Author's Note: UGH, finally. This chapter just did not want to be written. We have lots of action and drama and hilarity and other things ahead, and hopefully the next chapter will be easier to get out! Thanks for your patience!

Martha didn't giggle.

She didn't. Really. Not anymore. Not in a long time, as a matter of fact, and it would be really unbecoming of the Savior of the Earth to be squatting in the dirt next to a bemused angel of the Lord, who was standing with her in front of their unconscious human friend, hiding a pastry behind her back and giggling.

On the other hand, decorum was the last thing on her mind today.

"I don't understand what we're doing," Castiel said, very softly, having already been once reprimanded by Martha for speaking too loudly.

"It's Dean's eight-month anniversary back topside," Martha whispered back. "We're gonna celebrate."

Castiel frowned. "That is a meaningless phrase," he said. "Anniversary refers to years."

"Eight month-i-versary," Martha said carelessly. "Whatever. Point is, I thought we'd commemorate it."

A soft rustling of trench coat indicated that Castiel had crouched down next to Martha, and when she turned, she saw his eyes trained on the sleeping Hunter. "It seems a morbid thing to celebrate," he said, his gaze piercing as he studied his charge. "I would assume that Dean would not want to remember his time in the Pit, and in fact, I regret that I was unable to take those memories from him."

Martha shifted her weight, looking down at Dean herself and smiling a bit. "It's not about that," she said, and felt Castiel turn to her. "It's about...celebrating the fact that he's back. And reminding him that we haven't forgotten what he's been through. That...we're giving him permission to talk about it, if he wants to."

That seemed to take Castiel aback. "Dean must know that I would attend to him," the angel said, sounding a little hurt.

Martha put a hand on his arm, and Castiel stared at it, puzzled. "He does," she said, and the angel's bright blue gaze turned to meet hers. "He knows. He just...he's Dean. Sometimes you have to remind him, even when it should be obvious."

There was evidently no argument from Castiel on that point, as the angel simply went back to studying Dean. The look on his face was strange even for Castiel, and Martha thought about asking him about it. Before she had a chance to, he said, without turning to her, "Thank you, Martha."

Martha stilled. "What for?" she asked.

"Dean..." and here Castiel actually hesitated, hesitated like a human, and had to start over. "Dean was resistant to me, when we met. Untrusting, angry, fearful. I don't know what changed, but I know you were part of it. Your trust in me gave him...permission...to do the same. For that, I am grateful."

Martha didn't have the words to respond to that.

"He prays now," Castiel said thoughtfully. "Before he falls asleep. I can hear it. He didn't pray before."

"Well, I can't take credit for an increase in prayer," Martha said. "Not exactly the kind of faith I'm peddling, Cas. No offense."

Castiel shook his head. "It's not that, Martha. It's something simpler than that."

But Martha was apparently not going to find out what it was, because Dean chose that moment to groan in a very loud, un-Hunter-like manner, and roll over. Martha picked up the pastry from the ground and hid it behind her back, her eyes shining with excitement. Dean blinked heavily, squinting up at Martha and Castiel. "Th'hell?" he muttered, passing a hand over his face. "Wh're you two doing?"

Martha couldn't contain her grin, and bounced on her heels as she said, "Happy anniversary, Dean!"

He didn't sit up, but instead laid his head back on the ground and stared up at her in sleepy confusion. "The hell are you talking about?" he demanded.

"Eight months back here, on the road," she clarified. His eyes clouded for a moment, but she'd expected that, and pulled the pièce de résistance of the celebration. His expression cleared instantly and he sat up, unbelieving gaze shifting from Martha to the pie in her hands and back.

"How the hell did you get your hands on that?" he choked, his hands hovering around the pie as though afraid that if he touched it, the mirage would be broken.

"Cas zapped me back to the last resistance HQ and I...borrowed the kitchen," Martha said. She stuck the pie a little farther towards Dean, and he took it reverently. Martha glanced sideways at Castiel, who was watching the proceedings with the air of an anthropologist witnessing some bizarre tribal ritual.

Then, abruptly, something occurred to Dean and he made a face that was halfway between panic and aggravation. "Wait, the two of you left me here, sleeping, so you could go play Holly Homemaker at an HQ kitchen?" he asked, voice full of umbrage.

"Technically, yes," Martha replied.

"Not unwarded," Castiel amended, shooting Martha a disapproving glare. "I made sure that you would be safe. You will notice, upon standing, that you were asleep in the middle of a Devil's Trap, and Martha left you the Doctor's key so that you would be invisible to the Toclaphane."

Dean bolted upright, staring around himself at the elaborate Devil's Trap Castiel had willed into the ground around him. The gouges in the earth probably went down a foot; it was nothing the wind could carry away. Then he reached down into his shirt and pulled out Martha's Yale key. Some of the flush that had been rising in his face lessened, and he pulled the chain off from around his neck and handed it back to Martha. "Seems kind of stupid," he grumbled, but there wasn't much heat in it, and Martha noticed the half-smile he wasn't able to completely resist as he looked down at the pie, sitting again. "What kind?" he asked.

"Apple," Martha said, settling down as well, cross-legged in front of Dean. Castiel sat with them, and Martha pulled out her hunting knife. Dean made a face at it, and she laughed. "I cleaned it, Dean, I'm not gonna sully your pie with guts."

Dean shrugged in an obvious attempt to play off his reaction, and took a piece of the pie when Martha handed it to him. He smiled fondly at it, and just as Martha was about to take a bite, he said, "Wouldn't be the first time I got my knives crossed up, though."

Martha pulled the pie away from her mouth, scowling at him. "Dean, that is really gross," she cried, laughing despite herself, as Dean smiled a self-satisfied smile and shoved a large portion of his piece into his mouth. Martha swatted him before taking a bite.

The amicable silence lasted for most of the duration of the pie, and Dean even talked Castiel into eating a piece (which was met by the angel with unimpressed silence), but once they were done, Dean sighed. "So what's the real occasion," he asked, staring up at the cloudless sky.

Martha furrowed her brow, then shrugged. "Really, eight months of having you back," she replied. "Doesn't that warrant a little pie?"

"Sure," Dean said, "but we didn't have pie for seven months. Or six, which would have made the most sense. Half a year. Good job on not being in Hell for half a year."

"Dean," Martha began, but Dean shook his head.

"I didn't mean it like that," he said. He picked up a crumb off of the pie plate and crumbled it between his fingers, avoiding Martha's eyes. "But let's be honest."

Martha put the remainder of her piece of pie on her leg, and pressed the heel of her hand against her eye, where she could feel a headache coming on. She had a couple of evasions prepared in her mind, but when it came right down to it she didn't have the energy to lie to someone as tenacious as Dean. He'd hound her until she told the truth, so she might as well. "It's May," she said.

"Yep," Dean agreed. "Sure is."

"We're in New Zealand," Martha added.

"Also true."

"This was the last stop on our get-out-the-good-word tour," Martha confessed, and Dean stilled, his eyes finally meeting hers. "It's been a year, or near enough, since Saxon was elected. That's how long I had. The Doctor said it would take Saxon that long to build up the force he'd need. And we've been everywhere it's even remotely safe to go, and the message has been spreading. We're as ready as we're gonna be, Dean, and the Doctor won't know we've succeeded until we get up there. I'm sorry, I know it's soon—"

"Sorry?" Dean interrupted, and Martha quieted. She watched him carefully, and far from the anger or the trepidation she'd expected, he looked thrilled. "Martha, I've been waiting eight months for this! It's time to get up to that ship and save Sammy!" He reached out and grabbed Martha, who let out a small shout of surprise, and he hugged her tightly. "That's better than pie," he laughed, and added, "Not that the pie wasn't good."

Martha hesitantly wrapped her arms around him, and hugged him back. "It's not going to be easy," she said. "We'll be in the heart of Saxon's empire. His place of strength."

"That nobody can get up to," Dean reminded her. "I mean, it's not like he's gonna just let anybody land a plane on it, right? But we've got angel air, so he won't even see us coming."

"Doesn't mean he won't know we're there once we get there," Martha warned, pulling away from him gently. She kept her hands on his shoulders and looked over to Castiel, hovering a little ways away. "I just...want to tell you. Both of you. That whatever happens once we get there—"

"Come on, Martha," Dean groaned, but Martha squeezed his shoulder and he contented himself with an eye roll.

"Whatever happens," she repeated, "these past eight months have been some of the best of my life. As hard as it was, and as much as we suffered, traveling with you two has been..."

She broke off before the tears could overtake her, but Dean said, "Like home," and she couldn't help herself.

Giggling and crying, all in one day. Not her bravest façade, but on the eve of battle she supposed she could indulge herself.

She stood up, dusted her pants off, and reached for her pack. "I have the coordinates for the Valiant here," she said, rooting through her pack as a distraction. "London's twelve hours ahead of us, so it'll be...six in the evening, over there. Not sure what the best time would be for us to arrive...when they'd be likeliest to be busy, or on short shifts, or—"

"There is not likely to be a best time," Castiel interrupted gently, and Martha kept rooting through her pack. "Saxon seems to be a paranoid man, but also egomaniacal. He will not be expecting, as Dean noted, for us to arrive in the manner that we will. And while the coordinates are useful, Martha, I do not require them, and I will find a safe place for us to land."

Martha nodded silently, keeping her eyes firmly on her pack. She didn't doubt that Castiel would be able to find a place for them to land, and she didn't doubt that he'd be able to keep them safe on the way there. But they were heading into the eye of the storm, and there was only so much that a single angel, cut off from Heaven and his brothers, could do against the entirety of UNIT and a rogue Time Lord. And after eight months of watching Dean slowly unwind and relax, of watching the way the three of them were able to interact without the kind of danger they usually faced, she was just so loathe to be the one to bring them back to the lives they were used to.

She was going to walk away from all of it when this was done, she knew, as much as it killed her to think of it. Dean and Castiel couldn't walk away.

There was nothing for them to walk back to.

She felt a hand on her shoulder and jumped, whirling around to see Dean standing next to her, looking concerned. "Hey," he said. "Don't freak out. This is the part we're good at, right? Going in, kicking a little bad guy ass, cracking open some beers when we're done. If the Doc and Sammy already laid down the ground work for us, all we gotta do is go in and hold off the goons while they do whatever it is they're doing. We can do that, Martha. We've got that, easy."

"It's going to be dangerous," Martha murmured.

Dean just laughed. "Right, because that's weird for us," he scoffed. "Relax, Martha. We'll be fine. We'll go up and do this thing, we'll save the world again, and then we'll come back and pick up where we left off."

"That's right," Martha said, "more and better pies when we're done."

"We'll crash at Bobby's and do nothing but veg out for a week," Dean promised, and Martha cracked a smile despite herself. Dean smiled back and turned to Castiel. "Cas, you ready?"

Castiel nodded. "Are you?" he asked.

"Beam us up," Dean said by way of affirmation, and while Cas obviously didn't get the reference, he put his hands on their shoulders and shut his eyes.

The ground disappeared, and when it reappeared, the air was cold around them. Martha gripped Castiel's arm for balance, and by the way he was standing she guessed that Dean had done the same on his other side. She opened her eyes and looked around.

They were in a storage room of some kind—perhaps a pantry. The unmarked grey tins lining the steel shelves didn't help identify the place, but there was a closed door in front of them and Martha couldn't make out any sound coming from beyond it.

"Are we here?" Dean breathed, hand hovering over one of the shelves to catch himself if he started to fall.

"This is the Valiant," Castiel replied, his voice equally soft. "We will have to find the Doctor, Sam, and the others from here, but we are aboard."

"You got us the bulk of the way," Martha whispered. "Thank you, Castiel. Now we just have to avoid getting caught until we can—"

The door opened, and all three stowaways froze as light poured into the pantry.

Martha's eyes were still adjusting when she heard someone whisper her name. Not Dean or Castiel. But a voice she knew.

She blinked hard, and when her eyes cleared, her sister stood in front of her, a tray clutched in trembling hands and a disbelieving look on her face.

Tish.

"Tish," Martha breathed, and her sister shut the door behind her before stumbling the few steps between them and taking Martha into her arms. "Oh my god, Tish."

"I knew you'd come back," Tish whispered into her ear. "They said there was no way. But I knew you'd be back for us. The Doctor, he never stopped believing in you. And your friend Sam, he's here, he's safe, but Martha, I don't think he knows you."

"It's all right," Martha laughed. "It's okay, Tish. Mum and Dad? Are they all right?"

Tish nodded, but before she could answer Castiel's low voice cut her off. "We should be moving," he said. "They will find us if we stay."

Martha released her sister and took a step back. "Tish? Can you get us out of here?" she asked.

"Where do you need to go?" Tish replied.

Martha thought for a moment, trying to quickly accomplish the unpleasant task of prioritizing her loved ones. But she knew what was happening with the Doctor, and they needed someone who could be backup if it came down to a fight with UNIT, so she said, "To Sam. Wherever he is. Can you take us to Sam?"

Martha ignored the straightening of Dean's posture as Tish smiled. "I was headed there now. Follow me. You'll have to be quiet and hide when I tell you, but I'll get you there."

They followed Tish out of the room, clinging to walls and keeping a sharp look out, but Martha couldn't help the feeling of happiness, almost giddiness that bloomed in her chest.

With her family and friends at her side, what could the Valiant or the Master throw at her that she couldn't handle?