Author's Note: Okay, so this bit at the end, I wrote ages ago and I've been dying to get to this point just so I could use it. And we witness the return of longer chapters! Sam's always been more verbose than the others...

They had probably less than twelve hours before Harold Saxon destroyed the planet. He would set off the missiles, kill the Doctor, and then probably kill all of Sam's friends—or worse, force them to live to see it.

They had a plan, but it depended utterly on the Doctor being right about Archangel, a network that he knew next to nothing about and was only able to examine from captivity, and it depended on Sam being able to harness powers that he didn't fully understand in a way he'd never really tried before.

They had a team, but it was comprised of a bunch of malnourished, exhausted humans, one seemingly baffled angel, and a Time Lord aged to reflect in human terms his true age. They hadn't had time to communicate the plan to each other, and Sam wasn't sure how much the Doctor had been able to tell Martha before she left the Valiant.

They were well and truly screwed, by any fair appraisal.

And yet Sam couldn't keep the smile off of his face.

He felt the way that Dean kept straying within the small distance between them, letting their shoulders brush, reminding himself that it was real. Dean never believed in anything he couldn't touch, so Sam understood why he kept making sure Sam was there, physically there. And in truth, he appreciated the reminder, too.

Dean was alive. Here, safe. With him.

And he wasn't going to let him go again.

He watched as Martha and Tish went through a similiar ritual, although it seemed less familiar for them; this was probably the first separation of this kind they'd had to go through, the first separation where neither of them had been sure they'd see one another again. So their fingers reached out and brushed each other, their hands fell on each other's backs when they paused to scout a new hallway, and the distance between them was never much more than the distance between Sam and Dean. He saw the awe in Tish's eyes and the unabashed relief in Martha's, and the way that, despite the gravity of their situation, the corners of their lips would tug upwards at the sight of each other, each time either woman's eyes fell on her sister. It was good to see Tish so happy. He'd rarely seen her smile during his year aboard the Valiant, and now it seemed all she could do to stop beaming for a moment to look appropriately somber.

And then there was Castiel.

Sam did his best to not stare, but he found it difficult. An angel. And after all the fun Dean had made of him on that case for thinking that angels might exist, Dean gets pulled out of Hell by one. Dean, agnostic, disbelieving Dean, gets to meet the angel first.

Sam didn't suppose he envied Castiel the struggle to convince Dean of his true nature.

On the surface, Castiel looked really normal. Like, shockingly normal. Dark, tousled hair, a little bit of stubble, rumpled clothes under a dirty tan trench coat. The whole appearance reminded Sam a little bit of Dean, and he wondered if that was on purpose, or if eight months in the trenches had just had the two of them picking up habits from one another.

Or just Castiel from Dean, because Sam couldn't wrap his mind around Dean picking up an angel's habits.

But Sam knew, knew in his bones, that Castiel wasn't normal. Of course. Even if he hadn't been told, even if Dean hadn't come up all glib with the Hey Sammy this is my friend Castiel and by the way he's an angel, Sam would have known that there was something more than human about him. But he did know what Castiel was, and more than that, he knew what Castiel had done.

And the angel could say that Sam didn't owe him anything for rescuing Dean from an eternity of torture that Sam got him into in the first place, but Sam knew better. He was a Winchester, and they didn't let stuff like that slide. He knew he'd never be able to fully repay Castiel, but damn if he wasn't going to try. Especially when he saw the way that Dean looked at Castiel—there was a trust and a comfort in his brother's eyes that he hadn't seen since they were kids. Sam didn't know what had happened in the past year, and there wasn't time now to ask, but whatever it was, he was relieved to see that Dean had had Castiel. Because if anybody deserved someone to have their back, it was his big brother. If anybody deserved somebody they could rely on, it was Dean.

I told you he'd be fine.

Sam made a face, then quickly smoothed it out when he realized that there were actually other people around him now—people who couldn't hear the Doctor. He didn't want to look like some kind of psycho in front of Dean, who would definitely notice him making weird faces like he was talking to somebody. (Even if he was actually talking to somebody.)

Hardly the time for I-told-you-sos, Doctor, he thought.

All right, fine. But really, Samuel, I'm glad you have him back. I'm glad to see him safe, too.

And Martha, Sam added. Dean, and Martha, too.

There was a silence for a moment, and the Doctor's voice was guarded as he echoed, Yes, Dean and Martha. No worries about Castiel, of course, rain or shine he'd've been a hard one for the Master to put a dent in. And due to that very fact, there wasn't much to worry about for Dean and Martha.

Sam glanced at the angel, who was watching Dean like he was trying to puzzle him out, and thought, It's...good to see that somebody was taking care of Dean.

Only hope Dean feels the same way about me, or I'm in for a lecture, the Doctor replied, obviously only halfway facetious.

He will, Sam thought. Dean's not big with letting people in, but he trusts you, Doctor. After all that crap with the Shadow Proclamation...after what you did for us—

Right, well, by-gones, the Doctor interrupted hastily. Ah, you might want to attend to your brother.

Sam looked over at Dean, who was giving him a weird look. "You all right in there, space cadet?" he whispered.

Sam swallowed hard and nodded. "Yeah," he whispered back. "Just the, uh, the Doctor."

Dean's eyebrows lifted. "Right. In your head?"

Sam was pretty sure that Dean would classify his expression as a bitch face, but he didn't care. "Look, it's complicated, all right? And it's...weird for me, too. Also, it's not like you don't have your own weirdness going on."

"What, Cas?" Sam blanched when Dean jerked a thumb at the angel, who glanced at them, looking puzzled. Or irritated. Or something, it seemed like Castiel's facial expressions consisted solely of narrowed eyes and head tilts and Sam had no idea how he was supposed to interpret that. "Cas isn't Time-Lord-in-your-head level weird, Sam."

And it hit Sam the second time. "What did you call him?"

Suddenly Dean looked a little uncomfortable, and his voice was even softer as he repeated, "Uh, Cas. I don't know, shut up. Go talk to the Doctor or whatever."

"Jerk," Sam muttered.

"Bitch," Dean shot back.

Sam heard Martha make a weird noise ahead of them, but looked at his brother and just said, fondly, "Dammit."

"What?" asked Dean, looking around in alarm.

"Nothing," Sam replied. "I just...I missed you, man."

Dean rolled his eyes, but in the moment before that, Sam caught the look of happiness and relief and comfort on his brother's face, and it was just as good as hearing me too, Sammy. "Dude, chick flick moments," Dean groaned. "When you're traveling with a girl, fine. Now that we're back...no."

Back. Yeah, that sounded good. "Sorry," Sam whispered, biting back a laugh.

"Yeah, okay," Dean muttered, but Sam could see the smile he was fighting.

Samuel, you might want to hurry. The Master has a program scanning for Dean at all times, and it's only a matter of time before he or one of his men checks it. You need to get to Jack.

"Hey Tish," Sam called softly, and Tish turned to look at him. "We've got to go faster." He gestured vaguely towards his head, and Tish nodded, checked the hall quickly, and walked up to him.

"We can take a right here, up ahead," Tish said, "but that brings us down the main corridor for a stretch. It'd be a miracle if we didn't run into anyone. Think your brother's friend can take out whoever needs to be taken out?"

No deaths.

Sam rolled his eyes. "I know, I know," he muttered, and Tish furrowed her brow. "Sorry, not you," he amended quickly. "The Doctor says no deaths. But I'm sure he can incapacitate someone without killing them."

There was a pause, and Tish cocked her head to the side, looking impatient. "You could always ask him," she suggested.

Sam startled, eyes going wide, and looked from Tish to Castiel and back. "Oh," he said mildly. "Uh, right."

The angel turned too-blue eyes to him, tilting his head slightly, studying him. Sam felt his mouth go dry, and he swallowed hard as he built up his courage to talk to the angel about something other than his gratitude for the first time.

Castiel looked normal. Looked like just some guy. But Sam was connected to Archangel, a little bit, all the time, and he knew a human when he saw one and everything about Castiel screamed other so loud that Sam just wanted to put his hands over his ears. Behind the rumpled suit and overcoat was a creature more powerful than he'd ever faced before.

Dean's friend. Dean's savior. Come on.

"Is there something you wish to ask me, Sam?" the angel prompted, his voice low and gravelly but surprisingly gentle. As Sam tried to figure out how to reply he saw Castiel look over to Dean, who looked pained but nodded—nodded his approval at Castiel's question. His brother was coaching the angel.

That struck Sam as pretty funny.

"We may have to head into the main corridor to get to the engine room more quickly," Sam explained quietly, trying not to be awkward in the face of Castiel's unwavering attention. "There will probably be guards there. We can't afford for any of them to set off alarms."

"I can dispatch them," Castiel said, and the conviction in his voice was absolute. Sam winced.

"Non-lethally," Sam pressed. "It's got to be non-lethally. These people are being forced into service against their will, and they want to get back to their families as much as—"

"Sam." Sam shut up instantly at the sound of the angel's voice, and waited silently, wide-eyed. Castiel's voice was patient as he said, "I will not harm any of Harold Saxon's human forces. I believe you should inhale."

Sam obeyed.

"We should proceed," Castiel concluded, and Sam thought he detected a note of dryness in Castiel's tone, but he wasn't going to explore it.

Tish crept around the corner, leading them around and down a few smaller hallways until finally the sound of footsteps and hushed voices announces their arrival at the main corridor. They all press themselves against the wall, except for Sam, who joins Tish at the mouth of the hallway and peers around the corner.

The crowd was surprisingly sparse, but at five soldiers, still more of a crowd than Sam would have preferred. He set his jaw and turned to look at Dean and Martha, who both nodded at him—we're behind you. He then turned to Castiel, who only looked back, stone-faced, and walked out into the hallway.

About a quarter of a second later all of the soldiers were frozen in place.

The four humans crept out from the hallway slowly, in disbelief—well, three of them did. Dean just strode out like he owned the place, a small smirk on his face, and Sam could just as well have heard him say look at what my angel did. He looked proud, and Sam felt the tiniest stab of jealousy, because he'd never seen anybody but himself prompt that look on Dean's face.

Dean went over to one of the frozen soldiers and waved a hand in front of her face like a kid, grinning like mad the whole time. "Hello," he called, softly, bending down to peer up at the woman's face. "Anybody home?"

"Quit being a dick," Sam muttered, and Dean made a face at him.

"All right, princess," he snapped, walking back up to his brother. "Sorry."

"We don't have time for you being stupid," Sam said as they began to make their way down the hall. Tish was staring around at the soldiers with a look of awe on her face, and Martha had a hand reassuringly on her sister's shoulder. "We've got to get to Jack and get out before Saxon notices you're here."

"Why me?" Dean asked, all joviality gone from his expression in an instant. "Notices I'm here?"

Sam sighed, pressing a knuckle against the dot of pain that was blossoming in his temple. "Saxon tried to get me to believe he'd brought you back from Hell," Sam explained. "He was trying to use you to get me to join up with him."

"It would be impossible for a Time Lord to break a crossroads deal or rescue a human soul from Hell," Castiel interjected, and Sam jumped a little, not having realized that the angel was listening to the conversation. He sounded affronted at the idea of Saxon taking credit for his actions, and really, Sam couldn't blame him. He had no idea what Hell was like—thank God—but he imagined that going down into the Pit to drag out the soul of a human he'd never met before was probably a horrible and memorable event, and an action that Castiel would take a fierce ownership of.

(And Sam wondered, from the way that the angel looked at his brother, if that was the only thing he took a fierce ownership of, but that was a discussion for another time.)

"I know," Sam said, gently, placating. "The Doctor told me. And I couldn't believe it, but he showed me that you were back, Dean, and I just...but the point is that after the Doctor told me to join up with Saxon—"

"Mr. Winchester?"

Sam stopped dead, and the whole party stopped behind him. He stared ahead into the eyes of a young UNIT soldier.

He wasn't anybody Sam recognized, but then, Sam hadn't been paying a huge amount of attention to the mostly faceless UNIT soldiers he was surrounded by. Tish, he paid attention to. The Doctor. Saxon, and Lucy. But he hadn't done a lot of work in memorizing names or faces of the others. But they all knew him. Of course they did; Saxon's second-in-command, raised from the labor camps to a place of glory in the new Gallifreyan Empire? Of course they knew him.

But more pressingly the kid had a finger on his communicator, ready to hit the alarm.

So Sam stepped forward, motioning for the others to stay behind him.

"Sam—" Castiel said, low and dark, but Sam shook his head and to his surprise the angel stopped.

"Hey," Sam said soothingly, and the kid didn't move either. "There a problem?"

The kid's eyes flicked from Sam to the assembled rebels behind him, and back to Sam. "Um," he said.

Samuel.

I've got it, Doctor, Sam thought, curt, and reached into the Archangel Network carefully.

A hundred, a thousand, a million, billions of threads zipped by him as he rifled through, looking for one, just one, one shining thread in the middle of the teeming mass, the right one. The kid's finger was still on the button, but he still wasn't pressing it.

"Everything's fine," Sam said. "They're with me."

"Isn't—isn't that your brother?" the kid stammered, glancing anxiously at Dean.

"The Master brought him back to me," Sam improvised, "just like he promised he would. Isn't he wonderful?"

The kid looked like he really wanted to believe, but just couldn't.

Not yet.

Not until Sam found—

Ah, there.

He touched the thread gently and it vibrated under what was not his hand but his mind, and he pushed belief, trust, calm into the thread. The kid visibly relaxed in front of him, and his finger fell away from the button, and he smiled.

"Everything's fine, Rob," Sam promised. "I'll take care of it."

"Everything's fine," said Rob, who was nineteen years old and joined UNIT because he was an IT whiz who'd graduated high school at fifteen, who lived with his mom and stepdad and big sister, who was dating a girl called Sophie, who didn't want to work for UNIT forever but thought it was the best way to get the references he needed to get into any school he chose and to get any job he wanted—Rob said everything's fine because Sam told him to, believed that everything was fine because Sam wanted him to. Rob smiled and the tension drained away from his shoulders because Sam wanted the kid to trust him, so he did. Rob's eyes were open and relaxed for the same reason that people on the surface of the planet lived in terror—because somebody sent them the order over Archangel.

Sam backed away from the thread, feeling a little ill.

Rob saluted smartly, said, "Sir," and continued on the path he'd been on previously.

There was a short silence, and the Doctor sent, It's all right, Samuel. It'll be over soon.

Sam didn't respond, and he felt the Doctor back off.

Dean stepped up to him and put a hand on his shoulder. He didn't jump, didn't tense, because that weight—that exact weight on his shoulder was so familiar. "Sammy?" Dean said, quietly, uncertainly.

"It's gonna be over soon," Sam said. "Let's go find Jack."

The rest of the trek to the engine room was quiet and uneasy, and everybody but Tish was looking at Sam a little differently, which he hated but couldn't blame them for. No one said anything until Dean came up right behind Sam and whispered his name.

"We don't have time to talk about this right now, Dean," Sam said wearily.

"Then just listen," Dean shot back, and Sam sighed. "I don't know what you did back there but I can see in your face that you didn't like it. I don't care what's happened up here, you get me? We have to do hard things sometimes. It's life. It's our lives. And I'm seeing my kid brother for the first time in for—in a long time, so I don't want you moping around the place. We're back in business, Sammy. So friggin' cheer up."

Sam stared at his brother, and felt his expression melt into relief. "Really?" he breathed.

Dean rolled his eyes again. "Shut up," he said.

"We're here," Tish announced, gesturing to a heavy set of doors. Castiel strode through and opened them easily, the others slipping in behind him just in time for them to see the angel raising a hand to freeze the soldier guarding Jack.

Sam gave the soldier a slightly apologetic look as he passed.

Jack whistled as they poured into the engine room, looking ragged. "Whoo! 'Bout time, cavalry!" he cried over the sound of the engines. "Starting to think you guys weren't gonna show."

"We're here now, Jack," Sam said, holding his hand out towards Dean, who he eventually realized was just giving him a weird look. He glanced at his brother. "Lock-picking kit," he explained.

Dean reached into his pack and pulled it out. "You sure you got that?" he asked.

"I got this," Sam assured him, walking over to Jack and taking a look at the cuffs.

"Good to see you, Sam," Jack said, and while his tone was light Sam knew the words were heartfelt.

"Sorry it took so long," Sam replied, and Jack shrugged carelessly.

"Undying Man," Jack reminded him. "A year's not so bad. Martha Jones!"

"Hey, Jack," Martha called with a smile, waving. "You look like hell."

"Back at you, beautiful," Jack retorted. "Tish, my top girl. And who are your friends?"

"That's Dean and Castiel," Sam replied shortly, focusing on the lock.

Jack stared, wide-eyed, at the two men in front of him while Sam hurriedly picked the locks and uncuffed him. "You're Dean," he said slowly.

Dean glanced at Sam, who shrugged, and he replied, "Yeah. Uh, Jack. You haven't changed."

Jack grinned past his wince as Sam got the left cuff off of his wrist, and then turned his eyes to Castiel. "Which means you're not Dean," he continued.

The angel frowned. "That is correct," he said.

"Which means I didn't know you as a kid," Jack clarified.

Castiel's frown deepened. "That is also correct."

Jack's grin got bigger, and he reached out to Castiel with his free hand. "Then I'm Captain Jack Harkness, and it is nice to meet you," he said.

Sam bit back laughter as Castiel, puzzled, gripped Jack's hand. Then Sam tilted his head, listening.

You tell Jack Harkness I said to stop it!

Sam made a face at the invasion of his mind for such a stupid thing, but nonetheless, he relayed the message. "The Doctor says, and I quote, stop it," he told Jack, who groaned.

"Seriously?" Jack complained. "He's not even here. Can't I introduce myself to anybody?"

Castiel looked extremely confused by the entire situation, and said, perhaps hoping to placate the puzzling humans surrounding him, "I do not mind his introduction. It is useful to know his name."

Sam had no idea why Jack and Martha started laughing so loud, or why the Doctor started sputtering in his head.