily he proceeded to share it with her.

It would seem that she was bilingual since she spoke both her own primitive language and English, as she miraculously comprehended everything he told her. In response, she "spoke".

"Aeklrjelkls, shakldjfls optrkfgjlf kijhglkfdkgjldjdf chaguierikjg quakjhd, ubk kolfdjglfd, kedljg, dukfjglfdjgfd vaheuwf."

Out of courtesy, he did his best not to let his utter bewilderment surface as much as it urged to, so he read her mind instead. "Thank you for your kind words, but I don't think she's inclined to see me."

The Cat Lady looked at him for another interested second, appearing eerily sane for that one second. And then, crouching over, she scooped up one of her cats from the ground and tossed it gently to him. It startled him, but he caught the feline without complication. His initial response was to question the point of this gesture, but then he took a close look at the cat. He knew those eyes.

"Rembrandt," he breathed. The cat meowed in response, no longer deploring the angel's presence. Slowly, it dawned on him. He glanced up at the Cat Lady. "You want me to return him to her. You're giving me a reason to see her." The wild hair on her head complied with the movement when she nodded. There was a very reverent quality with the way he then rose from his seat. "Thank you."

A smile smeared across the Cat Lady's face. Then she blinked at him. Black eyes.

He would never admit that the sharp intake of breath was his. "You're a demon?" he questioned scathingly, scowling.

She said nothing and rose from her own seat, eyes returning to hazel but regarding him with a slyness typically used by demons, and moseyed off with her dozen cats without further word, a graceful spring in her step. He glanced between Audrey's cat in his hands the demon making its very laid-back escape. See Audrey or do a divine service? On one hand, Audrey was an irrelevant human and this was a demon. On the other hand, this was a demon as characterized by New York (see: Valefar aka "Robin Hood"), and Audrey was his Audrey.

Making his decision a second later, he stepped into a nearby shadow and vanished.

When he rapped his knuckles on Audrey's door, it swung open slightly at the contact. It hadn't been closed. Tentatively, he entered, noticing immediately that her lights were switched on. It was totally silent, aside from the rumbling sound of the burgeoning storm outside. He knew for sure that her father wasn't home as he had gone to Vermont a few weeks after he had first "broken up" with her.

Something about it all rubbed him the wrong way.

"Audrey," he called, pursuing her main hallway. Halfway, he knelt down to settle Rembrandt on the floor, and as he rose to his feet again, his eyes trailed the cat into the living room. That was when his eyes met with the intimidating accumulation of shopping bags, bound to have originated from the boutiques of Fifth Avenue. If one wanted a place to sit, it was occupied by bags. If one wanted to set down an object, even if it was as small as a wine glass, it was occupied by bags. It's been a week since he'd last seen her, and it became abundantly obvious as to what she had been doing.

Before he could brave a step further into the retail dumping ground and former living room, he heard Audrey's heels click-clacking down the same hallway.

"Yes, it's Audrey James Hathaway – Hathaway, like the actress, or Shakespeare's wife; I'll be using Visa; my number is —" she stopped everything upon discovering him in her living room. "I'm… I'm sorry, I'm gonna have to place the order at a later date." She hung up her cell phone. Flashed him a malicious smile.

"Hello liar!" she greeted, relinquishing a fistful of even more bags onto the floor. "What are you doing here? Can't you see I'm doing splendidly without you?" she motioned the room brimming with purchases before sauntering past him, and his gaze accompanied her, "I've had a little retail therapy, surviving only on the milkshake I had this morning!" She stopped and made a thoughtful face, "It's actually the only thing I've had in the past twenty-four hours, sleep included."

"You haven't rested or consumed food in the past twenty-four hours?" he interrogated, overtly disapproving and overprotective.

"Proving to you that I am stronger than ever! Ain't nothing gonna break my stride, nobody gonna slow me down, oh no, I've got to keep on moving!" she sang. "Seriously, I feel just —"

Then she fainted. He had anticipated it, as she had been teetering for quite some time, so he materialized behind her in an instant and caught her before she could hit the floor. He didn't realize how much he missed the feel of her until he touched her, but he was allowed only a moment to bask in the contact when she came to a few seconds later.

"I'm okay, I'm okay!" she warbled groggily, shooing away his hold as she wobbled to find stability on her two feet.

"You need to rest," he stated severely, observing her being weak at the knees for completely platonic reasons.

The look she shot him was tired, but still decidedly sassy. "You need to get the hell out of my apartment." The expression quickly receded when something appealed for her attention downward. Castiel had watched as Rembrandt padded over to her and now furled around her leg. "Rembrandt!" she gasped, delighted, and knelt down to shower it with adoration.

"I returned him to you," he informed, interrupting their reunion.

After smiling lovingly at Rembrandt for another moment, her expression dried as she glanced up at him. "You sure you didn't steal him and pretend to return him?"

His eyes hardened, not coldly but very seriously. "I would never lie to you anymore." His words earned him a cynical look that brayed a flat "whatever" before she stood and headed for the front door. Frowning, he followed. "You need to stop and rest." The added strength of his tone succeeded to halt and turn her to him. "You know you're tired but you aim to defy everything I say out of spite."

"No, I don't need to stop and rest. I do not know I'm tired and I do not aim to defy everything you say out of spite."

His tone tightened. "You're doing it right now."

"I'm not doing it right now."

Not finding this cute at all, he scowled pointedly at her. Then, he briskly strode right up to her, picked her up, flung her over one shoulder and headed toward her bedroom.

"HEY!" she squealed, beating her fists against his back and kicking her legs mutinously, "PUT ME DOWN!" In her room, he settled her down on her bed, walked away and stood at her door. She eyed him blisteringly, understood his subtext and scoffed. "What, you just gonna stand there until I nod off?"

"If by nod off, you mean fall asleep," he folded his hands behind his back, a display of stoical readiness, "then yes."

"Then you're gonna be waiting a very long time!"

"I'm an angel. I could wait for all eternity."

Her nose twitched in a way that seemed to damn him. After a moment, she huffed, "You're right. You're an angel. Don't you have better things to do than to supervise my sleep patterns?"

"Most likely. But here I am." An intimation to his emotional attachment hung in his tone, compelling her to look away, discomfited. "If you're not going to sleep, we can do something else."

Her eyes widened, slowly, as though disbelieving whatever had struck her initially. "Um. And that is?"

"Talk," he answered simply, confused by her confusion.

She blinked steadily, the mist of a different suggestion clearing from her mind. "Right. Of course."

On some level, he knew what had crossed her mind, which rendered his tilt of his head somewhat pretentious. "What were you thinking?"

Dismissively, she waved a hand. "Doesn't matter." Then she said nothing, instead working her mouth from side to side in an absentminded manner.

The urge to roll his eyes had to be resisted. "So, you're refraining from speaking now? Simply to defy me again?"

His words triggered something in her, and she abruptly beat her fists into her duvet moodily. "WHAT is there to talk about, Cas, really?"

Drawing in a slow breath, he ventured a step forward. "You and I have discussed many things during the time we've been together, but we've willfully avoided the subject of God. It would manifest itself on occasion and we would bypass it, since we both knew it would…" he pulled out a term Gabriel had once used, "… open up a can of worms. It's possibly that, at this point, now would be ideal time."

Her head she had buried stubbornly on her duvet whipped up at him with a weary groan. "Why are you still here? I told you to get out, and I told you to stay away from me. Being around you gives me a needling sense of failure."

Boldly, he countered, "And yet you're not making much of an effort to remove me."

She choked out an aghast sound, her smile nothing but incredulous. "I've told you to leave! Do I have to physically move you to get rid of you?"

"You could try."

The scoff she made suggested her more-than-willingness to take the challenge. She sprung off the bed and marched up to him, rolling up her sleeves. She opened the door behind him, grabbed one of his wrists and started pulling with all her might. It was as though his feet were rooted to the floor. The vain exertion made her cry out but she kept tugging until finally, ripping out a growl, she gave up.

"It's like trying to move the Berlin wall!" she seethed, slamming the door shut and storming around to face him. She flung her hands in the air, reduced to a tantrum. "What do you want from me, Cas? I mean, what's the use? Why must I make an argument when I know you're right?"

"I understand your exasperation only on a surface level, but since we'd abstained from the topic of God, I can't know how deeply your feelings for the subject lie." Another step forward. "I want to know what you've believed all this time and why it irks you to have it disproved."

Already, she was bobbing on her feet like a petulant child in a toy store. "Why, why do you insist on doing this?" she asked imploringly, turning and trudging back to her bed.

"Because I know you have ammunition to exhaust," he replied, leaning back against her door and folding his hands over his front, "Perhaps I've won this battle before it even began, but there's no loss in showing me what you're fighting for."

Another reason was his theory that once she verbally cleansed herself of her Atheism, she would be of a ready mind to reflect on their "relationship".

"But that's just it, isn't it?" she fired back as she sat down on her bed. "You would have asked me why I don't believe in God, but you as the asker, as the believer, the burden of proof is on you. It's up to you to prove X, I can't disprove it if I don't think X exists to begin with, so you would be the one fighting." She shook her head in an effort to clear it, demurring from continuing down that complex line of thinking. Moaning, she leaned forward and planted her face into her hands. "I am too tired for this."

"Then rest."

Continuing with her show of defiance for the night, her head snapped up instantly. "ALRIGHT, LET'S TALK!"

Jolting up to her feet, she flounced over to him with eyes that shone dangerously. He regarded her expectantly. "Firstly, there are two types of atheological arguments: logical and evidential. Professor is, was, the latter. He argued with facts that are consistent with theism in a way that provides evidence against it. Sciencey stuff, evolution, quantum physics, whatever. I'm the former, I argue with logic, and I think that's why all this cuts me even more than it did Professor. Even though science is his life, to have it contradicted is not as personal as having your own rationality challenged."

Pasting on a smile, one that was vicious, she then clapped her hands together, keen to do some damage. "Let's start with a few things I pointed out to you the first night we met. Hurricane Katrina, Virginia Tech, the Haiti earthquake, the Boxing Day tsunami," she stepped right in front of him, the fire in her eyes aggravating for one emphatic mention, "9/11! God is meant to be this almighty, omniscient, gracious thing of perfection, and to allow all this random shit to happen in the world is contradictory to the supposed nature of God."

"And, by extension, where's the logic in God creating people doomed for eternal damnation in the first place if he, as an all-knowing being, already knows the end result? Similarly, why would a perfect god create imperfect things, with flaws indented inherently in all of us, carved all of his own hand, and then judge and punish us for who we are? It makes no logical sense! Free will is granted but there's an asterisk: if you don't do what I say, you'll burn for all eternity. What the hell kind of free will is that?"

The pent up frustration and ammunition that had been contained for so long welled to the surface, spilling recklessly. "And why would God drown out the human race? Why would God send a plague upon seven thousand people? Why would God make people cannibalize their own loved ones just because they'd failed to obey him? And why would…" Her eyes stirred out of focus, finding herself short for words, but then shook a finger fiercely at him. "I–I hear there's rape in the Bible too, so there's that! Why does a god so unholy and immoral and most definitely not perfect merit so much worship?"

A searing glare contorted her face, her voice narrowing to a virulent hiss. "Your boss, Cas, is the cosmic Saddam Hussein; Antony Flew's words, not mine. In fact, God created Saddam. He created Charles Manson, cancer, the Green River Killer, AIDS, Hitler, Fred Phelps…" her hands whirled wildly and her voice wandered, fumbling for more material, "… autotune!"

Almost as an act of mercy, she took a few steps away from him. "Now. Moral issues aside, what about the fact that there is absolutely no evidence of his existence? Absence of evidence is evidence of absence! But nooo, theists will argue with the premise that something, or someone is working outside of space and time, something they haphazardly refer to as God, and must have created the universe and set everything in motion, which makes no logical sense, because it implies that there was a time before the universe existed, which is impossible because time itself is a property of the universe. There is no "before the universe" or "after the universe"! And it's with these standards that they've set, that things must have originated from a source, that they try to excuse God from, in objection to any question challenging his origin. They will claim that, oh, he's a "necessary being" that doesn't require a creator. It's such a flight of fancy that's both unsupported and unsupportable."

There was a sort of supercilious manner with the way she then pressed her hands against her hips, the vicious smile surfacing again. "Speaking of unsupported and unsupportable, how 'bout that Bible? Someone like me may put forward a few instances from the Bible illustrating God's immorality to a theist, and they will feebly criticize with something like, "Oh, the Bible doesn't really mean that God ordered soldiers to slaughter the Midianite without mercy and take the surviving virgins for themselves, no no no!""

Her sarcasm over anything else roused him to look vaguely affronted, but was still too riveted to interrupt.

"It's a weak argument that only compromises the reliability of the Bible, and if a passage of such plain meaning is so ambiguous, how can we pin our hopes on the rest of it? I mean, once the fidelity of major segments of the Bible are discredited, how can you defend the rest? The whole text is undermined if there are any questionable accuracies and inconsistencies!"

She deflated suddenly, sinking into the waters of exhaustion, but she sloppily managed one last shot the next second. "And the whole praying thing? DOESN'T WORK!"

Something resembling reverence gleamed in his eyes as he stared at her. Then, with the slightest suggestion of a smile, he raised his hands and clapped slowly, which only made her expression sour.

"Oh, don't patronize me with your applause, Cas," she muttered, dragging her feet back to her bed and sinking down on it defeatedly. "I know, now, that God exists."

"I'm not patronizing you," he replied lightly.

"Aren't you gonna defend yourself?" she forced out the question gruffly, sore in defeat, "Aren't you gonna correct my misconceptions and redignify your God?"

He should feel indignant to her misconceptions and he should feel superior in possessing the truth. And yet, his consideration tended only for her sake. If only she knew the things she did to him.

He considered all this before he spoke. "No." The subtle change in atmosphere gave him clearance to approach her. "I asked you to strike me with everything you have, without pulling your punches." He stopped right by where she sat on the bed. "Why would I take reprisals?" With great discretion, he slowly sank down to sit next to her. "You know the the truth now. There's no need for me to belabor the reality by thrusting evidence upon you, especially since I've already done that in some way. As you've said, it's more than you can sustain."

Though she looked straight at him, her eyes were strictly introspective, as though using him to assess herself and her new reality. "It doesn't make sense," she mumbled in small voice.

"Remember what I once told you," he murmured, watching at her wringing hands and doing his utmost not to reach over and embrace them, knowing she wouldn't let him. He looked up at her awaiting eyes. "It's not as simple as you believe. It's a labyrinth of obscurities you cannot fathom until you cross over." His gaze was fixed yet compassionate, aiming for what he said on either side of this pause to sink in properly. "You are surrounded by many beautiful things, creations of God, but few real things. Real things are truths that do not require your attention. At least not yet."

He didn't realize he had been slanting forward to her until he straightened up. "Don't focus on the reason for your existence. You should continue focusing on your many reasons to live." His thoughts began to expand beyond Audrey. "This is why it's better for humanity to remain in a quiet ignorance of things of the divine. Such things simply exceed the reach of your capacities, which is what God intended. And people aren't wrong to doubt His existence, because with the current state of the world, they have reason to be, but it's when people claim to understand His nature that they are wrong."

His words lead to a silence filled only by the rain, and the vestiges of the conversation prior ringing in their ears. They stared at one another longer than what was necessary. Their eyes communicated in silence, but strangely, disappointingly, they didn't seem to be on the same wavelength anymore. In a vain attempt to find it again, he shifted closer to her on the bed. She renewed the space by shifting away from him. It was such a tiny move but it made him feel so … rejected.

"It feels … nice to get that off my chest," she murmured distantly, staring forward. Even with her eyes turned elsewhere from him, he was relieved to see that its intensity had dimmed, as though her internal storm clouds were ebbing away after the tempest. Something in her tone, also, had told him that she was slowly but surely making peace with the situation.

With the lethargy of someone who had been sedated, she turned those faint eyes to his, that watched her with a more abstract concern than emotion. Calmness waned and hope swelled when she began to list forward to him. Her eyes veered downward.

She was going to kiss him.

When her eyes closed, he did the same, relishing her nearing warmth as their proximity narrowed, without seeing it. Then, the bed rocked at an added weight, and then a snore. He opened his eyes.

She had fallen asleep.

I hope everyone had a lovely Christmas!

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