She had been an aspiring actress, just like hundreds of other plain-Jane mid-western girls who lit out for California with dreams of fame and fortune, and just like the majority of those girls, she ended up waiting tables.

Her plastic nametag said "Christine" but that wasn't how she spelled her name, so she had taken a black magic marker and written a "K" over the first letter. "It's Kristine with a K," she would tell people, but they often seemed to ignore her. She'd tried to get back home from California when her dreams all came crashing down around her, but only got as far as a dusty little town in Nevada. She didn't even make it to Vegas. They gave her a job at the truck stop where she'd been stranded. She had been nineteen then, and stayed for six more years.

At the age of twenty-three, she met the man of her dreams, except in her dreams he stayed with her after they made love in a swanky penthouse suite down in Vegas. In reality they had awkward, sweaty sex in the restaurant supply room surrounded by giant BulkClub Warehouse-sized bottles of ketchup and mayonnaise. He wasn't a foreign prince or even a high roller from one of the casinos. He wasn't even legal – just barely seventeen. Kristine was mortified when she found out.

He didn't stay either. Thirty-six hours later he was nothing but a pretty memory.

Thirty six days later Kristine realized her period was late.

When Evan was born everyone said he was the prettiest baby they'd ever seen, and Kristine believed every word. When he was two years old she packed her things and took him back to California. He landed a commercial gig almost immediately. At the age of four he caught the eye of one of the biggest talent scouts in L.A. and was asked to read for a new family sitcom. Evan got the part – and kept the part for nine years.

At thirteen Evan found himself going through an awkward stage, and then the horror of unemployment. The long-running sitcom had been losing ratings until the network was forced to pull the plug, leaving Evan without a job and without any prospects. He just wasn't cute anymore. For two years he and Kristine lived off his savings, until Evan passed through his ugly duckling stage and started getting pretty again. He started getting roles again too, and in the glare of the spotlight he failed to notice his mother's failing health until it was too late.

As she lay dying, Evan spent a great deal of time in the hospital chapel. He'd always been a bit of an oddity – being a very spiritual child, and one within the wild life of the Hollywood scene to boot. Kristine never discouraged him. Her greatest fear had always been that he'd go the route of so many other child stars, addicted to something nasty, living on the streets, dead…

"Making pornos," Evan would tease. Kristine never found it funny.

He was just sixteen when she died. She never even made it to her fortieth birthday. After her funeral Evan began devoting more time to his Bible studies, and had a folder full of pamphlets from various theological colleges around the country. He seriously considered entering the priesthood, deeply convinced that he had a calling - and it was not acting.

At seventeen Evan officially found God.

At eighteen, God found him.

Or rather, an angel did.

Dean Winchester was an angel. He wasn't supposed to believe in coincidences, because if you believed in coincidences it blew holes in the entire notion of God having a Divine Plan and made you a bad angel. It was hard for Dean not to believe in coincidences because angel or not, he still considered himself a damn good poker player. Dean had to believe that you could beat the odds. If you believed everything happened for a reason, then there was no way you could beat the odds unless God wanted you to, which Dean found unfair.

He thought finding Evan had been a coincidence, but eventually realized he'd been wrong, and that was unfair too.

Possessing someone was something Dean found uncomfortable. It made him more than a little squeamish in fact, something Castiel could not understand in the slightest. Angels like Cas had been created by God, and their true forms varied widely. Younger, low-ranking angels like Dean were drafted from human souls and their true forms remained more or less like what they'd been in life. Therefore Castiel couldn't understand why, if he could cram his larger-than-life form into the fragile shell of a human, Dean found the idea so abhorrent.

"It's not my shell," Dean explained. "And seriously – it's kinda like being intimate with another dude, and I'm so not into that."

"Gender is a human notion. You are no longer 'a dude.'"

"Oh, I am so very much a dude, trust me."

He'd sought out his vessel very carefully, finally locating Evan during a pass through Los Angeles – discovering him on a billboard no less. Evan had gotten a part on a popular soap opera. Dean had spotted him among a cast photo as part of an advertisement for the show. The height, the build, and even his looks were very similar to Dean's. Dean sought him out and was stunned to find him not only to be of vessel material, but very willing to prove himself to God.

When he showed up before Cas in said vessel, Castiel had been livid. "Put him back!"

"What, why?"

"Did you check his bloodline?"

"Yeah, he's good. He's got the right markers for a vessel."

"His bloodline, Dean, not his blood type."

"Well, no. Does it matter?"

When Castiel reluctantly admitted that it really didn't, Dean ignored his protests and didn't take it any further. He'd borrow Evan to complete his task, and then plunk the boy safely back into LaLa land – no harm, no foul.

But Cas' reaction to Dean's newly acquired vessel lurked at the back of his mind, bugging the hell out of him. He let it go for a long time, never following up on the task of checking out the boy's heritage, until Castiel revealed to him exactly what, and who, Ruby was protecting.

Knowing Evan had also grown up without a father, and that he had just lost his mother, Dean felt perhaps he owed it to the kid to do a little research. He looked up the angelic markers encoded into Evan's blood. Since these markers followed the paternal line, they would tell Dean precisely who fathered him.

Dean looked, and then he looked again.

"Ah…dammit, this can't be right!"

So much for coincidences.

There was no way it could be a coincidence that the vessel Dean had chosen was his very own offspring. He didn't even remember who the girl had been. When he tried to think of her, the only impression he got was of a giant bottle of ketchup.

God, he determined, really did have a sick sense of humor.