Dean, and Sam just stood there in the hospital hallway, staring at Bobby's body, as the doctors called a code and tried to revive their uncle. Just twenty minutes ago Dean had almost punched a guy out for even suggesting that Bobby might die, and now he was just standing here, watching it happen. Since Bobby got shot he had been fighting to keep his temper in check, fighting back the tears. He had been fighting every negative emotion known to man, dread, fear, anger, self-loathing, hate for that laviathin bastard that had shot Bobby, terrible sadness, loss of hope, and now he was just numb. Now He felt nothing.

A tear fell from his eye, and he quickly wiped it away. Dean just stood there, with his arms crossed, and his feet a few inches apart. He was ready for a fight at any time, but there wasn't anything to fight here. Reapers were invisible, so you couldn't fight them. So he just stayed there, feeling useless... Again. What would it take for his heart to break? He felt like he could die from this. This was one straw too many.

Sam looked at his brother, to check to see if Dean would have a break down, or any emotional outbreak what so ever. After a bit of time, watching Dean stand there, he walked away. He got in the elevator down the hall, and then followed all the signs untill he reached the outside of the hospital. When the cool breeze hit his cheeks, he knew that he was going to throw up, so he did. He got sick, right there in the bushes. Sam could only identify one emotion in his heart at the moment, and that was tired depression. He was tired of trying to keep it together for Dean, he was tired of worrying about Dean, and at the same time he knew that, in the next minute, he'd be worried again. He was tired of getting the shittiest card in the deck with every dealing.

Sam once had known this girl in college who had a hippie outlook on life. Sam had told her about the falling out with his family, and she had said that life was like counting cards in blackjack. Sometimes the cards were in the positive, and sometimes they were in the negative, but you always end up with the neutral number of zero in the end, so things will always even out. He could see now that Francine had been so full of it!

Sam eventually went back into the hospital. He grabbed a soda from the vending machine before he went in to check on Dean. Dean was sitting in a chair only a few inches from where he had been standing when Sam had last seen him. He was still staring, only he had moved his eyes to his lap, as he held his head in his left hand. They had taken Bobby down to the morgue. A nurse came over, as soon as she saw that Sam had returned.

"I tried to talk to your brother about this stuff," she said in a soft tone, reserved for the bereaved, "but he just told me to talk to you."

"That's probably for the best," Sam said, as he cleared his throat, and took the clipboard.

As morbid as it was, it was his turn to take care of the after death papers. Dean had taken custody of Dad's body after he had died. The nurse tried to explain the forms and the procedure to him, but Sam waved her off, saying that there was no need for an explanation.

"You've been through this before."

"My Dad died a few years back, and we were the next of kin. Now that Uncle Bobby's gone, well, we're the only family he has left."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"Yeah, thanks," Sam said, forcing a small smile across his lips.

The nurse hesitated, and then when Sam looked up at her, she looked embarrassed. She dug into a pocket on her sweater, and pulled out a little rosary pin and handed it over to Sam. When Sam tooked the proferred trinket, she explained, "My mother is Catholic, and she gives me all these different saint pins. I usually just dump them in a tray downstairs in the chapel. I keep a few handy though. That one is St. Paul, Patron saint of the bereaved. I don't pray to saints, myself, but sometimes the stories of the saints bring comfort to some. I pray to my grandmother who died of cancer when I was twelve. Anyway, sometimes it helps to pray to someone, no matter who it is. I don't mean to push religion on you, if you don't believe, but studies show that prayer and meditation does change brain chemistry, and it lets the body relax. I always feel a little bit better afterwards. So... I just didn't want to leave you here when you, and especially your brother, seem to have a need for comfort in your loss."

Sam looked at this tiny girl who could be no bigger than five three, and felt a little touched. She really was trying to help. He grabbed her hand and squeezed it, thanking her once more, and asked her name. Her name was Lucy, or Lucinda, named after her grandmother.

When Sam went back to his papers, Lucy went to go sit by Dean's right side. She didn't touch him, because she had noticed how he had reacted to Dr. Chande when he had asked about organ donation. She just sat there, hoping that her presence would help him somehow. Finally, he spoke to her, even though he still hadn't looked at her.

"What are you doing here?"

"I just didn't want you to be left alone in here."

He finally looked at her and he just looked so lost that her heart went out to him. He leaned back in his chair with a sigh. His hand was on the armrest between them, and she very gently took ahold of his hand and gave it a little squeeze. They sat like that, both of them kind of slouched back in their chairs, hands connected, untill Sam came to tell Dean that it was time to go.

Sam said good-bye to Lucy and Dean gave her hand a small squeeze, before rising to his feet. Eventually Lucy had to go to work again, and so she did. She checked on a few patients with a blood pressure cuff, and thermometer. She helped turn Mrs. Ebstein because she couldn't turn on her own with a bad hip. On and on her day went, as she thought of the guy named Dean and his sad eyes.

0-0-0-0

Dean got wasted drunk that night, knowing that he would have to go to Bobby's funeral tomorrow, sweating liquor, but he didn't care. Sam took his keys from him when he declared his intentions to go to a bar, and so Dean had to walk there and back. It was all worth it. He walked home in the cool evening, swearing at God, the Laviathin named Dick, and even Cas. When he ran out of terrible things to say he started singing ribald songs. Eventually he got stuck on a gross version of the "Old Mother Hubbard" nursery rhyme.

By the time he got home to the motel, he was swaying back and forth across the sidewalk, and then the parking lot. He landed on the hood of his car, and climbed on top, putting his boots on the shiny grill, but he didn't give a shit. He had heard that nurse Lucy talking to Sam about praying, so he rolled onto his back, and when he was sprawled out from end to end, he began to pray. He didn't pray to God, because he knew for a fact that the guy wasn't listening. He didn't pray to that St. Paul guy because he didn't know nor care to know who that guy was. He prayed to Cas, dead, and gone Cas... But weren't all his people gone, now-a-days? Everybody but Sam, poor, sad Sam who would have to bulldoze him out of bed tomorrow.

"Cas," he said, "Bobby's gone, and I don't know how to get revenge on this thing that killed him. I know that you have helped me out of many hairy situations before, and you plucked me from the fires of hell. You turned your back on your orders in order to fight by my side. You dropped by whenever I truly needed you, even though you had bad problems of your own. What I'm trying to say is that I forgive you. And I'm willing to carry my share, but... I don't how. I need you to help me. I need you, Cas."

When there was no answer, of course there wasn't going to be an answer, Cas was gone, tears fell from the corner of Dean's eyes. He quickly sat up to wipe the moisture away. 'Woah. Not a good idea.' he thought as the world took another dizzying turn around its axis. He leaped off his car before he could mess up the nice wax finish, and threw up in the parking lot. He wouldn't be surprised if he had a mild case of alcohol poisoning.

Dean went inside to call it a night, only to be woken four hours later to worship before the porclain thrown, not once, not twice, but three times. And the fourth one hardly counted because there was nothing more to upchuck but bile.

"Sammy, I need something to drink!"

0-0-0-0

Cas heard Dean's slurred prayer from where he was. If the angels that were in heaven with him, had any eyeballs to roll, they all would have done so, as Cas' memories started nudging at his consciousness once more. He remembered drinking with a woman named Ellen, and her daughter named... He couldn't remember. He clunked down his twentieth shot, as the bartender (whatever that was) had done with her two shots.

"Feel anything yet?"

"Uh... No."

"Nothing?"

"Nothing," he confirmed.

"Hot damn, that was your twentieth shot! I wonder how much it would take to get you drunk."

He also remembered what it was like to get drunk, and how much it took, an entire liquor store, apparently. He remembered posing in a picture with Bobby, Ellen, Ellen's daughter, Dean, and Dean's brother. Dean's brother was named... Dean's brother was... .. Sam? It felt right...

Cas sat seperate from the others again. This time they had been the ones to withdraw from him. For some of them, they weren't sure if they wanted to remember. Heaven was more blissful than they had ever hoped to have. Remembering drove that bliss away, even if it wasn't their own memories.

Cas sat there for a long time after that last memory trying to think, trying to remember some more. For the longest time nothing came, then a faded voice came to him, it was his own.

"I'm going to find a way to redeem myself to you."

That was it, that's all that he was going to remember. He reached out tentatively to the others, but they shrunk away from his tendrils. They rejected, and shunned him. It wasn't anything new, he had somehow come to expect it from his brothers and sisters. He didn't know why he thought that, but he knew that it was true. So he sat there, all by himself, waiting, waiting for a voice to call for him again.